Shards of the Republican Party

I thought this article in the Weekly Standard was fantastic. National Review frequently reiterates (yes, I do read it frequently, even though I wouldn’t consider myself a Republican) their standard position that a Republican candidate must win all 3 wings of the Republican party (the “Reagan coalition” of social, fiscal, defense conservatives) in order to win the election. I have no way of knowing whether that statement is true, and have seen no statistics that make it seem that coalition is any more viable than any other. But in any case, NR talks about the coalition frequently as a central feature of the party which still remains relevant today.

This article by contrast basically takes the position that the coalition is dead, and that the Republicans are no more ideologically coherent than the Democrats. I don’t understand how Reagan managed to unify those factions (I am too young). The article is about Mitt Romney’s inability to pull off a similar feat. A brief excerpt:

Of all the strategic errors that all of the campaigns have made this cycle, Romney’s effort to appeal to all the individual factions of the GOP may have been the biggest. Even successfully checking all those boxes wasn’t enough for victory last night.

Now I am curious to read more about Reagan: how was he able to unify disparate wings of the Republican party, what exactly did he do, and why do Republicans still idolize him? And why did/does the “Reagan coalition” make more sense than any other selection of interests that will get a candidate to 51% of the electorate?