by Matthew Raley With Mitt Romney's wins in Michigan and Arizona last night, the race for the GOP nomination may become more stable. But the diminishing political options for Romney's competitors will not change the attitudes of GOP voters. The candidates reflect America's deepening division without giving the leadership Americans need to reunite. Republicans will continue to grumble.

Great political leaders make coalitions that give different interests a place to combine. Ronald Reagan, for instance, is best understood as a coalition builder. He knew that strong unity begins with a dense message, one that integrates many points of view. The secret to his political power was the diversity of people and philosophies behind him. (The left has never understood this, preferring to call Reagan an illusionist.)

The two most significant GOP candidates at this writing, Romney and Rick Santorum, are not going to be great leaders.

Here are some of the cultural changes the GOP candidates reflect.

1. Economic divide.

Santorum and Romney reflect this divide perfectly. Santorum comes from a blue collar district in Pennsylvania, the real rust-belt deal. He articulates the priorities of blue collar people who have seen their way of life fall to pieces. Romney lives in the managerial world of law and finance, and articulates the problem-solving ethos of that world.

Both men talk about freedom. But the blocks of culture they represent need to hear how their specific interests in freedom combine. The question of the hour is, "Where do interests converge?"

2. Educational divide

One chunk of the nation has a college or graduate education. That block has mobility, options, and wealth. The people in it have seen their choices narrow in the last four years because of the bad economy. But they still have options to improve their lives.

The other chunk of the nation has a high school education and, maybe, work experience. This block has little social mobility, few to no options for improving their lives, and little wealth. Men in this group, particularly, do not see how they can make their way back into the economy with anything like the vitality their fathers enjoyed.

This educational divide has hardened into worldview divide. Many in the educated block view their education as a spiritual mission, a means to moral and personal transformation. Most in the uneducated block see the educational establishment as a fraud. Harvard, Madoff -- what's the difference? And this suspicion is all too well-founded (here and here). It is not just anti-intellectual bigotry, as the educated classes love to suppose.

Santorum spoke directly to this split, taking one side of it in unambiguous terms. Obama is a "snob" for talking up college. Santorum's approach is not going to benefit him. It will be seen as unpresidential even by those who might eat it up on a talk show. But, even though candidates do not gain the nomination with boorish jabs, there remains a deep and justified hostility to the socially approved waste of resources by colleges and universities.

Romney, for his part, is a numbers guy, planted complacently on the other side of the divide.

So the question remains: how can the interests of both combine?

3. Family divide.

Charles Murray has delivered another of his virtuoso performances in social science, speaking of numbers. In Coming Apart, he shows the predominance of traditional marriage among those who are educated with a secular worldview, and the predominance of broken families among the less educated. Michael Barone analyzes the Romney-Santorum battle in light of Murray's findings.

Santorum, in his populist flush, seems unaware that the working class no longer lives a traditional family life. Indeed, the most significant reason why the working class has fewer economic and social options is not the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, but the loss of resilience that comes from a committed marriage.

Romney has nothing to say about this. He has the gut of a financier, which, valuable though it may be, seems to leave him incapable of speaking effectively to these problems.

What will the new coalition for the traditional family look like? Actually, it won't be political at all.

The reason the GOP hasn't settled on a front runner is that no candidate is building a coalition.

If Santorum had wanted to be credible, he would have come out of the gate with a coalition message, and he would have made his strategy and tactics in the primaries cohere with that message. As it is, he is merely rallying a constituency, and is blowing an opportunity that only comes once in a generation.

If Romney had wanted to be credible, he would have launched his campaign with a deeper, more cogent assessment of America's problems. But he does not appear to have the imagination to do more than deliver slogans. And by now, he has morphed too many times to sharpen his message.

Gingrich and Paul? Paul does not want a coalition. That was never his game. As for Gingrich, I would never count him out. But the coalition he envisions seems to change every time his mic goes live.

In other words, every GOP candidate wants to be Reagan without doing what Reagan did.

by Matthew Raley The value we place on human life may be revealed in ordinary self-restraint.

While the exact causes of the Costa Concordia tragedy may not be any clearer today, the story of the evacuation unfolded all too clearly over the weekend. There seems to have been a total breakdown of order as the ship capsized.

Surviving passengers recounted how the crew gave false reassurances, then abandoned their posts. The scenes were described as "every man for himself," with no consideration for women and children, or for the elderly. Two bodies discovered inside the ship over the weekend were elderly men wearing life jackets. The captain insists that he was the last to leave the ship, but the bodies of those two men reply, "We were still here when you set foot onshore." Fifteen others are still missing.

The value of others on the Concordia was obviously lower than the value of Self.

For many decades now, Americans and Europeans have valued personal authenticity over social norms. We like to think each person is autonomous, free from artificial bonds. The Self is holy. Duties are anathema. The very word order has become almost contemptible, regarded by many as code for repression. And so the passengers of the Concordia endured not just the violence of a sinking ship but the fury of personal authenticity in a panic.

We've heard about the thin line between civilization and barbarism. We've seen that line crossed in macrocosm (Iraq after the invasion) and microcosm (Walmart mobs on Black Friday). On the Concordia, passengers were dining comfortably one moment, and in the next were crawling on their knees through broken glass, lashing themselves to railings, and passing their 2-year-olds to a stranger in the hope that she might think of a child rather than herself.

We have also seen the line maintained. New York City did not collapse into an orgy of personal authenticity on 9-11. Its citizens showed why order is noble. Our soldiers around the world don't abandon their units under fire. And there were passengers on the Concordia who remained calm, nursed the wounded, and gave leadership.

Every day, we show the value we place on human life in our small actions. Giving place to the elderly, showing self-restraint in front of children and gentleness to women -- or, to use the old-fashioned phrase for these actions, showing deference -- these are the ways we acknowledge another person's worth.

They are also society's rehearsals for emergency. What we do in danger depends on what we practice in safety.

I think our society has big reserves of civility. But we are tolerating disrespect in too many ways. People who spew foul language in front of children, who refuse to defer to flight attendants, school teachers, or police, who are incapable of respecting the elderly, and who treat women as valuable only if they are hotties -- and then only give the reward of crudity -- are rehearsing a fresh Concordia experience for the rest of us.

It's time we gave them the smack-down.