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From Tom McClintock, penned in December of 1998:

For California Republicans, whose fortunes are lower now than at any time since 1958, there is the best of news and the worst of news.

The best of news is that eight years after 1958 Ronald Reagan swept the governor’s race, carrying virtually every constitutional office. The worst of news is that eight years is also the period between the election of the last Whig president and the demise of the Whig party. Both cases are important for Republicans to understand as they contemplate their party’s future.

Reagan often urged Republicans to "paint our positions in bold colors, and not pale pastels." There is an element in the Republican Party today that would have called – in fact, did call - this approach "divisive" and "polarizing." Indeed, it was. Reagan sought to draw a sharp distinction between two ideologies: one that embraced the bureaucratic state as the best provider of happiness for the prevailing coalition, and one that embraced liberty as the best guarantor of happiness for the individual.

He knew that until these two ideologies were clearly delineated, voters had no basis upon which to choose.

Reagan was divisive in precisely the same way that Abraham Lincoln was divisive. "It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world," Lincoln said in 1858. One was freedom, the other was "the same spirit that says ‘you work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes…"

In the early 1960’s a great debate arose within the Republican party. On one side were those who sought to keep the party on a "moderate" path, closely mimicking the agenda of the ruling Democrats. On the other were those, like Reagan, who believed that the loyal opposition should stand clearly and forthrightly upon uncompromising principles of liberty.

Reagan’s wing prevailed, though not without serious obstacles. In 1964 Republicans learned anew that change does not come easily, especially when that change is from the security of the welfare state to the responsibility of freedom. "All experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed," the Founders warned in the Declaration of Independence.

But Reagan was undeterred and unafraid to speak for a cause bigger than himself. "We’ve come to a moment in our history," he said, "when party labels are unimportant. Philosophy is all important." To the Republican establishment, Reagan was an ideologue destined to drag the party down to defeat.

The same debate raged within the Whig party in the 1840’s and 1850’s. The moderates of that age were determined to distance their party from the polarizing questions of slavery. In 1848 the Whigs elected slave-owner Zachary Taylor, who quickly transformed the party into a pale reflection of the opposition. Fearful of controversy that might alienate one group or another, the Whigs did not even adopt a party platform that year.

Within eight years the Whigs had vanished, while a new party emerged made up of widely disparate elements united in a single principled and highly controversial cause.

Reagan’s genius lay in his willingness to embrace principled causes, though they might be controversial, while uniting those disparate elements around a central tenet: that free men and women can decide their futures better as individuals than government can decide for them collectively. This was the ideological pillar that held aloft the so-called Republican "Big Tent." When George Bush in Washington and Pete Wilson in California destroyed that pillar in the 1990’s by massively increasing taxes and regulations, the tent came crashing down and the diverse groups within it began brawling with each other.

Now a ruling party has emerged in California after sixteen years of stalemated government. It has the charter to govern. Its ideology is clear: to use the power of government to provide collectively for the demands of its constituencies.

The question is whether the Republicans understand the role of the loyal opposition: to offer a contrasting agenda of liberty and to take that agenda aggressively to the people.

Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln understood that role. Zachary Taylor and George [H.W.] Bush did not. Which style of leadership the Republicans choose could well decide whether eight years from now the Republicans sweep the state as they did in 1966, or whether they go the way of the Whigs in 1856.