THE GOLDEN RULE….Ross Douthat is skeptical that things are (yet) really that bad in the Republican Party:
Oh, the pundits will fight, as they have been for a while, but for a serious circular firing squad you need the activist groups to turn on one another. You might think that a defeat like the one the GOP endured last week would prompt Grover Norquist to argue that the Republican Party needs to ditch its warmongers and its theocrats, or prompt Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council to argue that the GOP needs to ditch its flat-tax obsessives, or prompt the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to complain about all those anti-intellectual hicks who loved Sarah Palin. But in practice the incentives probably cut the other way: Nobody wants to fire the first shot against their fellow movementarians, because then everybody else might just close ranks and train their fire in your direction. So the social-conservative activist groups will stand by the economic-conservative activist groups, and so on, lest they all hang separately.
He’s probably right, but that’s because the single-issue activist groups mostly don’t have any beef with each other. They’re pretty much on board with the entire movement conservative agenda, and are convinced that they just need to make their case to the American people and everything will be fine again.
The business community, however, is both more practical and more ruthless than the activist groups. Richer, too, and at some point they’re going to conclude that Something Must Be Done. They don’t want Dems writing new regulations and taking away their offshore tax shelters and making unions more powerful, and if the activist groups are in the way of getting Republicans back in power — well, they’re just going to have to be dealt with. If that means backing more moderate Republicans with huge fistfuls of cash, then that’s what they’ll do. If it means more direct threats, that’s fine too. And if James Dobson and Grover Norquist get caught in the crossfire, that’s unfortunate, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. It’s nothing personal, guys. Just business.
