We hear so many misleading reports about “civil war in the Republican Party” that it’s sometimes hard to see the real thing when it appears. But while Republican divisions over domestic policy are usually over strategy and tactics rather than ideology, there are growing signs the battle over international affairs could be the most serious in a very long time. That was the subject of a column I did this week for TPMCafe. Here are some excerpts:

The sharp exchange last weekend between Rick Perry and Rand Paul over Iraq — and more broadly, its relationship to the “Reagan legacy” in foreign policy — may have seemed like mid-summer entertainment to many observers, or perhaps just a food fight between two men thinking about running against each other for president in 2016. But from a broader perspective, we may be witnessing the first really serious division in the Republican Party over international affairs since the 1950s….
Yes, there was scattered GOP opposition to LBJ’s and Nixon’s Vietnam policies and a brief conservative reaction against Nixon’s and Ford’s detente strategy with the Soviet Union. And throughout the period of consensus, there were small bands of paleoconservative and libertarian dissenters against Cold War and post-Cold War GOP orthodoxy. But unless you think Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservative foreign policy views were a significant spur to his occasionally impressive 1992 and 1996 primary challenges (I don’t), none of this dissent rose to the level of a real challenge to party leadership, and generally lay outside the mainstream of conservative opinion.
The current discussion of Iraq among Republicans should not obscure the fact that party elected officials dutifully lined up behind the Bush-Cheney drive for a “war of choice.” Ninety-seven percent of House Republicans and 98 percent of Senate Republicans voted for the resolution to authorize the invasion. Republican backing for the later “surge” was nearly that unanimous, despite rapidly eroding public support for the war. Indeed, John McCain’s identification with the “surge” was crucial in making him acceptable to rank-and-file conservatives in 2008.
The current argument being fronted by Perry and Paul is different in three important respects. First, public opinion among Republican voters over what to do right now in Iraq is notably divided, with (according to an ABC/Washington Post poll last month), 60 percent opposing the deployment of ground troops that the Cheneys are promoting and 38 percent opposing the air strikes Perry favors.
Second, this strain of GOP reluctance to embrace a fresh war in Iraq (supplemented by significant evidence of “buyer’s remorse” over the 2003 invasion) is not, like past anti-interventionist sentiment on Libya or Syria, just a function of reflexive opposition to Obama, whose position on Iraq is not that different from a majority of Republican voters.
And third, GOP divisions on foreign policy are very likely to sharpen as we move into the 2016 cycle, partially for competitive reasons but also because the candidates will be forced to project their own vision of America’s role in the world and not simply play off Obama’s record. And while Paul and Perry have staked out early and sharply divergent turf (as has to a lesser extent Marco Rubio, another neocon favorite), it’s possible other candidates will find intermediary positions–viz. Ted Cruz’s claim that he stands “halfway between” John McCain and Rand Paul on foreign policy. It will be quite the contrast from the 2012 cycle, in which the entire field lined up in support of traditional conservative positions favoring higher defense spending and aggressive confrontation with Iran, Russia and China, with the lonely exception of Rand’s father Ron.

I’ve observed elsewhere that while Rand Paul has a lot of support from GOP rank-and-file on Iraq, and has been clever in projecting his longstanding call for eliminating assistance to the Palestinian Authority into a pro-Israel measure, he’s not quite into the party mainstream just yet. Republicans reflexively favor higher defense spending and lethal aggressiveness towards America’s enemies, real and perceived. It’s not clear Paul’s amalgam of libertarian and Old Right perspectives on the world will pass muster with elites or with the GOP rank-and-file. But he’ll certainly force long-buried issues out into the open.

The sudden and fateful separation of the two parties by the variable of age has created a lot of speculation about the future of a GOP that could literally die out some day. But it’s not a generational accident, as I noted briefly today at Washington Monthly:

Matt Yglesias riffs a bit today on a theme he’s developed in the past: the price Republicans are paying for the old-white-folks “base” that is so helpful to them in midterm elections:

There’s something very oldsterish about contemporary conservative politics. The constant bickering about Ronald Reagan is very odd to anyone too young to have any particular recollection of the Reagan years. Calling a group of people “Beyoncé Voters” as an insult is weird. Some of this oldsterism is just ticks, but some of it has policy implications. The sort of budgetary priorities that call for huge cuts in all domestic spending, except no cuts at all for anyone born before 1959 is kind of weird. The huge freakout over New York City starting a bicycle program last summer was bizarre. It’s easy to imagine a political party that’s broadly favorable to low taxes and light regulation without sharing this particular set of ticks.

That’s all true, but there’s something a bit more profound going on in the conservative “base” that makes this “oldersterism” so evergreen. The cultural wing of the Right has been for years in active revolt against much of what’s happened to social norms since the mid-twentieth century. You could make the argument, in fact (I’ve been making it for nearly a decade), that the original sin of the Christian Right is to confuse the Will of God with pre-mid-twentieth century family structure and gender relations (and a generally authoritarian civic life). Now the “constitutional conservatives” (most of whom have roots in the Christian Right) have come along and made the same culture the eternal measurement not just of divine providence but of national identity. This is “oldersterism” that’s more than a demographic accident; it’s a powerfully-held ideology.

As anyone familiar with the twentieth-century concept of “the politics of cultural despair” remembers, threats to “eternal” cultural patterns are felt intensely and can produce quite literally reactionary political movements that can sometimes jump the rails into dangerous extremism. That’s worth remembering when thinking about today’s increasingly radical Right.

