Republican Civil War: Is There a Hardcore Conservative Rebellion Brewing?

The Politico published a piece yesterday about the tension between Republican leadership, who are starting to veer away from an emphasis on social issues and recast themselves "as a constructive, respectful opposition to a popular president," and the Republican base, who "have no desire to moderate their views."

GOP activists and operatives say they hear intense anger at the White House and at the party's own leaders on familiar issues – taxes, homosexuality, and immigration. Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.

There is little appetite for compromise on what many see as core issues, and the road to the presidential nomination lies – as always – through a series of states where the conservative base holds sway, and where the anger appears to be, if anything, particularly intense.

…."I've never seen the grass-roots quite as motivated, concerned and angry," said Steve Scheffler, the head of the Iowa Christian Alliance and the state's RNC committeeman.

That the conservative Republican base is apoplectic about taxes—despite the reality that Americans pay shockingly low taxes, by comparison to other industrialized nations and by the standards of our own recent history, no less the eventuality of Obama lowering taxes for most Americans—is the consummate evidence of their two defining characteristics: Greed and stupidity.

That they're wild-eyed about "homosexuality and immigration"—and their other perennial bailiwick, abortion—is the consummate evidence of their greatest fear: Queers, darkies, and uppity bitches overrunning the perfect, lily-white, patriarchal Christian nation that only exists in their fever-dreams and infecting it with our horrible progress-cooties.

The Republican leadership, the people sophisticated enough to not personally be offended by gays and people of color and feminists, but unethical enough to exploit their ignorant base's bigotry nonetheless, are losing control of their base. After three decades of fear-mongering, scapegoating, and wedge issue politicking, they're left with a seething conglomeration of intolerant bullies whose stubborn refusal to evolve ideologically is matched in astonishing obduracy only by their unjustifiable hatred.For three decades, the Republican Party deliberately, cynically, and unapologetically fanned the flames of that hatred, which served as the fuel for the base's single-minded crusade to protect their privilege and thus the rationale for voting Republican—the party who promised to "protect tradition."

"Tradition" is the kind of word that appeals to people for whom the world is changing more rapidly than they can comfortably adjust, who are too busy to or socially discouraged from reading or thinking about things too much, who have heard some things about how feminism is responsible for the breakdown in the family and gays want to redefine marriage and immigrants are taking all the good jobs. "Tradition" is a word that plays well with people who can't be bothered to examine anything too closely, or were never taught how to properly think, how to analyze and assess information in a way that teases out the truth.

And it's an even better word for speaking to the unabashed bigots of the base, obliquely reassuring them that they're right to hate women and gays and brown people, those three separate monolithic groups of faceless enemies, and implicitly promising them they'll be protected from the onslaught of the radical hordes. America's great tradition of conferring undeserved privilege on you won't fail. Not on our watch.

That has been the sacred covenant between the Republican Party and its straight, white, patriarchal, Christian supremacist base for a generation: Vote for us, and we'll protect you.