There used to be a political truism: Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line.

That’s no longer true. Not in this moment. Democrats have learned to fall in love and fall in line. Republicans are just falling apart.

Last week, the opening salvos were launched in a very public and very nasty civil war between establishment Republicans and Tea Party supporters when it was reported that Karl Rove was backing a new group, the Conservative Victory Project, to counter the Tea Party’s selection of loopy congressional candidates who lose in general elections.

The Tea Party was having none of it. It sees Rove’s group as a brazen attack on the Tea Party movement, which it is. Rove sees winning as a practical matter. The Tea Party counts victory in layers of philosophical purity.

Politico reported this week that an unnamed “senior Republican operative” said that one of the party’s biggest problems was “ ‘suicide conservatives, who would rather lose elections than win seats with moderates.’ ”

Democrats could be the ultimate beneficiaries of this tiff. Of the 33 Senate seats up for election in 2014, 20 are held by Democrats. Seven of those 20 are in states that President Obama lost in the last presidential election. Republicans would have to pick up only a handful of seats to take control of the chamber.

But some in the Tea Party are threatening that if their candidate is defeated in the primaries by a candidate backed by Rove’s group, they might still run the Tea Party candidate in the general election. That would virtually guarantee a Democratic victory.

Sal Russo, a Tea Party strategist, told Politico: “We discourage our people from supporting third-party candidates by saying ‘that’s a big mistake. We shouldn’t do that.’ ” He added: “But if the position [Rove’s allies] take is rule or ruin — well, two can play that game. And if we get pushed, we’re not going to be able to keep the lid on that.”

The skirmish speaks to a broader problem: a party that has lost its way and can’t rally around a unified, coherent vision of what it wants to be when it grows up.

The traditional Republican message doesn’t work. Rhetorically, the G.O.P. is the party of calamity. The sky is always falling. Everything is broken. Freedoms are eroding. Tomorrow is dimmer than today.

In Republicans’ world, we must tighten our belts until we crush our spines. We must take a road to prosperity that runs through the desert of austerity. We must cut to grow. Republicans are the last guardians against bad governance.

But how can they sell this message to a public that has rejected it in the last two presidential elections?

Some say keep the terms but soften the tone.

A raft of Republicans, many of them possible contenders in 2016, have been trying this approach.

Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, speaking at a Republican National Committee meeting last month, chastised his party for being “the stupid party” that’s “in love with zeros,” even as he insisted, “I am not one of those who believe we should moderate, equivocate, or otherwise abandon our principles.”

Jindal’s plan, like that of many other Republicans, boils down to two words: talk differently.

Other Republicans, like Marco Rubio, seem to want to go further. They understand that the party must behave differently. He is among a group of senators who recently put forward a comprehensive immigration proposal that would offer a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country.

This is a position Democrats have advocated, and it’s a position that Republicans have to accept if they want Hispanic support — and a chance of winning a presidential election.

The Tea Party crowd did not seem pleased with that plan. Glenn Beck, the self-described “rodeo clown” of the right, said:

“You’ve got John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and now Marco Rubio joining them because Marco Rubio just has to win elections. I’m done. I’m done. Learn the Constitution. Somebody has to keep a remnant of the Constitution alive.”

For Beck’s wing of the party, moderation is surrender, and surrender is death. It seems to want to go further out on a limb that’s getting ever more narrow. For that crowd, being a Tea Party supporter is more a religion than a political philosophy. They believe so deeply and fervently in it that they see no need for either message massage or actual compromise.

While most Democrats and Independents want politicians to compromise, Republicans don’t, according to a January report by the Pew Research Center. The zealots have a chokehold on that party, and they’re sucking the life — and common sense — out of it.

For this brand of Republican, there is victory in self-righteous defeat.

With the Super Bowl over, last week's coast vs. coast game of gun control one-upping saw California Democrats announcing an effort to out do New York's midnight end run Safe Act. Flanked by the state's two urban figureheads, State Senate leadership says it will use its supermajority to ramrod a package that will make even Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg green with envy.

The stakes of cultural warfare continue to rise and gun owners regardless of party affiliation are being told they must lay down arms and submit to their superiors. The elitist notion from the time of Colfax that "for the interests of the state, the rights of the People may be set aside" remains alive and well in this country.

