CONVENTION '96: WHERE'S THE PARTY?

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Agreed: those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. The real problem is that sometimes so are those who remember it. And there you have the predicament of recent Republican history. From the time in the 1970s when the right wing of the G.O.P. zapped the moderates once and for all--a pivotal moment in that struggle was the substitution of Bob Dole for Nelson Rockefeller as Gerald Ford's running mate--there has never been any doubt as to whether the G.O.P. would be a conservative body. The only real questions have been how conservative and whose notion of conservatism it would be. If Republicans ever find an answer that truly matches the national mood, they might yet become the majority party they feel sure they must be. Two elections in recent years, Ronald Reagan's in 1980 and the congressional sweep two years ago, have brought them close. Then the same conservatives who revitalized the party ended by dragging it away to a place all their own.

So Bob Dole has been struggling all year to drag the Republicans back to the center, trimming on abortion and tacking on gun control. And whenever he does, explosive factions blow up in his face. Today Republicans are divided between socially moderate suburbanites and Ralph Reed's cultural conservatives, between supply-side tax cutters and old-fashioned budget balancers, between Pat Buchanan's protectionists and everybody else's free traders. In some ways the G.O.P. is like some massive geological formation. Each postwar upheaval--the cold war, the civil rights movement, the expansion of the Federal Government, the sexual revolution--left behind some powerful formation and a fracture line.

The party that Dole will stand before this week started to take shape more than three decades ago, at about the time he arrived in national politics. Dole was first elected to the House in 1960, the year Jack Kennedy regained the White House for Democrats, who already controlled Congress. The conventional wisdom foresaw a new era of liberalism and activist government. For once the conventional wisdom was right. But most of the 40 or so G.O.P. House freshmen were so right-leaning they were called the Young Fogeys. That was fine with Dole. During his eight years in the House, he would be cited repeatedly by the Americans for Constitutional Action as the most conservative member of Congress.

Dole's brand of conservatism, however, which favored Small Government yet was susceptible to the charms of Washington when it came to things like farm-price supports, was being outpaced not only by the triumphant liberals but also by another kind of conservatism. A new right wing was consolidating within the party, causing internal splits that Nixon's loss to Kennedy made worse. On one side was an old-line Republican establishment built mostly on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Its guiding doctrine was containment, not just in international affairs but at home as well. Republican moderates resigned to Moscow and Beijing had likewise accepted peaceful coexistence with the legacies of the New Deal, things like Social Security, government-backed mortgages and G.I. loans.