The Battle for the Soul of the GOP : Gingrich rebels seek to end the welfare state, while the old guard goes along to get along.

The intra-Republican spat over Sen. Mark Hatfield’s holdout vote against the balanced-budget amendment foreshadows the fight within the GOP over taxes, spending and most other elements of the “contract with America.” And the lines drawn in these battles prefigure the larger war for the soul of the party in 1996.

The Republican fault line is commonly described as generational--the natural conflict between Young Turks and Old Bulls--or else the result of the difference between the “People’s House” and the slower-moving Senate. Yet the most significant split is that between “movement” conservatives and Republican “regulars.”

The conservative movement sees itself as the wave of the future; its ideological identity transcends loyalty to the Republican Party. Indeed, in the 1970s, when the GOP seemed hopelessly in the thrall of Jerry Ford-type regulars, movementers flirted with forming a true-believing third party. Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy in 1980 made such talk of secession moot; yet even today, the movement is quietly contemptuous of the regulars, whom they view as mere drones, more interested in country-club camaraderie than in storming the barricades of liberalism.

The movement is defined by cutting-edge positions on guns, God and government; it keeps its national consciousness raised via Rush Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and a variety of party-bypassing pressure groups such as the National Rifle Assn., the Christian Coalition and Americans for Tax Reform. The Maximum Leader is Newt Gingrich; he paid his dues in the ‘80s, when he orated to an empty House, with only C-SPAN cameras watching. They all laughed then; today, dozens of former C-SPAN junkies are now serving Speaker Gingrich in Congress.

What Republican regulars lack in passion, they make up for in numbers. They are the bulk of the party, literally its rank and file. Yet the movement believes that the Republicans’ massive 1994 election victory was a tribute to their movement-inspired message, which cut through the 500-channel clutter of apathy and Oprah. While polls show that only a fraction of voters knew the details of the House Republicans’ “contract with America,” people did know that the Republicans had some sort of shake-’em-up plan, and that was good enough to attract the Perotistas.

In contrast to members of the “lower chamber,” Republican senators are mostly older; their sharpest edges have been rubbed off by time and incumbency. Most senators weren’t even on the ballot in 1994; nobody can tell them that they are bound by the contract. So when Hatfield defied the movement on the balanced budget, most of his colleagues remained calm. The young senators who did seek to purge him--Connie Mack of Florida and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania--are both alums of Gingrich’s House. They still see the world through movement eyes; they have not yet developed the parochial perspective of the world’s greatest deliberative body.

The movement may not be able to overcome the institutional roadblocks in the Hatfieldified Senate, but to the committed, the 1995 contract is just a prelude to the 1996 cause. For movementers, defeating Bill Clinton is only the first step in a long journey toward the real goal: deconstructing the bureaucratic welfare state.

Movement conservatives see next year’s presidential election as their chance to vindicate the Reagan Revolution. But to make that happen, the regulars must be stopped from nominating one of their own. Sen. Bob Dole was a reluctant Reaganite all through the ‘80s; his defense of Hatfield is only his most recent counterrevolutionary act. Dole can get away with such behavior in Washington, where the chummy Beltway culture supports him. But next year, Dole will be on the movement’s turf, out in caucus- and primary-land, where only the most zealous trudge through the snow to phone-bank and envelope-stuff. As far as the movement is concerned, Dole is just a bass-voiced version of George Bush, as dismissive of the “vision thing” as Bush--and just as likely to sell out the right on future tax increases.

Many movementers would rather keep Clinton in the White House than elect a deviationist such as Dole, but they can’t say that, lest they arouse the regulars. So movementers will throw every kitchen sink at Dole in the primaries, including his failure to bring Hatfield to heel. The movement looks forward to the day after the New Hampshire primary, when Hatfield opens his morning newspaper and finds a dead fish, with an accompanying note reading: “Bob Dole’s presidential campaign died for your sins!”