The two great Republican general-election victories of the recent past grew out of intraparty insurrections. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, fresh from challenging a sitting Republican president in 1976, ran against a party establishment represented in various ways by Howard Baker, George Bush, and John Connally. A decade later, Newt Gingrich led an insurrection, first against the Bush budget deal and then against Bob Michel and the Republican congressional establishment, which culminated in the Republican landslide of 1994. Now we are witnessing a third insurrection. John McCain is taking on the Republican establishment. In New Hampshire, he crushed it.

At first glance, the McCain insurgency seems nothing like the other two. Reagan and Gingrich led ideological crusades. They attacked the Republican establishment from the right, and the ground had been prepared by a conservative movement which first won the war of ideas. The McCain insurgency is not ideological. It does feature certain themes and principles, but they are not yet fully developed into a governing agenda.

But if one abandons the premise that insurrections have to be ideological, it becomes clear that in some ways the McCain insurgency does resemble its two predecessors. Like Reagan and Gingrich, McCain makes the corporate and lobbyist types nervous. The corporate elites have invested heavily in George W. Bush, and they must have been chugging Tums after New Hampshire.