Cracked.

MARA LIASSON, the often besieged liberal on Fox News, marveled at the differences between the Republican and Democratic presidential debates during a recent edition of Fox News Sunday. "I thought that in the Democratic debate there was much more unity," she said. "Everybody's kind of scrambling to talk about how they're going to end the war, but there were no big divisions on social issues. In the Republican debate, there are divisions.... I mean, there are real divisions there on the social issues."

This was an interesting observation that Liasson didn't get to follow up on. After all, there's a big "And therefore what?" to be answered.

It's easy to guess what she was getting at. For years, conservatives in general and Republicans in particular have been caught in a Catch-22 of liberal conventional wisdom. On one hand, the Right is supposedly too hidebound and dogmatic, unwilling to embrace dissent on social issues. On the other, the GOP is supposedly rife with division on social issues. The GOP is "cracking up" from the irrationality of its coalition, and its party line is too rigid.

Am I the only one who sees the inconsistency here? How can we be both too rigid and too loosey-goosey at the same time?

The explanation for our intra-party disputes is quite obvious, though invisible to those who don't want to see it: Despite its myriad problems, the GOP is still the natural majority party in the United States. Majority parties have internal debates and divisions because--get this--they're majority parties. Political majorities, pretty much by definition, are coalitions of disparate elements. The FDR coalition contained everyone from Communist Jews to southern aristocrats (and Klansmen).

Obviously the Republican-conservative majority is not reflected in Congress or in the polls right now. But this is not proof that conservatism has lost its majority so much as a sign of how many Americans, including many conservatives, are disgusted by the way Republicans governed in recent years. It's far more significant--and almost impossible to dispute--that the GOP is a more ideologically diverse party than the Democrats. Proof can be found in the presidential debates, as Liasson seemed to grasp. Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of the capital of Blue America, is pro-choice and still the frontrunner.

Now, some liberals will object that Giuliani may not get the nomination because of his liberal stance on abortion and other social issues, thus proving that the GOP is too rigid. But this is where the dishonesty of that Catch-22 comes in. Liberals never complain that Democrats are too hidebound on social issues, because liberals think their enforced unanimity on, say, abortion, is the height of wisdom. What bothers them is that pro-choicers can't win the same conformity in the GOP. So they pretend that this is some major handicap for the Republican party, when the truth is simply that a big party is going to have people who disagree with each other, while a smaller party is more unified.

There are "real divisions" in the GOP over social issues because there are "real divisions" in America on social issues too.