Social media is of course alive with anger and bluster mostly ignored by mainstream media and it's headline writers. Well maybe Piers Morgan has found a temporary boost in his poor ratings but that won't last. Quietly, those familiar with the economic incentives of "black markets" are beginning to take note. Even more quietly, people rumble about who gets dibs on the top bunks in the camps. You see states aligning on two sides of a divisive issue so potentially explosive we could cleave the Union itself. Now between you and me, driving citizens to blows is not my idea of a good outcome for this country. The search for inclusive solutions seems called for in such extraordinary times.

In all this, an interesting thought occurs this weekend.

The Democrats in their zeal may be creating the very basis that will revitalize the Republican Party in spite of itself. By targeting -- yes I do love the pun -- gun owners across the board as some sort of witch coven are they driving people to join a new American coalition?

The thought experiment goes like this. Posit the every gun owner of every race, religion or any other persuasion switches parties to and then use these swelled numbers to invigorate and change the Republican Party to focus on becoming a broad based defender of the Second Amendment. Further posit that it doesn't matter what one thinks about all the other social issues; that this single issue unites all manner of people who are uncomfortable with trusting everything in government and that this is what created the glue to sustain this new coalition.

The Republican Party has been bumbling about seeking a new wedge and the Democrats may have handed it to them on a silver platter. An influx of people to the party would certainly work itself out in a broader caucus that changes the party once everyone is settled in. Democratic pressure on the gun issue could make that happen much sooner. It'd be interesting. It's a very credible threat. What politician won't perk up if they see a tide of party registrations reaching the registrar showing that suddenly something not quiet is happening on the reservation?

It turns out it's easy enough to do. And like most interesting things these days, it can happen virally. Let's continue the example of the two coasts.

In California, one can change party affiliation online. One can change it anytime one likes. One can change arbitrarily up to 15 days before an election. You can do it here.

That means it's possible to mount grassroots revolts in between election cycles to get the California State Legislature's attention. A social media campaign to ask every gun owner who's a Democrat to a least consider re-registering as a Republican and then send a note to their representatives saying they've done so and if they want them to switch back 15 days before the next election they should heed the message. It's kind of like "Move Your Money" for redistributing political clout and there's nothing the careful gerrymandering of redistricting can do about it.

Party switching for political messaging is not as easy to do in New York. But it's still a citizen's right to do it. In New York you need to do two things. First download a PDF file with the voter registration form. Then -- this is where it gets tricky -- you need to mail that form to the specific county registrar where you live. The list of mailing addresses is in a link in the same website. Bit more trouble but it makes for a nice educational outreach campaign, a somewhat different form on the Occupy Something theme. Maybe one could start by sending a nice letter to all the addresses published by the New York Journal News? The PDF file for recording State of New York voter registration and party affiliation change is here.

Be sure to send your regards to the Governor if you do.

So the next question is can the Republicans handle the influx? It will certainly change the party to have to become much more broadminded about many issues. My guess is yes. If one looks particularly at African-American, Hispanic and Asian cultures -- as opposed to their self-appointed leaders -- one finds a great deal of common core values with the non-fringe portion of the Republican Party. There are already many such persons who are Republicans. Swelling their numbers would certainly be healthy for the party, and arguably healthier for the United States. What's not to like about seeing the voices of diversity prosper within any group? You'd have to be a bit dictatorial to oppose it. And that's not supposed to be a good thing in these United States. Have some apple pie.

Clearly such a development will also alter the Democratic Party. A broad cultural coalition of Republicans held together by the liberty to pursue more forms of happiness of the 1st Amendment and the power to compel government to serve as opposed to rule of the 2nd Amendment is a formidable vision of the going forward American experiment. No doubt Democrats will respond and win back party members by adjusting the platform. Some of the fringe from the left side of aisle will have to give way to the center. I can't say that's a bad thing either.

