“On balance it is probably healthier if religious conservatives are inside the political system than if they operate as insurgents and provocateurs on the outside. Better they should write anti-abortion planks into the Republican platform than bomb abortion clinics. The same is true of the left. The clashes over civil rights and Vietnam turned into street warfare partly because activists were locked out of their own party establishments and had to fight, literally, to be heard. When Michael Moore receives a hero’s welcome at the Democratic National Convention, we moderates grumble; but if the parties engage fierce activists while marginalizing tame centrists, that is probably better for the social peace than the other way around.”
Disclaimer: I do not recall ever having heard of Rauch before nor have I ever read the New Atlantic. Therefore this discussion is perforce limited (as Hugh requests) solely to the text above.
In primus I agree with the general principle. It is indeed far healthier for policy disagreements to be handled within the political system. Where this does not occur you get civil unrest and strife and other things that incomode the passers-by. Northern Ireland is a prime example of what happens when a community is excluded over a long period of time - the US civil rights marches of the 1960s (which arguably sparked the Irish troubles) are another.
Where I disagree is that Rauch apparently assumes that the US political system may only have two "inside" parties and that religious conservatives must belong to the Republicans while anti-war protestors must belong to the Democrats. Contrary to what seems to be popular wisdom political beliefs are not a simple one dimensional spectrum but multi-dimensional and thus any system that limits people to a binary choice is already in trouble.
To me it is obvious that both Democrats and Republicans are already uneasy coalitions of people with different beliefs who make common cause because the alternative seems to be no voice in government. While I would not wish the Italian or Israeli systems of proportional representation on anyone else, I do think that the US (and UK for that matter) system does make it excessively difficult to have more than two viable parties. Personally I like the German and Japanese systems which, in their different ways, make it possible to have perhaps half a dozen viable political parties [in practise the Japanese system has pretty much degraded into LDP vs "Everyone else" with more debate occuring within the LDP that between it and the rest, but the theory behind the system is still good and there are multiple viable parties]. I believe that it would probably be good for the US if the Republicans split into, say, religious and libertarian sections and I suspect a similar split - between utopian socialists and pragmatic regulated-marketeers perhaps - could be achieved in the Democratic party too (I am resisting the temptation to characterise the proposed Democratic split between wackoes and sensible people).
The result of my modest proposal is that the moderates of both parties need not feel ignored at the expense of the radicals or vice versa. and it becomes possible to imagine governments where (for example) the "pragmatic" democrats allly with the "religious" republicans. Indeed in many ways there are as many commonalities between these two groups as there are between the current dominant governing alliance of libertarians and religious in the Republican party - certainly the current president seems to be as unclear on the concept of "limited government" and as hazy on the idea of free markets as the previous Democrat was. In the UK Tony Blair's new Labour has indeed performed such a triangulation as it now has the antiwar wackoes on one side and the libertarians on the other - although I guess neither the Lib Dems nor the Tories completely fit these one phrase descriptions.