It used to be that the fight within the Republican Party was mostly between the moderates, who would have been content with repealing the Great Society, and the radicals who wanted to repeal the New Deal as well.
That’s over: with the Social Insecurity plan, which will become an article of faith for the GOP as soon as Karl Rove figures out what it is, the entire GOP is firmly committed to repealing what remains of the New Deal. (The union-busting process that started under Reagan is well on its way to making the Wagner Act a dead letter.)
Now the faction fight will between the economic conservatives and libertarians, who are prepared to stop with the New Deal, and the two overlapping groups of “social conservatives”: the white supremacists, who really want to repeal Reconstruction but would settle for undoing the Second Reconstruction, and the fundamentalists who want to repeal the Enlightenment.
For now, the extremist Catholics of the Buckley-Bennett-Scalia faction, who would be tempted to repeal the Reformation as well, are prepared to suspend that desire and work with the extremist Protestants to take out the seculars.
Note to libertarians: When you sup with the Devil, bring a long spoon.