Well before Donald Trump became the presumptive leader of the Republican Party, the outlines of a schism within its ranks were apparent. The precise factors that precipitated this crack-up were and remain elusive. Some on the right argued that it was conservatism itself that no longer appealed to the GOP’s base voters. Others contended that it wasn’t arguments over policy but strategy that created fissures within the movement. The mercurial Donald Trump has not lent much clarity to this debate, and his deliberate vagueness has allowed critics of the GOP to impose on his candidacy their priors and biases. For the time being, the fault lines within the party are still more easily explained by disputes over tactics rather than the average primary voter’s ill-defined frustrations over this or the other policy. To distill the matter further, the GOP split has been driven primarily by Republican voters’ contempt toward incrementalism. These Republicans want radical change, and they want it yesterday.

It is tempting to look upon the Trump phenomenon as a rejection of conservatism itself. After all, this is a candidate who has explicitly rejected center-right orthodoxy on everything from trade, to taxes, to abortion. After vanquishing the last of his myriad 2016 GOP opponents, Trump dismissed conservatives who would not sacrifice their convictions as recalcitrant purists to whom he did not need to appeal. “This is called the Republican Party, it’s not called the Conservative Party,” the prospective GOP nominee said. The Trump campaign has been explicit in its desire to replace conservatives who bolt the GOP in 2016 with Bernie Sanders-backing independents or even outright socialists. To that end, the celebrity candidate softened his stance on raising the minimum wage and his proposed cuts to top marginal rates in his tax plan. On its face, that sure looks like a rejection of conservatism. What’s more, it’s a rejection to which a plurality of the GOP’s primary voters consented.

This is only compelling evidence in support of the death of conservatism on a trivial level. As of this writing, Donald Trump has managed to secure just over 40 percent of the GOP primary vote. Trump’s more traditionally Republican opponents (Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz) have won 54 percent of the vote combined. The GOP has, over the course of the last three election cycles, managed to win over 30 governorships and 900 legislative seats back from Democrats. In 2014, the party secured a majority in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate larger than at any point since the Truman administration. These Republican elected officials did not run for office and win by rejecting Paul Ryan’s agenda. What’s more, throughout the long and bitterly contested primary process in which a record number of voters turned out to the polls, not one of these sitting Republican incumbents was “primaried” by an allegedly bitter and angry electorate.

Some may be tempted to dismiss the Trump phenomenon as merely the results of a cult of personality. GOP voters have been swayed by his affect, his outsize persona, his baked-in celebrity status, and his prohibitive domination of all forms of media. There are, however, deep divisions that animate the leaders of the conservative movement’s insurgent factions, and they are not contrivances. If the Republican Party continues in its rush to capitulate to Trump, then the real estate developer may yet succeed in transforming the country’s conservative party into something much less conservative. For now, though, the questions bifurcating the GOP along pro-and anti-Trump lines are still over tactics. That fact was exemplified best by a U.S. District Court decision released on Thursday over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, in which a judge ruled in favor of the Republican Party’s arguments against the law.

The ruling affirmed the claims from the GOP-led House under former Speaker John Boehner that the Affordable Care Act was illegally funded. The 38-page decision affirmed the constitutional principle that the executive branch cannot spend money that has not been appropriated by the Congress. By providing subsidies to health insurers under ObamaCare without congressional consent, the Obama administration was breaking the law. This ruling will surely be appealed. As a result of the venue, the case will likely end up before an evenly divide Supreme Court. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board noted that this raises the stakes of the presidential elections substantially. As the Journal reminded us, however, this lawsuit was derided by the “GOP establishment’s” most vociferous critics as a foolish waste of time. It wasn’t. What’s more, this decision affirms an authority that the Republican Party’s loudest conservative detractors have for so long insisted the party was afraid to assert: namely, the power of the purse.

By relying on the courts to affirm that authority, the party avoided a politically disastrous shutdown fight while reasserting its constitutional authority in a decisive and incontestable fashion. In concert with the repeal of ObamaCare, passed by both chambers and vetoed by President Barack Obama in January, the stage is set for a perfectly legitimate repeal and replacement of the odious health care reform law by a new Republican president and a GOP-led Congress.

When it comes to ObamaCare, what the Republican Party’s conservative critics demanded was never a shift in ideology or focus, but a change in tactics. They have forgotten that ObamaCare was not the result of a midnight coup but the culmination of the Democratic Party’s 30-year crusade for universal health care and the end result of two consecutive landslide elections. The pugilist right wanted a fight; the hill upon which the party decided to fight and perhaps die seemed for some more important than the outcome of the engagement. But your glorious and dramatic martyrdom in battle only matters if the survivors are inclined to honor your memory. The GOP’s pragmatists knew ill-fated tactics, like those that led to the government shutdown over the funding of the ACA in 2013, taint and cheapen the cause for which they are employed. To the Republican Party’s radicals, this notion is a contrivance. Being selective about the ground upon which to fight is for them tantamount to spinelessness. A dispute over tactics was and remains the central issue cleaving the Republican Party in two.

The superficiality of this divide was exposed amid a panel discussion on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” on Thursday between and columnist Charles Krauthammer and the American Conservative Union’s Mercedes Schlapp. In a lengthy and contentious exchange, Schlapp noted that the GOP’s base voters are punishing the party for failing to enact conservative reforms even despite the opposition of a Democratic president. “That standard of success is absurd,” Krauthammer insisted. Schlapp claimed, however, that there is a pervasive “perception” among conservatives that their leaders in Congress are more inclined to collaborate with Democrats than to accede to the will of their voters. When Krauthammer observed that the Constitution prohibits the legislature from governing without the acquiescence of the White House, Schlapp insisted that the base of the party needs a “better messaging from the GOP.” They have one: Articles I and II of the nation’s founding charter. One suspects Mrs. Schlapp, a messenger herself, is disinclined to disseminate a “better” pragmatist message.

It is unfortunate for the “angry” conservative that the instrument they have chosen to communicate their frustration is not a member of their tribe. Though they are wrong about optimal tactics or the responsiveness of their leaders to the voters, they judged the cowardice of their elected representatives in Congress quite accurately. The rapidity of the congressional GOP’s capitulation to Trump suggests that they will throw conservatism out the window if they think that is what their voters demand. What began as an internecine feud over strategy may yet end as a permanent split over the nature of conservatism, with conservatives on the losing side. For now, however, the issues that have led to a GOP’s split are far more easily repaired than they appear on the surface.