What actually interests me the most about this weekend thought experiment is coming to terms with seeing that lifetime party affiliation in the Internet age is a myth. As a people, we can actually think of it more as a commodity and yes even a weapon -- thankfully a political one -- to be employed to constrain the excesses of government. We aren't just limited to being sheep. American citizens are eclectic individuals. Each of us is a unique mixture of values that defies the pigeon holing of the traditional party system. How we continue to adapt our political system to serve us is probably the most important thing each citizen can do in these times.

The United States, from day one, was a project about principles and ideals.

The superpower that emerged and grew from the handful of colonists that began settling here was not the product of where those colonists happened to land, but the ideals and principles in their head and heart – applied in how they lived their lives.

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 to address one great blot on the nation’s founding legacy – the existence of slavery in a nation founded under the ideal of freedom under God.

Runaway slave and self-educated abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass said, “I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.”

Douglass called Abraham Lincoln, America’s first Republican president, “emphatically the black man’s president.”

When some 30 years ago I told the welfare officer not to bother showing up again at my home – when I decided that my own future would be based on the values of Scripture, work and personal responsibility – there was no doubt in my mind what party would become my political home.

The party of “freedom and progress,” the party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

But, as longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer once observed, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

It ‘s no mystery why the Republican Party is having a hard time today. No matter how hard you squint and try to discern the values of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, or any values for that matter, in those now wielding the money and power at the top of the party, they’ve disappeared.

These establishment Republican leaders and operatives are not about ideals and values but business – their own business.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office is that unemployment will “remain above 7.5 percent through next year. That would make 2014 the sixth consecutive year with a jobless rate that high, the longest stretch of such elevated unemployment in 70 years.”

Yet the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 could not defeat the current occupant of the White House.

In the party that is supposed to be about freedom and personal responsibility, party operatives want to blame everyone else for their own failures.

Worse, they want to pin it on candidates who actually take seriously the traditional values of their party.

Karl Rove would like to weed out candidates like former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin.

Akin, who was defeated by Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill in the U.S. Senate race in Missouri, was a six-term Republican congressman with a flawless conservative record.

For most of 2012 he was ahead of McCaskill in the polls. Then, in August, he expressed himself poorly in an interview about abortion. Despite his apologies and efforts to clarify himself, his own party abandoned him.

McCaskill ran ads, over and over, showing the Republican’s own candidate Mitt Romney questioning Akin’s qualifications. This race could have been saved. But the party elite wasted not a second dumping Akin because they were not comfortable with his conservative values to begin with.

We’re living in a deeply troubled country today. Americans are looking for answers, not a political class feathering its own nest.

There are tens of millions of conservative American patriots who seek an opposition party to represent their conviction that America will not get back on the path to strength and prosperity without restoration of freedom, limited government, free markets and traditional values.

Today’s big question is whether the Republican Party is going to be that opposition party.

If not, it is not conservative values and convictions that will be abandoned. It will be the Republican Party.

For anyone who sees Mitt Romney's loss in the November presidential election as a harbinger of GOP decline, conservatives have a message - make that two, tellingly conflicting, messages.

One, embodied by the Conservative Victory Project (CVP) - a group backed by Karl Rove's "super PAC" seeking to curb influence from far-right organizations - and spelled out Tuesday by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.: Our olive branch is ripe, Democrats, and with the right legislation, we're willing to compromise.

The other, perhaps best summarized in paperwork filed today by ousted Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., to create a "super PAC" countering Rove's: The tea party that in 2010 ushered into Washington a wave of staunch conservative ideologues isn't going away.

The Rove group's formation was just the most explicit among intensifying calls to inject discipline into a Congress that has seen unprecedented gridlock, particularly on critical economic issues.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, R-La. - a favorite on 2016 speculation lists - at a GOP retreat last month said, "We've got to stop being the stupid party," and called on his fellow Republicans to start talking "like adults." Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., appearing subsequently on CBS News programs, rushed to condone the remarks. "I think we clearly have to change," Gingrich said.

Meanwhile, Cantor's speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday brought substance to the argument, not to mention a glimpse into what the tone of the newly minted 113th Congress might be. Reviewed largely as a recasting of the Republican Party's image, Cantor's remarks offered a striking departure from the partisan battles that in the past few years have brought the government more than once to the brink of crisis. Rather than emphasizing spending cuts, he spoke of the economy from an American family standpoint; most drastically, he also endorsed immigration principles of the Dream Act.

