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.”

Following Thad Cochran’s upset and highly unorthodox runoff win earlier this week, some Republicans and non-Republican undoubtedly hoped a mold had been broken making it possible for the GOP to reach out to African-American voters regularly.
Aside from the ugliness associated with the backlash to Cochran’s “crossover” voters, this hopeful thinking underestimates how unusual Mississippi really is. I toted up some reasons at TPM Cafe Wednesday:

Let’s look at the ways the Magnolia State’s unusual character made Thad Cochran’s win possible:
1) Heavy dependence on military spending in coastal counties, where Cochran campaigned heavily during the runoff period and improved both turnout and his percentage of the vote.
2) The justifiably defeatist attitude among Mississippi Democrats that made them a ripe target for Cochran’s audacious attempts to recruit them for a Republican runoff.
3) The lack of party registration, the poor turnout in the June 3 Democratic primaries, and Mississippi’s large African-American population, which together created a pool of winnable Democratic votes for Cochran.
4) The highly visible McDaniel-associated campaign to deplore and even intimidate “crossover” voting, which brought back many bad memories of Mississippi’s notorious resistance to African-American voting rights.
5) The massive trans-ideological support for Cochran among a Mississippi “Republican Establishment” that would be considered hard-core right-wing in most other states.
These factors help explain why Team Cochran deployed the counter-intuitive runoff strategy of not competing with McDaniel for the “most conservative” mantle, but instead emphasizing his pork-producing background, attacking McDaniel as an extremist, and overtly appealing for Democratic (code in Mississippi for African-American) votes.
Is there another state where a Republican could deploy this same strategy and win? It would have to be a heavily GOP state with a sizable defense industry, no party registration, an unusually conservative “Republican Establishment” and a large percentage of minority voters. That pretty much narrows it down to Alabama and maybe Texas. Add in the fact that Cochran had managed to avoid race-baiting for a few decades in a race-obsessed state, and you have a really unique situation.
Had McDaniel won, we might have had the interesting and potentially replicable scenario of conservative voters choosing ideology over self-interest in America’s poorest state, and then a general election test of partisan and racial polarization. But that’s all water over the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Don’t expect any replications of the Miracle of June 24 any time soon.

One one level, Thad Cochran’s success in attracting enough African-American “crossover” votes to subdue Chris McDaniel in Mississippi’s GOP SEN runoff was a strange and unexpected triumph for Republican “outreach” to minority voters. But the conservative backlash to this tactic, in MS and beyond, could do that cause a lot more damage in the long run, as I noted at Washington Monthly today:

A lot of us spent a good part of yesterday wondering what the basis might be of some Chris McDaniel challenge to the results in Mississippi on Tuesday night. Would Team McDaniel stick to investigating clear and provable violations of state law (e.g., Democratic primary voters being allowed to participate in the GOP runoff), or essentially try to criminalize “crossover” voting?
The answer is “both,” it appears, per comments McDaniel made last night on Mark Levin’s radio show:

We haven’t conceded and we’re not going to concede right now. We’re going to investigate.
Naturally sometimes it’s difficult to contest an election, obviously, but we do know that 35,000 Democrats crossed over. And we know many of those Democrats did vote in the Democratic primary just three weeks ago which makes it illegal.
We likewise know that we have a statute, a law in our state that says you cannot participate in a primary unless you intend to support that candidate. And we know good and well that these 35,000 democrats have no intention to do that. They’ll be voting for Travis Childers in November. We know that. They know that. And so that makes their actions illegal.
So we’re going to be fighting this.

Aside from the fact that this “intent to support” statute McDaniel cites is blatantly unenforceable and unconstitutional, I hope he understands that any inquiry into “crossover” voting in a state like Mississippi is going to be strictly about race. How do we know these are “crossover” voters, since there’s no party registration? Because they are African-Americans! Can’t have African-Americans voting in our White Primary, can we?

The “Republican Establishment” folk who are congratulating each other for engineering Cochran’s upset win should probably wake up and spend some time muzzling (or better yet, though they wouldn’t dare contradicting) McDaniel. Having Republicans debating whether or not they should be willing to accept minority votes is a long-term disaster. Reminding the world they’re now the segregated White Man’s Party of Mississippi isn’t the best idea, either.

