Secular Right

John Henke’s post Organizing Against WorldNetDaily has prompted some response in the blogosphere. This Conor Friedersdorf post is the second contribution he has made to the discussion. Much of the debate has revolved around the intellectual/elite vs. populist dimension. Because it is a debate where rhetoric can get out of control some people are acting as if one must choose between elites and the masses, or, that a movement can be organized around only elites or masses. In a democratic republic a movement based on elite concerns only has no electoral base. On the other hand it seems that movements from the bottom-up which have no elite leadership or intellectual superstructure and are driven only by inchoate impulses tend to lose steam and lack long term focus.

This observation is trivial, but from what I know it is also a rock-solid inference one could make from a conservative model of how societies are organized, that is, they are organic wholes characterized by a diversity of roles, status and abilities. Movements or subcultures have the same characteristics. A totally flat and egalitarian structure in any movement is simply not scalable, so populism naturally throws up elites (other elites may call these demagogues, but sometimes it is in the eye of the beholder). Similarly, elites which take over societies can often generate populist cadres through the leverage they have in offering up patronage and advancement to the abmitious.

The natural compromises which emerge between the leaders and the led can take various forms. Black Americans are part of the liberal movement in the United States, and subordinate their social and religious conservatism to party loyalty and racial and fiscal liberalism (the exceptions of recent note have been via direct democracy). The black political elite espouses social liberalism in keeping with the movement elite. Though the American population tends to be suspicious of the advantages of free trade and the logic of comparative advantage, both Democratic and Republican elites have tended to push forward globalization despite populist resistence. In the case of Republicans, the party has been socially conservative for a generation now, and yet has yielded few efficacious policies which are purely driven by social conservatism* (e.g., welfare reform is arguably a social conservative victory, but it was also a fiscal issue). While black political leaders simply ignore the sentiments of the black masses and espouse social liberalism explicitly, Republicans have in the main respected the beliefs of the grassroots in their espoused planks. But they simply haven’t expended much political capital in reversing the trend toward social liberalism over the past generation from what I can tell (I think “South Park conservatism” is a classic case of declaring victory and ceding the war).

Because of the first-past-the-post winner-take-all nature of our legislative districts I suspect that a two-party system is the equilibrium for the American republic. But there are more than two strands of political thought in the United States. Naturally this results in a situation where coalitions emerge out of compromises. The process of discussion, argument and factional strife is simply a byproduct of this structural reality.

* Bush’s policy on embryonic stem cells is a prominent exception to this.