"No fighting in the war room,” shouted the President, as chaos broke out near the end of Dr Strangelove. The scene in Republican Party circles this weekend must resemble that moment from Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece of satiric film-making.

The Republicans are fighting in the war room. They are fighting in the television studios. They are fighting in the blogs and on the opinion pages. They are fighting on the dinner-party circuit and outside church on Sundays (all right, I made that last bit up, but you get the picture). There's a quaint idea that in politics, as in war, one should wait until the shooting is over before assembling the commission of inquiry into the defeat.

But the pre-mortem is now a well-established political ritual and Republicans, for so long used to arguing in victory, are diving in, like frenzied fans into a mosh pit. Some anonymously, getting their retaliation in first by telling Obama supporters in the media (sorry, that was tautologous) what's gone wrong. Some, such as Colin Powell, and less predictably, Ken Adelman, one of the most enthusiastic backers of the Iraq war and one-time acolyte of Donald Rumsfeld, breaking publicly and endorsing the Democratic candidate.

The ferocity of the current fighting will be nothing though, compared with what comes after the inevitable defeat. John McCain and his campaign will be the initial targets, and will deserve some of the blame they get. How they contrived to turn one of America's most attractive and independent-minded figures into a spluttering partisan and oddly ineffective jackal will be a tale worth hearing. But the retrospective McCain Mutiny will be just the opening salvo in the war for the soul of America's Right. The fighting will be so furious and so multidirectional it will be hard to know what's going on at times.

It will pit neoconservatives against isolationists. The isolationists will say that a crazy ideological faith in America's mission to democratise the world through force of arms led to the debacle in Iraq (even as American arms succeed in democratising Iraq). Do not be surprised if neoconservatives end up feeling closer to an Obama presidency (as they often did to a Clinton presidency) if it seems internationally engaged, than to Republicans who think it's time to pull up the drawbridge.

It will pit social conservatives against libertarians. The latter will argue, with good grounds, that the obsession with creationism and gay marriage ended up leading Ronald Reagan's shining New Jerusalem in an ill-fated and unedifying peasants-with-pitchforks assault on Sodom and Gomorrah.

There will be much fighting around the proposition that conservatives lost their way because they ceased to be conservative. There's always a danger of wilful ideological blindness about this assertion - a favourite reaction to defeat among a party's more extreme members is the claim that it was punishment for not having been extreme enough. But the behaviour of the Bush Administration and its sometime allies in Congress in the past eight years suggests that, in economic terms at least, a bit more traditional conservative distrust of government might not have been a bad thing.

An intriguingly large part of the skirmishing already revolves around the person and politics of Sarah Palin. This is partly because she will presumably be a leading contender for the party's presidential nomination in 2012. But it is more that the Palin question goes to the heart of what Republicans are or should be.

Some conservatives (always described in the media as thoughtful, to distinguish them from the braying masses that make up the bulk of the conservative class) worry that Mrs Palin represents a nadir for their movement - the pitiful but logical reductio ad absurdum of the populist, identity-over-issues approach that the party has taken of late. They see - in her “You betcha, gosh darnit” colloquialisms, her narrative of a frontierswoman of simplistically heroic personal virtue, her instinctual identification with a narrow and exclusive parody of ordinary Americanness - an anti-intellectualism, a repudiation of the very idea that ideas matter, an unspoken assertion that thinking about complexity is for cissies and Frenchmen.

It's hard to know what to make of this Palintology. It's hard to make a reasoned and fair judgment about the Alaska Governor because she has been the victim of one of the nastiest, most sustained and comprehensive slime-jobs ever performed by a hyper-partisan national and global media.

The latest piece of nonsense to hit the media's fan this week is a fine example: the news that the Republicans paid $150,000 to kit out her and her family for the election campaign. Forget for a moment the special and ridiculous sartorial demands made of a woman and her family over three months on the campaign trail, or that the party has said it will donate the clothes to charity afterwards (she can't keep them, in any case, under tax law). Just think how we would have scoffed if she had shown up for her television appearances in an off-the-rack dress from the Anchorage Dress Barn or if she had been spotted wearing the same jacket twice in a week.

So, the Palinphobia is so shot through with condescension and ideological incomprehension on the media's part that trying to cut through to the reality of her political message is not easy.

Her performance on the campaign trail has been shaky, it's true, though it has significantly improved of late (she is now talking directly to reporters more frequently than any of the other candidates). But in the absence of much hard experience of national politics it does seem as though she and her Republican handlers fell back on the Sarah Palin Story as a substitute for a political argument.

This has harmed her and distorted what she could bring to a Republican Party in renewal. There's still a better story to be told about her record as politician in Alaska, where she has achieved more of substance than Barack Obama has in Washington.

As for the anti-intellectualism she seems to represent, this is a favourite old saw not only of the Left but also of the whole Establishment crowd. There's an unshakeable view among the coastal elites that real wisdom is acquired only by circulating between the ivy-encrusted walls of scholarship and the Manhattan and Hollywood cocktail set.

But there's real wisdom among those derided Americans who have never even ventured to the coasts, but whose steady consistent voice and values have been truly responsible for America's many successes.

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