The GOP's rabid faction

They're on the rise. And they expect a revolution.

A supporter of Roy Moore.
(Image credit: AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

On the night before former Alabama state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore won his runoff contest against Republican Sen. Luther Strange, Moore held a campaign rally at which the biggest applause lines were those attacking Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader. One of those lines came from Stephen Bannon, President Trump's former White House chief strategist, who described McConnell and the "permanent political class" of which he is a part as "the most corrupt, incompetent group of individuals in this country.”

This is the vicious civil war the Republican Party is locked in. On one side are those like McConnell, who uphold Zombie Reaganism, applying to every area of domestic and foreign policy precisely the same ideological formula that has guided the party for the past 37 years. On the other side are the revolutionaries (Bannon has described himself as a "Leninist," and the term is apt) who have turned Reaganite skepticism of big government against the institutional Republican Party itself.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.