The 1990s right is subdividing and feuding like the 1930s left.

Leftists are enthusiastic sectarians. The most brutal internecine spats took place in New York City in the 1930s. Dozens of tiny Marxist sects vied to launch the Revolution. Most of these were personality cults, led by charismatic trade unionists and brainy theorists: Fieldites, Lovestoneites, Weisbordites, Shermanites, Cochranites, Schactmanites, and Oehlerites. The prize for best sectarian of the decade may go to a Trostkyite named Karl Mienov. Mienov and his followers bolted from an alliance with the Oehlerite faction, following a debate over which Leninist strategy best suited the Spanish proletariat. "We are proud to have split with such a centrist group," Mienov proclaimed. But within months of forming his own party, the Marxist Workers League, Mienov purged all its members for a lack of revolutionary zeal. He flamed one poor Mienovite in his party's journal, Spark: "We can gage Comrade Stanford's sincerity, however, by the fact that rather than give out leaflets for the revolution, he prefers to study for exams at Brooklyn College." According to leftist apocrypha, Karl Mienov, now the only Mienovite, developed multiple personalities and split with himself.

In America, at least, political activists of the right have generally eschewed minuscule parties and bloody breaks. Recently, however, conservatives have become enthusiastic sectarians. Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote recently about the rumbling between libertarians and Christian conservatives over issues like the regulation of the Internet. The New Republic carried a piece last month about how neoconservative intellectuals have also started to condemn the Christian-conservative rhetoric. But these are broad-brush disagreements. True sectarianism requires more esoteric disputes.

In the last 20 years, hundreds of new groups have come on the scene promoting right-wing agendas. There's the U.S. Taxpayer Party, the National Taxpayer Union, the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition, the Christian Action Network, and so on. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, boasted in the American Spectator last year that there are now more than 1,000 state and local property-rights groups, and more than 1,500 taxpayer organizations.

Through the late '70s, the right took a Popular Front approach. The Popular Front was the American Communist Party's attempt in the late 1930s to pool leftists into a grand anti-fascist coalition. Groups like the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby, and Young Americans for Freedom similarly suppressed their differences in the service of anti-communism. Libertarians, evangelicals, segregationists, and others put aside significant doctrinal disagreements.

Most of the new conservative groups, by contrast, have particular ideological agendas. They fall into different camps. Some examples: Buchananite populists (conservatives who are anti-tax and who are social traditionalists, but who are also economic nationalists) can join the U.S. Taxpayer Party or Gun Owners of America. Less radical populists (like the Buchananites, but more committed to the Republican Party and without the economic nationalism) fund interest groups like U.S. Term Limits Now, the Institute for Justice, and Americans for Tax Reform. Libertarians have their own party and organizations promoting the rollback of government, like the Separation of School and State Alliance.

And then there are the Christian conservatives--the Trotskyites of the right. Trotskyites believe they actually have an obligation to undermine other leftist groups. They follow their namesake's aphorism that revolutions are like birth: The forceps shouldn't be applied too early. Only a vanguard party (their own, of course), using the correct tactics at the correct moment, can instigate a revolution. Christian conservatives have a similar sort of fixation on the purity of their movement's strategy. Consequently, the religious right is riddled with tiny groups, their very own Mienovites and Oehlerites, who believe they each have a monopoly on midwifery techniques for bringing a Christian society into the world.

Reconstructionists, for instance, follow the teachings of Francis Schaeffer, an obscure theologian in Switzerland, and argue for an Iran-like theocracy. Judgment Day, they reckon, has come and gone--so we are headed to perdition, unless a vanguard of radical Christians reconstruct society using Mosaic law as a blueprint. A truly Christian polis, they believe, would deny nonbelievers citizenship and publicly stone or kill disobedient children. Though they can't claim much of a following, their coterie is well organized and well positioned. Reconstructionists dominate the pro-life group, Operation Rescue. Howard Phillips, a well-known figure on the right and the recent U.S. Taxpayer Party presidential candidate, belongs to their tribe.

Most other Christian conservative groups don't preach such an extreme vision for their ideal society, but they similarly abhor compromise. Take Focus on the Family, a "parental rights" activist group with a mailing list of 3.5 million names, and its ally, the Family Research Council. James Dobson and Gary Bauer, the leaders of the two groups, sing the old leftist tune "Which Side Are You On?" Here, they describe their mission in pretty stark terms: "Nothing short of a great Civil War of Values rages today throughout North America. Two sides with vastly differing and incompatible worldviews are locked in a bitter conflict." So if you give an inch in battle, you lose.

There's a long list of other groups with a fairly similar take. Many claim to have several hundred thousand members: the Christian Action Network, Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for America, and the Traditional Values Coalition.

These groups feel uncomfortable with the Christian Coalition, the most powerful organization on the right and the one most committed to reviving the popular-front approach. Executive Director Ralph Reed explained the Christian Coalition's strategy last spring in his manifesto, Active Faith. He called the approach "surfing the mainstream." Reed argued that the religious right needs to retreat from the shrill language used by Bauer and Dobson, and to abandon radical positions--such as their insistence on a constitutional amendment banning abortion--in favor of more popular, piecemeal solutions.