The Economist is out with an editorial this week called “What’s Wrong With America’s Right.” It starts out rowing back from its endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008, explaining that he has done “little to fix the deficit,” shown “a zeal for big government,” and “all too often” has “given the impression that capitalism is something unpleasant he found on the sole of his sneaker.” So it asserts their endorsee needs to be “pegged back.” Then editors John Mickelthwait and Co. take out their humiliation on those American Republicans and conservatives who have stood most steadily on principle from the get-go.

Illustrating the editorial is a cover cartoon showing a tea party from Alice in Wonderland. Sarah Palin wears an apron and bears a gun, while holding up a frayed Democratic donkey with a bullet hole in its bosom. Next to her is Rush Limbaugh as a cigar-smoking White Rabbit. Next to him is a weeping Glenn Beck as the Mad Hatter, with his topper labeled “Nonsense 24/7.” There is a caricature of Barack Obama as a voodoo doll, slumping in a cup of oil labeled “BP.” From an adjacent cup protrudes a sign: “Immigrants out.” In the center of the table is the teapot, labeled “Fox.” Looking over the raucous scene are two dismayed looking elephants.

“[I]t is sad to report,” the editorial says, “that the American right is in a mess: fratricidal, increasingly extreme on many issues and woefully short of ideas, let along solutions.” It reckons the alleged dysfunctionality is “especially unfortunate.” It seems particularly upset at the tea-party movement, which it labels a tax revolt whose activists — “some clever, some dotty, all angry” — “seem to loathe the Bush-era free-spending Republicans as much as they hate the Democrats.” One might add in their hatred of the Bush-era Republicans they seem to be at one with the editors of the Economist, though it isn’t the free-spending that the Economist hated, else they wouldn’t have endorsed Mr. Obama.

In any event, the thing that struck us about the Economist’s editorial is that it misses a story that is becoming clearer by the week. It is the emergence at the fore of the party’s debate of a strain of thinking that one might call constitutionalism — or constitutional conservatism. In was on display when, to cite but one example, Fox News aired over the weekend the new edition of Andrew Napolitano’s Freedom Watch. The debut featured Sarah Palin, Congressman Ron Paul, and Paul’s son, Rand, who is running for the Senate from Kentucky. It seems that the ground to which they — and increasing numbers of other Republicans — are repairing during the current crisis is the Constitution of the United States.

Governor Palin made this point, marking the importance of enumerated powers. Congressman Paul and Governor Palin, who disagree about many things, including foreign policy and the Patriot Act, both spoke about the negative way in which the Constitution vouchsafes rights. They discussed how rights don’t come from government but from man’s creator and that the Constitution was put in place precisely to prohibit the government from violating those rights. They did so more articulately and rationally than even a leading article in the Economist. Judge Napolitano, who has written extensively on the Constitution, illuminated common ground between the libertarian Dr. Paul and the socially conservative Mrs. Palin.

What is Glenn Beck doing while the Economist is mocking him? He’s rolling out a series of broadcasts on the American Founders, starting with his encomium to Samuel Adams, centered on Ira Stoll’s biography of the most radical of American revolutionaries. The Economist thinks all the Republican ferment boils down to a party of “no” and rattles on about a “lack of coherence” among the Republicans, even while Mrs. Palin seems to be erecting a tent big enough to accommodate a major moderate in California, a radical in Nevada, and a Libertarian Republican from Texas, and scores of other politicians from Massachusetts through the Carolinas. Republicans are in the lead on monetary reform, and three-quarters of the Democratic-led House of Representatives is swinging behind Congressman Paul’s campaign to gain an audit of the Federal Reserve.

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And what does the Economist reckon is the “real problem,” as it puts it? It turns out to be, by the Economist’s lights, the possibility that the Republicans might win in November, when, the Economist fears, their commitment to lower taxes and pro-growth policies will leave them bereft. If the GOP does gain ground in November, we predict it will be the start of a new campaign for the GOP, one in which the party, in preparation for 2012, repairs to the law as laid down by the Founders — and an understanding government needs to be checked and balanced, that it possesses only those powers which the Constitution enumerates, that powers are not only enumerated but separated, and that un-enumerated powers are reserved to the states and to the people. What the Economist can’t see today will come into focus as a broad, level-headed, coherent philosophy that is more attractive than any advanced by the Democrats.