Many Republicans will see these "firsts" as a great liberation for their party, which by nominating a candidate at odds with religious conservatives will have at last freed itself from its disastrous bluenosery.
***Interesting you should zero in on that sentence, because that's exactly the same one I chose to lead with. I wonder where they get the idea that this coalition with socons has been a "disastrous bluenosery"? It's obvious to many socons that the party turning its back on its most activist wing in favor of becoming democrat lite is the beginning of the end, similar to what happened to the Whigs.
Very good question. I mean, did we back over their cat? It's a persistent strain with two groups: neocons and blue-blood Yacht Clubbers.
The neocons, someone pointed out, were disappointed and disillusioned Trotskyites back in the 40's who reacted to Trotsky's assassination by a Stalin goon in Mexico (while he was a guest of the muralist Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, if I had that detail right) by turning against sovietism. They eventually migrated over to the Republican Party when Dems began to squish on defense and on supporting Israel after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
But neocons remain big-city reformers and socialists at heart, and by their pronouncements they have no more use for Southern whites, whom they regard as Kluxers, than the liberal Jewish lawyers who joined the ACLU and the NAACP so they could work for "colored" rights back in the 20's.
One has the impression that, in spite of the Israel-boosting (in the face of fashionable Leftist Israel-bashing) of the Christian Right, the neocons nevertheless persist in regarding the Religious Right as unwashed Amalekites and priests of Baal. It seems they just don't like or trust them and have decided that no amount of goodwill from the Right is going to persuade them that these Southerners and other Christian conservatives are anything but a Menace.
So I'm interpreting neocon hostility toward Southern conservative Republicans as a social, cultural, and religious aversion to knuckledragging goobers from Boondockia.
The other elite Republican group are the Economic Conservatives (a.k.a. Yacht Club Republicans, Wall Street Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, Economic Royalists, take your pick) who are the legatees of Lincoln's and the Hamiltonians' victory over the Southern Jeffersonians, who were the Antifederalists and the big supporters of the People's liberty interest, the Bill of Rights, and simultaneously the historical compromise over slavery in 1789 that allowed the Constitution to be ratified and the new Republic born.
The Economic Royalists have bifocal vision: they are Limited Government enthusiasts when it comes to things like social services and workers'-rights, wage-and-hour, etc., legislation. But they are Big Government non-conservatives when the question is whether to spend a lot of money supporting Chiquita Bananas' sunk investments in Nicaragua, or building infrastructure like the Transcontinental Railroad, the Panama Canal, or the NASCO Highway ("NAFTA Highway"). That benefits the whole country, you see.
The Economic Royalists know one thing about the South: Of all the groups and subgroups in America, that group was the only one that ever contested the Yacht Club's privy ownership of the national agenda until the Socialists showed up in 1932. The Southerners threatened their power once, and are therefore Enemy forever.....except on Election Day. At best, Southerners can aspire to being Those Horrible People We Have to Be Nice To, around real Republican Brahmins.