Rich Lowry: The Battle for the Soul of the Right

At the moment, the Republican establishment is relevant to the presidential-nomination battle only as an epithet.

The fight for the Republican nomination isn't so much a vicious brawl between the grass roots and the establishment as it is a bitter struggle between traditional conservatism and populism that few could have foreseen.

Conservatism has always had a populist element, encapsulated by the oft-quoted William F. Buckley Jr. line that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But the populism was tethered to, and in the ser...