Hard not to quote in its entirety

[womzilla]

So I basically will:

Mark Kleiman has this summary of the factions and tension within the Republican Party that I wish I had had the wit to write:

It used to be that the fight within the Republican Party was mostly between the moderates, who would have been content with repealing the Great Society, and the radicals who wanted to repeal the New Deal as well.

That's over: with the Social Insecurity plan . . . the entire GOP is firmly committed to repealing what remains of the New Deal. . . .

Now the faction fight will between the economic conservatives and libertarians, who are prepared to stop with the New Deal, and the two overlapping groups of "social conservatives": the white supremacists, who really want to repeal Reconstruction but would settle for undoing the Second Reconstruction, and the fundamentalists who want to repeal the Enlightenment.

For now, the extremist Catholics of the Buckley-Bennett-Scalia faction, who would be tempted to repeal the Reformation as well, are prepared to suspend that desire and work with the extremist Protestants to take out the seculars.

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

See, none of these Republicans is an actual conservative, since a conservative by definition tries to hold on to established institutions, not destroy them in favour of something else, new or old.

(that's my less cynical definition of 'conservative'; my more cynical definition says that what they seek to conserve and consolidate is the power of the wealthiest two percent and the wealth of the most powerful two percent. They will happily destroy any and all institutions and traditions in the service of that goal)