In a sense, this is one of the most glorious elections I’ve seen in a quarter century; for the first time, there is no “moderate” Republican.

“But wait!  Romney’s a moderate!”.

Well, by some standards, and on some issues, sure.  But as I started explaining Monday, there are really three main currents in American conservatism:  about this for quite a while; we have…:

• Northeastern Conservatism:  Comfortable with big government (and generally very hawkish on law-and-order issues), but generally pro-business and anti-government-intervention, at least in re the economy.  We’re talking Romney, Giuliani, Chris Christie, the earlier Rockefellers, and George H. W. Bush….
• Southern Conservatives:   Think Mike Huckabee and, to an extent, George W. Bush. We’ll come back to that later.  Anyway – standing well aside and hectoring them both – these days, from the high ground, in virtual control of the GOP grass roots – are the…
• Western Conservatives:  Libertarian on social issues (at least as re government is concerned) and budget hawks.  They are big on Small Government.  Ron Paul is as far out as the GOP gets in this department; most of us Hayek buffs fit in here.

I was reading this bit here, by Walter Russell Mead, on the legacy of the battle between Hamilton and Jefferson in the founding of the Republican.

Jefferson, of course, was the godfather of the libertarians; he believed in a weak federal government facilitating a very decentralized nation run, at the end of the day, by a free association of equals.  He believed the US should reside in splendid isolation, at least as re intervening in foreign affairs (until the Barbary pirates became too big an issue to ignore, politically or economically, at which point he created the Navy and Marine Corps we have today.

Hamilton?  He believed in a republic led by an elite that had the power to intervene in society – including a strong federal government.  Hamiltonians are a big part of why the US is a major world power.  They’re an even bigger part of why we have a huge national debt and a rampant national bureaucracy.

And both Hamilton and Jefferson appear both to the right and left of center; “Progressive” Hamiltonians are behind everything from the New Deal to, well, everything Obama has done.  Conservative Hamiltonians – think “Northeastern Conservatives” – believe in federal power, if not necessarily the bureaucracy to feed off that power (for example, the conservative case for the healthcare individual mandate).   Southern Conservatives?  They’re a lot more Hamiltonian than you might think; it was federal power that brought the South into the 20th and 21st centuries.  Western conservatives are Jeffersonian, to a degree – except, in many cases, on defense.

So to a degree, nobody is a purist.

The last 100-years of American history has been largely Hamiltonianism run amok.

But what about our politics today?

Here’s my attempt to illustrate our current field:

All of this leads up to talking about the Mead article I cited above. More on that later this week.