Every time polls show high “wrong track” and low congressional approval numbers (particularly in a time of divided control of Congress), you’ll find someone predicting a bipartisan anti-incumbent wave that will sweep out the old and sweep in the new regardless of party. Something vaguely like that sometimes occurs to House incumbents in a redistricting year (though it didn’t much happen in 2012), but not so much any other time. And so far 2014 is no exception, as I pointed out today at Washington Monthly:

I suppose it could happen in November (though a bipartisan anti-incumbent wave is the Loch Ness Monster of electoral phenomena). But as Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball points out, the primary season so far is making this a banner year for incumbent survival:

So far this cycle, 273 of 275 House incumbents who wanted another term have been renominated, and 18 of 18 Senate incumbents. That includes results from the 31 states that have held their initial primaries; while a few of those states — Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina — have runoffs coming up later this month, those overtime elections for House or Senate seats are all in open seats.
This is a better performance than the postwar averages in both chambers. Since the end of World War II, just 1.6% of House incumbents who have sought another term were not renominated by their party, and just 4.6% of Senate incumbents.

To put it another way, Eric Cantor’s loss in Virginia constitutes exactly one-half of the incumbent primary losses in either party this cycle (so far). That’s all the more reason it was so noteworthy.

And so hard to explain. Don’t expect a recurrence any time soon.

Embedded in the furor over the MS GOP SEN runoff is an argument by conservatives about the legitimacy of pursuing African-American votes that could prove toxic the more it is articulated. I discussed it at some length today at TPMCafe:

[F]or the immediate future, we’re going to hear ever-more-shrill arguments from the right in Mississippi and elsewhere that by appealing to African-Americans on the positive grounds of potency in securing federal dollars, and the negative grounds that the challenger is a bit of a neo-Confederate, Cochran’s campaign replicated the Democratic “race card” appeals that conservatives so violently resent.
Since state Sen. McDaniel’s campaign cannot repudiate the very idea of outreach to African-Americans (particularly in a state where black folks make up well over a third of the population), it’s forced into an argument that outreach can only be pursued via the right kind of message to the right kind of African-Americans. McDaniel’s campaign manager, state Sen. Melanie Sojourner, exposed the perils of that argument in a Facebook post wherein she pledged never to endorse Cochran no matter what the party decides:

Throughout my campaign and since I’ve repeatedly made comments about how I felt the Republican Party was doing itself a disservice by not reaching out to conservative African-Americans. Where I’m from, in rural Mississippi, I grew up knowing lots a [sic] God-fearing, hard-working, independent conservative minded African-American family’s [sic]. On the McDaniel campaign we had two young men from just such family’s on our staff.

So it seems anything other than appealing to self-consciously conservative African-Americans is forbidden.
Aside from the implied suggestion that the vast majority of African-Americans are not God-fearing or hard-working, and may actually be selling their votes for government benefits (a charge at the rotten heart of the many extant GOP versions of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent video”), how likely is it that the kind of minority outreach deemed kosher by this and other conservative activists could actually succeed? Not very.
Despite the many rationalizations and revisionist takes we hear about the GOP and race during the 1960s, the truth is Republican support among African-Americans collapsed dramatically at the moment of the first conservative movement conquest of the GOP, in 1964, and has never recovered.
From the New Deal through 1960, the GOP share of the African-American vote in presidential elections averaged about 30 percent; it was 32 percent in 1960, in part because a lot of African-American clergy shared their white Protestants’ antipathy to the Catholic John F. Kennedy (who also, of course, was supported by many southern segregationists). But in 1964, even as Barry Goldwater was sweeping the white vote in much of the deep south after he voted against the Civil Rights Act, the GOP share of the black vote plunged to 6 percent. (That didn’t much matter in Mississippi, as it happens, since African-Americans outside a few cities were largely barred from voting; Goldwater took 87 percent of the vote in the Magnolia State).
African-American support for GOP presidential candidates has since peaked at 15 percent twice in years the party promoted a “centrist” image (1968 and 1976). The Great Communicator of the conservative message, Ronald Reagan, pulled 12 percent and 9 percent of the black vote in his two general elections. There was great excitement in 2004 when George W. Bush, deploying both “compassionate conservatism” and hostility to same-sex marriage, won 11 percent of the African-American vote. And now, as of 2012, the vote share is back down to 6 percent, right where it was in 1964.
The idea that becoming more conservative is going to lift the prospects of Republicans among African-Americans is a complete hallucination. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say, reflecting Sojourner’s comments, that conservatives want African-Americans to change before they are worthy of outreach.

So do Republicans really want to be a Big Tent party that’s not mainly limited to older white folks? Not, it seems, if that means they have to change.

As the staff post earlier today noted, this is the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And yes, the anniversary reminds us of a time when many Republicans were staunch supporters of civil rights.
But it’s also the 50th anniversary of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, in which the Party of Lincoln chose to nominate for president a candidate who voted against the Civil Rights Act on constitutional grounds.
The standard analysis of the current right-wing trend in the GOP is that the conservative movement is trying to pull the Republican Party back into the Reagan era. But if you listen carefully to the arguments of the powerful “constitutional conservative” faction of the GOP, which rejects the entire “Commerce Clause”-based line of Supreme Court decisions that provided the basis for the Civil Rights Act along with much of the New Deal/Great Society legacy, there’s a very good case for saying the Goldwater campaign never ended, and is in fact reconquering the GOP.
Rand Paul has tried to walk back his personal opposition to the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act on constitutional grounds. That opposition, however, is entirely consistent with his general views on the appropriate powers of the federal government, and that of so many “constitutional conservatives” today.
Democrats need to challenge such conservatives as often as the occasion arises to clarify their views on the Civil Rights Act. I strongly suspect their actual attitude towards Goldwater’s vote against that crucial legislation is: “In your heart, you know he’s right.”