The Republican Party will destroy itself -- or at least seriously fracture

[Lex]

.
Big struggles will occur in the Republican Party over the next 4 years and will cause the party to damage itself. The fault lines:


1. The oldline Republicans who are economically conservative (horrified by the deficit) and who want less government (don't like the Patriot Act)

vs

2. The religious-right Republicans who are mostly consumed with social conservative issues (no stem cell research, anti-abortion, etc)

vs

3. The neocons who have their own separate set of ideology abut the Middle East and dominating the world at any cost.

---------

At some point, these separate agendas will have to butt up against each other, and hopefully with results that will fracture their party.

[NorthernSpy]

1. those ARE real fault-lines, Lex

And we should exploit them whenever possible...

[Lex]

3. When they start trying to set their Republican agenda

the fights will begin. Count on it.

[Piperay]

2. I think both parties

are going to go through some bloodletting, I just hope the repukes end up fractured beyond repair.

[leftofthedial]

4. those "fault lines" have been there since 1980

every four or eight years, some batch of Dems claims the Repukes are about to fall apart or implode or fracture.

and it hasn't happened yet.

the bushgang will give every one of those constituencies everything they want.

the only place I see any potential for a real shattering of this coalition is if one group's secret evil agenda is exposed and so horrifies another group that they revolt on "moral" or ideological grounds, or if the massive feeding at our tax-dollar-and-deficit trough becomes so over the top that the fiscal conservatives finally crack (not likely).

If the current deficit frenzy hasn't alienated enough conservatives to matter, almost nothing will.