Every time approval ratings for Congress (or for both major parties) take a dive, we hear talk of the next election cycle as portending an “anti-incumbency” wave. Then most incumbents are re-elected, with partisanship predictably being a bigger factor in who wins or loses than who has the dreaded (i) next to the name on the ballot.
But in looking back at the Cantor loss in VA-07, FiveThirtyEight’s David Wasserman notes that there has this year been an anti-incumbent effect in primaries, which led me to this commentary at Washington Monthly:

[T[he most interesting data Wasserman provides is in support of the argument that this cycle’s anti-incumbent sentiment is making primary upsets more likely, without necessarily creating any sort of tsunami:

Cantor was only the second House incumbent to lose a primary this year (the first was Texas Republican Ralph Hall), but the warning signs of discontent were abundant: Plenty of rank-and-file House incumbents had been receiving startlingly low primary vote shares against weak and under-funded opponents, including GOP Reps. Rodney Davis of Illinois, Lee Terry of Nebraska and David Joyce of Ohio. In fact, just a week before Cantor’s defeat and without much fanfare, socially moderate Rep. Leonard Lance of New Jersey received just 54 percent of the Republican primary vote against the same tea party-backed opponent he had taken 61 percent against in 2012.
Overall, 32 House incumbents have taken less than 75 percent of the vote in their primaries so far this year, up from 31 at this point in 2010 and just 12 at this point in 2006. What’s more, 27 of these 32 “underperforming” incumbents have been Republicans.
In other words, while Congress’s unpopularity alone can’t sink any given member in a primary, it has established a higher baseline of distrust that challengers can build on when incumbents are otherwise vulnerable. And as the sitting House Majority Leader, Cantor was uniquely susceptible to voters’ frustration with Congress as an institution.

That makes sense. The two underwhelming incumbent GOP performances that struck me earlier in the cycle involved North Carolina’s Renee Ellmers, who won 58% against an underfunded anti-immigration-reform crusader, and Nebraska’s Lee Terry, who did even worse (52%) against a similar opponent.
Now some eager Democrats may look at this phenomenon and predict some general election upsets, and that’s possible. But there’s no real evidence yet that anti-incumbency is trumping partisanship among 2014 voters. And obviously, Democrats have a lot more incumbents being targeted in the key fight for control of the Senate.

To put it another way, there are three levels of “anti-status-quo” feeling that might have an effect in November: anti-the-party-controlling-the-White-House, anti-the-party-controlling-the-House-or-Senate, and anti-my-own-congressman. While the third is likely to be the weakest, it could have an effect on the margins.

Remember the panicky debate over “rebranding” among Republicans after the 2012 elections? While GOPers didn’t all agree on what needed to be done to deal with the negative political and demographic trends displayed in two consecutive presidential defeats, they did mostly agree some sort of remedial action was in order. But as I noted at TPMCafe today, that need isn’t being felt in the 2014 cycle:

[A]side from those who chose simply to blame Mitt Romney for the 2012 defeat, there was general agreement that something needed to happen to expand or intensify the GOP’s electoral appeal before the next presidential cycle, and the midterms were regarded as a fine opportunity for a test run.
Though there were plenty of essays and even manifestos published on this subject, the most extensive (and most discussed) was actually prepared by the RNC’s own “Growth and Opportunity Project” and released in March of 2013. It bluntly contrasted the performance of the GOP in presidential and non-presidential elections and argued that the national party’s image had to change, even if that meant thinking beyond the alleged perfection of the Reagan legacy. Here are a few pertinent passages with how they have or have not been implemented in the midterm cycle:

It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies….
We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.

Today even the most optimistic immigration reform advocates in both parties agree that comprehensive reform will die this year at the hands of a House GOP leadership that’s afraid to bring the subject up. Attacks on “amnesty”–increasingly defined as any sort of legalization process for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country–have been a conspicuous part of several successful GOP primary campaigns, including the one that just toppled House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

When it comes to social issues, the Party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming.
If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues.

This call for moderation on cultural issues like abortion and same-sex marriage has been followed only to the extent that some GOP candidates talk about them a bit less. But only some of them: Leading “Republican Establishment” candidates for the Senate like Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Joni Ernst of Iowa have conspicuously identified themselves with the most extreme positions on these issues. Republican-governed states continue to pass legislation aimed at shutting down abortion clinics, and judges who defend marriage equality are still being subjected to attempted “purges.” And the entire GOP has managed to identify itself with a “religious liberty” doctrine that treats commonly used contraceptives as morally equivalent to late-term abortions.
About the most you can say about Republican “rebranding” on social issues is that GOP candidates have been trained not to publicly lecture rape victims about their responsibility to carry pregnancies to term.

