The GOP battle over identity

THE REPUBLICAN convention will soon be over and the party's efforts to retain the White House will reach new levels of intensity, fueled in some cases by support for John McCain and in others by the specter of Democratic control of both Congress and the presidency. But for many Republicans, the contest for president will not be the most important battle at hand. Whether McCain wins or loses, the coming months are almost certain to see a reemergence within the GOP of an often-bitter struggle that began 45 years ago.

In 1963, Young Republicans gathered in San Francisco a full year before the 1964 nominating conventions, primed for the opening battle in a challenge to the GOP establishment and what was then the party's prevailing "liberal Republican" orthodoxy. A significant number of the delegates, many of them elected officials or local party leaders, arrived at their convention determined to change the GOP's direction. These were the supporters of a blunt, straight-talking, former military jet pilot who had gone on to become a maverick senator from Arizona. That man was Barry Goldwater, the man McCain succeeded in the Senate.

Republicans were thought to have a good chance to recapture the presidency; after the departure of Harry Truman, the GOP had won two of the next three presidential elections by wide margins and had only narrowly lost the other. But the battle over the Republican nomination was not to be merely about choosing the party's standard-bearer (analysts believed Goldwater had a good chance to defeat the incumbent, John Kennedy); it was also about choosing an identity.

Almost every Republican leader of any significance - Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, George Romney, Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott - opposed Goldwater. It was not that they feared Goldwater would lose; what they were afraid of was that he might win and that the GOP, which the conservative Goldwater saw as nothing more than an "echo" of Democratic liberalism, would be transformed. They were right: Goldwater's forces took over the Young Republicans in 1963 and captured the entire party a year later. Even though he lost the election to Lyndon Johnson, the party was fundamentally changed. It has now been in conservative hands for more than four decades.

That battle over identity is precisely where the GOP is today. It is now McCain, Goldwater's successor, who is a threat to what has become the party's new orthodoxy. Although self-described "conservatives" still control the party, Goldwater's constitution-based, limited-government conservatism has long since been replaced by advocates of concentrated federal power and religion-based social-issue activism. Although McCain's nomination is certain, and party leaders will support him, the real struggle in coming months will once again be over the nature of the party itself. Supporters of the religious right have warned McCain not to stray from the social agenda of the Bush administration. At one point, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and other right-wing noisemakers threatened to sit out the election if McCain won the nomination. These new conservatives may vote for McCain (or against Barack Obama) but they don't trust him or fully support him and will be only partially reassured by his choice of conservative Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as running mate; if he is elected, they will aggressively attempt to push him in their direction, and will oppose him if he resists; if he loses to Obama, they will claim the loss was a predictable result of the party having turned its back on their culture-war agenda.

McCain has challenged the current Republican president on the use of torture and on declarations that the president has the authority to disregard federal law. He has spoken of the need to act in concert with allies, not independently and not rashly. He is a threat to the neocons and the religious right. Just as the liberal Republicans of 45 years ago were endangered by the Goldwater candidacy, the new breed of hard-right conservatives who supplanted Goldwater are endangered by the prospect of an independent-minded McCain. For Republicans, the results will be largely the same whether McCain wins or loses: a prolonged war within the GOP over what the party is and what it stands for, a struggle over identity much like the one that took place nearly half a century ago.

Former Republican congressman Mickey Edwards teaches at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the author of "Reclaiming Conservatism."