So it's now semi-official. With Sarah Palin's confirmation yesterday of her "headlining" a Republican Party event in Iowa later this month -- the Ronald Reagan dinner, Sept. 17: "A Salute to [your] Freedom" to live like an abused dog chasing whatever bones the organized powers that be throw you -- the guns of August sounded. And oh, what a beautiful war.
Within the GOP, that is.
For 50 years American conservatives have maintained a shaky alliance, but an alliance nonetheless, between their social and libertarian wings. And presidential-candidate Palin, who either doesn't know or refuses to accept that her cultural warriors have been relegated to the subordinate position in the conservative partnership, will split what remains of the rank-and-file GOP wide open.
Doubtless, she won't intentionally pursue such a fissure. She'll mechanically make all the proper bows to fiscal conservatives, whose population as well as egos have been swelled somewhat by deficit-neurotic tea partiers of the Hayek School. Palin's colorful inability to extemporize within the lines, however, will soon find very unhappy ears attached to libertarians, weary as they are of yesterday's battles over school prayer or abortion while depraved statists further encroach on "your Freedom."
We've all watched scores of GOP strategists in television interviews who, when asked if they'd support a Palin candidacy for president, turn every lily hue of white, just before stammering on about what an excellent crop of presidential material they'll have in 2012, of which Ms. Palin is only one. These terrified interviewees are, I repeat, the strategists; the hard-boiled insiders who comprehend all too well what a catastrophic candidacy Palin's would be -- how she would at once shrink and divide the Republican Party and blow all to hell any chance of a GOP comeback.
Conservatism's ideological divide has bedeviled its strategists for decades, although a detente was achieved circa 1960, most preeminently from the pages of National Review. There, conservative intellectuals such as former Trotskyist Frank Meyer plied his old dialectical ways and arrived at the synthesis of reason (libertarianism) operating within tradition (social conservatism). Conservatives hadn't yet lost their restraint, hence a working consensus was possible -- quite rough at first, with the Goldwater disaster, but we all know the rest of the story.
Now comes Sarah Palin -- and the end of restraint, the end of consensus.