Another consistent theme that emerged from our conversations related to mechanics is the immediate need for the RNC and Republicans to foster what has been referred to as an “environment of intellectual curiosity” and a “culture of data and learning,” and the RNC must lead this effort.

Though the report was talking about the willingness to learn from election analysis instead of coming up with conspiracy theories to explain defeats, I think it’s safe to say that “an environment of intellectual curiosity” isn’t the first term that comes to mind generally about a Republican Party that dismisses climate science and encourages taxpayer support for sectarian schools.

This trend in early, absentee, and online voting is here to stay. Republicans must alter their strategy and acknowledge the trend as future reality, utilizing new tactics to gain victory on Election Day; it is imperative to note that this will be a critical cultural shift within the Party. Additionally, early voting should be factored into all aspects of political strategy, messaging and budgeting so that we understand that we are no longer working in an environment where 72-hour GOTV efforts will determine an election outcome.

Instead of embracing early voting, Republicans continue to make every effort to restrict it. Hostility to an expanded franchise was best illustrated by the angry reaction of Republicans when Sen. Rand Paul suggested Voter ID initiatives were alienating minority voters.
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that the authors of the 2013 report didn’t seem to have in mind a Republican Party focused on presidential “scandals” and still arguing over the best way to kill Obamacare and plough and salt the ground forever.

What’s happened to rebranding? Well, aside from the fact that the dominant conservative-activist faction of the GOP never entirely bought into the idea that changes in policy were necessary (or acceptable even if necessary) in the first place, the main culprit is almost certainly the party’s positive prospects for this November, thanks in no small part to an extraordinarily favorable Senate landscape along with a built-in midterm turnout advantage. It’s easy for Republicans to lull themselves into the belief that a good midterm means a good ensuing presidential cycle, just as they did after 2010. It didn’t work out so well in 2012, did it?

Some of the incomprehension progressives are expressing about the rage of people like the voters who croaked the career of Eric Cantor may reflect an inadequate understanding of how they view political history. Here’s the reminder I offered at Washington Monthly today.

[T]here’s an important aspect of conservative grievances with the Republican Establishment that makes all the talk of immigration reform or the Ryan-Murray Budget or Defunding Obamacare being the catalyst for revolt more than a little short-sighted. It was nicely articulated by RCP’s Sean Trende on Wednesday:

[A]nalysts need to understand that the Republican base is furious with the Republican establishment, especially over the Bush years. From the point of view of conservatives I’ve spoken with, the early- to mid-2000s look like this: Voters gave Republicans control of Congress and the presidency for the longest stretch since the 1920s.
And what do Republicans have to show for it? Temporary tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, a new Cabinet department, increased federal spending, TARP, and repeated attempts at immigration reform. Basically, despite a historic opportunity to shrink government, almost everything that the GOP establishment achieved during that time moved the needle leftward on domestic policy. Probably the only unambiguous win for conservatives were the Roberts and Alito appointments to the Supreme Court; the former is viewed with suspicion today while the latter only came about after the base revolted against Harriet Miers.
The icing on the cake for conservatives is that these moves were justified through an argument that they were necessary to continue to win elections and take issues off the table for Democrats. Instead, Bush’s presidency was followed in 2008 by the most liberal Democratic presidency since Lyndon Johnson, accompanied by sizable Democratic House and Senate majorities.
You don’t have to sympathize with this view, but if you don’t understand it, you will never understand the Tea Party.

I personally plead innocence to the charge of failing to understand the deep movement-conservative grievances against W., which reinforced the sense of mistrust and betrayal generated by Poppy and feeds negative feelings towards Jebbie. But as Paul Waldman notes at the Prospect, this is a difficult perspective for many liberals to “get.”
It’s worth remembering that even the sainted Ronald Reagan experienced a bit of a conservative backlash during his second term in office. In a very real sense, the last Republican leader fully trusted by movement conservatives was Barry Goldwater, and it’s his legacy today’s conservative insurgents are carrying forward a half-century after the fact.

This is why I’m a bit skeptical towards the theory that what gives the right-wing Tea Folk their mojo is an unprecedented anti-Wall Street “populism” that is likely to erupt in the Democratic Party as well. Yes, there is hostility to TARP and “crony capitalism” across the spectrum. But the very particular “populism” of the right is one that is furious at virtually every expansion of the federal government since the 1930s. It’s not new, just renewed, and angrier than ever.