Republicans are squabbling over Obamacare, national security and immigration, and their ramifying squabbles are turning bitter and delightfully public. Which leads Byron York to ask, "Are Republicans too divided to have a civil war?" His take:
It’s more likely that this is just a rocky time for a rejected and confused party. The conflicts inside the GOP today just don’t line up in the configuration of a classic civil war.... Perhaps chaos would be a better description.
He may be right. The GOP's squabbles may proceed no further than pinballing chaos, at which point a sobering panic will take hold, returning organizational unity. On the other hand it is instructive, perhaps, to recall that revolutionary movements tend to be impressively unified at birth, but in maturity they unravel in acrimonious dissension. As movements' once-thrilling pieties age into received wisdom, the founding pietists morph into the conservative Old Guard in the eyes of the revolutionary newcomers wanting to rattle the cage, be seen, and make names for themselves. The outcome is less civil war than universal bloodbath, leaving each faction too wounded, weak, stigmatized and isolated to stage a leadership coup.
Which takes us back to York's analysis:
[A]t least some of [the GOP's] division is entirely understandable. It’s what happens to parties when they don’t have a leader. And Republicans, after two straight presidential losses, have no one who even approaches national leadership.... The coming battles inside the Republican party will be a series of moving fronts, with changing sides and changing tactics. It could be ugly at times, and it could be serious enough to ensure a chaotic presidential primary fight in 2015 and 2016. But all-out civil war? Probably not.
No one who even approaches national leadership. That's the key passage here, and it militates against York's larger argument of temporary chaos.
In 1952, having lost five straight presidential elections, Republicans similarly engaged in an epic, interventionist-isolationist battle for ideological dominance. But the cunning Dwight Eisenhower was no blustering Chris Christie. Because he came to the GOP as a leader and not as a brawler, Ike was able to subdue the isolationist forces of Mr. Republican, Bob Taft; unify his party; welcome the vast middle; and leave the isolationists ... well, isolated. Christie will only alienate them.
And to flip the script, just as Christie was no Eisenhower, for damn sure Rand Paul is no Mr. Republican. He's more party pooper than hail fellow well met, more tea partier than party loyalist, more third-party founder than wound-licking also-ran.