"There are some who would rather avoid fixing the problem in order to save this as a political issue," Cantor said of immigration reform proposals currently making their way through congressional committees. "I reject this notion and call on the president to help lead us towards a bipartisan solution rather than encourage the common political divisions of the past."

While announcing gun trafficking legislation today, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said he was "very encouraged" by the House majority leader's speech. "I think he clearly opened the door for the House to move on meaningful legislation," he said. "Maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of opening doors."

But despite some who believe the tea party peaked with its influx of dogma-driven freshmen in 2010, the grassroots activist group is sounding off about this new push toward the center. Statements from the various factions of the movement have echoed the sentiment expressed on Nov. 7 by Tea Party Patriots coordinator Jenny Beth Martin, blaming President Obama's reelection on the GOP's nomination of Romney - "a weak moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of the Republican Party."

Even Tea Party Express chairwoman Amy Kremer, who despite early criticism ultimately supported Romney, and who, during the near-government-shutdown ordeal of 2011, advocated "realistic" pragmatism in budget negotiations, in a statement Monday pointed to "the biggest Republican victories in modern American politics" as indicative that CVP won't be successful.

"Reagan's victories in the 1980s, Newt Gingrich and the Republican revolution of 1994, and the Tea Party's historic wins in 2010 were all made possible because the Republican Party, and its candidates, stood strongly and proudly for pro-growth fiscal conservative policies," Kremer said. "The newly launched Conservative Victory Project wants to push the tea party out and replace them with the failed strategies of 2008 and 2012. This Super PAC is choosing power of principle, but will end up alienating conservatives and electoral losses.

"If the establishment's large donors want to see a complete electoral catastrophe, then all they need to do is push tea party conservatives into supporting alternative third candidates," she continued.

FreedomWorks, another powerhouse tea party fundraising group that suffered from its own infighting in December, also put out a statement, touting the "leadership" of the movement's heroes like Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, and warned, "the Empire is striking back."

"A clear pattern has emerged, beginning with the GOP leadership's efforts to silence delegates on the floor of the RNC, continuing with House Leadership's purge of fiscally conservative congressmen from their committee positions for voting out of line with the GOP establishment," spokeswoman Jacqueline Bodnar wrote. "Now, an Orwellian-named 'Conservative Victory Project' is created with the sole operating mission of blocking the efforts of fiscally conservative activists across the country.

"All events point to a fundamental clash between the old guard Republican establishment, dictating outdated ideas from the top-down, versus a tech-savvy younger generation of activists driving their agenda from the bottom-up," the statement continued.

CVP spokesman Jonathan Collegio said in an email to CBSNews.com that his group's goal "isn't to divide the party," but to "institutionalize the William F Buckley rule by supporting the most conservative candidate in the primary who can win in the general."

"...Our party has lost a number of races in recent years, both by so-called 'establishment' candidates and tea party candidates, not because of bad messages but bad messengers: undisciplined candidates with little local support and who lacked the fundraising prowess necessary to win campaigns," Collegio continued. "To win more races, we need better candidates, and that's what this group will support."

Collegio said CVP has not yet made a list of specific races they will target because "it's too early," but some reports suggest Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who says he is "50-50" on whether to make a bid for retiring Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin's seat, may be the group's most obvious starting point. King has been known to rally with firebrand Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., who founded the House Tea Party Caucus and almost lost her seat in November after an unsuccessful run for the White House. Bachmann's office declined to comment for this article.

Though early polls show King with solid footing in the Hawkeye State, Steven Law, president of Rove's "super PAC" American Crossroads, told the New York Times the CVP is "concerned about Steve King's Todd Akin problem," referring to King's defense of the former Missouri congressman and Senate candidate's incediary remarks about "legitimate rape." King, too, has been known to offer controversial statements, including his critique of Mr. Obama's middle name "Hussein" as a hindering factor in winning the "War on Terror."

Another target may be tea party Rep. Paul Brown, R-Ga., who is expected to announce today his intention to seek the seat of retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga. Broun has bagged his share of controversy as well, having had his say in the "birther" movement questioning the president's citizenship, and opining that "all that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell."