The Reagan Coalition, etc.
There have been a lot of articles in the MSM and on the Internet in recent weeks about the coming breakup of the so-called Reagan Coalition -- social conservatives; national security conservatives; economic conservatives -- here and here and here and here. Like my thoughtful brothers and sisters in the media I enjoy promoting grand decline-and-fall theories explaining current political developments by ascribing them to historical struggles involving clashing intellectual-political forces (or the other side of the coin: the formation of coalitions between them). But I'm not sure whether that that is happening right now with regard to the Reagan Coalition. It's true that the glue of the Cold War that held it together melted after the Soviet Union and Communism collapsed. But the post-9/11 effort to replace the Soviet/Communism threat with that of so-called Islamo-Fascism has overall been quite successful. Yes, some of of the "realists" and a few libertarians and pale...