A right-wing earthquake in the making?

Bear with me. This is a bit dry, but relevant -- more relevant than many appreciate.

In the mid-1950s, Bill Buckley founded the National Review in response to a crisis: conservatism, as broadly defined, could not in fact be broadly defined, except in terms of internal warring. For too long, as Buckley and his strategic lieutenants saw it, Burkean "traditionalists" and economic conservatives had been at each other's throat, producing a fault line which manifested in electoral drag.

And this, thought Buckley & Co., simply had to stop.

To the counterintuitive rescue: former Marxist Frank Meyer, who began mapping in the National Review and other conservative publications a means to right-wing unification and ultimate electoral victory. And in discovery of the winning path, Meyer had only to go home to Mama: the dialectic.

By 1960 he was insisting that conservatism's traditionalist and libertarian camps were indeed in fundamental agreement, yet each -- and this is the relevant key -- was so self-righteously cocksure of what it alone postured as philosophically "decisive," a self-destructive "distortion" set in; which is to say, each side took its dogma to exclusive extremes, refusing necessary compromise and accommodation -- necessary, that is, if ultraconservatives were ever to gain electoral dominance.

Thus, wrote Meyer, "Conservatism, to continue to develop today, must embrace both: reason [libertarianism] operating within tradition [old-school Burkeanism] ... It can only be achieved by a hard-fought dialectic ... in which both sides recognize not only that they have a common enemy" -- that being modern liberalism, glibly conflated by Meyer with communism -- "but also that, despite all differences, they hold a common heritage."

And achieve it they did; haltingly at first, through a Goldwater implosion that seemed to spell doom for the right and a "permanent majority" for the left. Nevertheless Meyer's synthesis - or detente, if you will -- held, and before long the right was whistling Dixie well outside of it. To its once rather subdued traditionalist ranks it added raucous "movement" conservatives of a Puritanical bent; the libertarians merely grinned and indulged. After all, mined in this uneasy synthesis was electoral gold.

And now, it's all unraveling -- the primordial fault line between, loosely, conservative traditionalists and economic libertarians has reemerged. A half-century of conservative unification appears shaky at best.

As Politico reported last week, "the evangelical Christian right ... [has] begun to express concern that tea party leaders don’t care about their issues" -- and that, friends, is a colossal understatement. More than "concern," they're at each other's throat, just like the good old days of a half-century past, those conservatively disunified days of self-righteous cocksuredness which denied accommodation's admission.

The right's reemerging divisions range from the delicately stated to the deliciously ugly: "There’s a libertarian streak in the tea party movement that concerns me as a cultural conservative," said Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association; said another social conservative leader, "As far as I can tell [the libertarian tea party movement] has a politics that’s irreligious. I can’t see how some of my fellow conservatives identify with it" as well as their "incivility" and "name-calling"; and said the ubiquitous Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, "They’re free to do it, but [the libertarians] can’t say [their economic platform] represents America. If they do it they’re lying."

What's more, there now runs a kind of tributary fault line among evangelical Christians, as much a generational as philosophical rift: "I don’t think younger Christians are all that interested in the tea party movement," wrote a "younger evangelical" leader to Politico. Yet he framed his dissent in a most curious way -- one that expresses even greater discontent with his evangelical elders: His generation, he said, is "increasingly dissatisfied by a myopic Republican party that seems unwilling to tackle important social justice issues" (my emphasis). And that's an in-house argument less with the 15-minute-stardom of Glenn Beck than with Tony Perkins.

Can they regroup? Can the right internally compromise and synthesize as it did 50 years ago in its cradle of ultraconservative resurgence? Here, skepticism abounds, chiefly because so much of the right's mobilization these days takes place impersonally and electronically.

The Internet, once wistfully envisioned as a road to mass enlightenment, has instead become a bloody battleground of shrillness and factionalized dogma. Absolutism reigns, with each mobilized and warring brigade self-righteously certain of its absolute correctness. For the right, electronic democracy is fostering an endless anarchy.

And in this, there's a warning to others.