Drudge’s headline story right about now is a WaPo piece about how Huckabee’s national chairman, Ed Rollins, gets so angry and Romney that he wants to knock out the Mittster’s teeth.

A little bloodletting is inevitable during the primary season, of course. But what we’re seeing on the Republican side, several folks contend, is nothing short of the opening shots in a Republican Party civil war. As Steve Benen over at Kevin Drum’s place notes:

Business interests, the religious right, and defense hawks have been kept together under the Republicans’ umbrella with smoke, mirrors, and chewing gum for the better part of a generation. But now the factions are drawing lines in the sand, and making clear who they won’t vote for — business interests won’t tolerate Huckabee, the religious right rejects McCain or Giuliani, and hawks look askance at everyone but McCain or Giuliani. Romney has tried for a year to tell all the constituencies that he’s with them, but given that he felt the opposite up until fairly recently, no one seems to believe him.

Granted, this isn’t the first time talk of a GOP “identity crisis” has emerged, but I’d argue it’s probably the most credible. The Republican factions used to be able to largely ignore one another; now they’re actively hoping to defeat one another, and there’s no presidential candidate who can step up to keep the gang together.

Ross Douthat and the WSJ sound similar notes; indeed, the latter interviews a long-time Republican Party activist who himself says: “It’s the end of the conservative revolution that started with Goldwater.”

Well, revolutions do have endings. The question is, what comes after.

In the short run this all benefits the Democrats, of course, but I’m hard-pressed to see that the Democratic Party, as it now stands, is going to be able to retain that advantage over the long haul. I’m simply not certain that thre’s a real “there” there, that the party on the whole stands for something. If it does, I’m not sure who’s really articulating it; because this isn’t 1932 or 1964 or even 1976, the New Deal is in the history books, any new Democratic coalition isn’t going to be comprised of the same elements it used to be. A new alliance is necessary, one that might have been unthinkable even seven years ago.

Libertarians, I’m convinced, need to be part of that alliance. But how could that possibly square with the traditional Democratic idea of activist government? Our entire culture now has been made averse to the mere notion of higher taxes on anybody; can a political party or even a legitimate movement overcome that ingrained bias in order to achieve the things - health care reform, for example - the public seems to want?

Competency is a key issue but then, these past six years in particular, so is the basic idea of freedom - warrantless wiretapping, evisceration of habeaus corpus, etc. One hopes liberals who have argued against these things won’t suddenly accept them if proposed by the likes of Hillary. We don’t really need a kinder, gentler totalitarianism.

So who, then, spells out this new coalition, who articulates a compelling alternative to what we have now? Not the Republicans; as Michael Tomasky writes in the essay that inspired all this navel-gazing, “dramatic ideological change among the Republicans is highly unlikely.” That ideology got us here; if the country wants to keep going down this same road, it will vote GOP in ‘08.

It may instead vote Democratic, if only as only a protest vote. I suppose I just wish the party might come up with a reason beyond that to convince those voters to stick around.