Over at The American Scene, Reihan Salam asks, IS SOCIAL CONSERVATISM THE PROBLEM?:
… I doubt that Frum fears a Republican party composed in large part of devout religious believers — rather, I think he’s worried about the perception that the GOP has become narrowly sectarian. Note that Huckabee did very well with white evangelicals, but very poorly with pro-life Catholics, this despite a message that was arguably tailor-made for Reagan Democrats. A “less overtly religious message” could nevertheless hold fast to the core concerns of cultural conservatives.
I was mumbling the word “sectarian” before I got to that point. Solutions? I think ultimately we are in for a new age of sectionalism, and the lowest tension resolution will be federalism.
Language is extremely powerful in its ability to classify in a way that reorganizes the way the brain thinks. Limiting the political spectrum to two dimensions is what has put us in the straights we are in today. When we have only right, left, and center to describe a political ideology, we misrepresent the views of the majority of its members and create an us vs them psychology that leads to deadlock and animosity. To lump secular vs all of the various religions, environmentalism vs people-first, socialist vs free-market, progressive vs conservative, isolationist vs internationalist, etc. into a single two dimensional construct is counter productive to the conversation and demeans those who feel unrepresented by the two party system.
into a single two dimensional construct is counter productive to the conversation and demeans those who feel unrepresented by the two party system.
There is something to this. But I think a lot less than I would have years ago. Most humans aren’t very subtle or deep in their thought. Adding more dimensions adds value when you’re tracking variation, but there are diminishing marginal returns. Quite often binning, as in Right-Left, causes problems. But on an ad hoc issue-by-issue basis it works.
No, the problem with the Right is not the Social Conservatives. Any more than it’s the Recession. Or the corrupt spending. Or GWBush. Or Cheney. Or McCain. Or Palin. Or the anti-brain-power stuff. Or the price of gas. Or Obama’s world-class campaign. Or torture. It’s the conjunction of all reasons and many more reasons, enough that it would have succeeded even without any one of them. 1980 was the same way.
But the Social Conservatives are definitely one of the many reasons. An important one. It’s not cooincidence that the total Right-to-Life wipeout happened when we really were within shooting distance of Roe/Wade. It confirms a long-standing pattern.
Reihan, Ross and Ponnuru have all made some vague statements about the youth demographic supporting more restrictions on abortion.
No cites, and I have seen zero data that supports this.
The Hamilton poll shows that 70% of young voters sampled would not personally have an abortion, but that in that same sample 60% support Roe v Wade.
Have you, Fraa Hume, seen any data that would illuminate this?
Ross has cited a poll here or there, but I always recall assuming that was just sampling error showing a “trend.”
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Show meh teh data.
I think this is type A error.
60% of the youth sample in the Hamilton poll are against striking down Roe v Wade.
Roughly the same percentage that voted for Obama.
Couple that with gay rights sentiment, and I think you could correlate pro-citizen rights with voter preference.
Pro-life sentiment loses out in a conflict with citizen rights.
Also, btw, the same percentage of the youth demographic that voted no on Cali prop 8.
There is a strong strain of magical thinking in the socons.
Ponnuru says in one opinion piece that the victory of prop 8 means that anti-gay legislation was supported by Cali youth voters. Yet the california youth demographic voted 2:1, or 60% against prop 8.
Ross and Reihan use selective poll results to try to convince themselves that the youth demographic is becoming more pro-life, your “trends”.
But I think the youth demographic is becoming more pro-citizen rights.
What is “sectionalism”?
I agree. There’s going to be a lot of infighting amongst the various conservative factions for a while. Until either Obama really screws up and there will be a groundswell of opposition (as in 94 with the combination of overreach of medical reform and gun control) or until an election where a new charismatic leader emerges.
One problem conservatives have right now is in overestimating the “mandate” against conservativism. Let’s be honest. The last 8 years were a mess even conservatives weren’t happy about and the biggest problem was competence rather than any particular ideology. Further you had a charismatic nice guy that even conservatives like running against the Bush legacy. It was the perfect storm but it’s a mistake to read too much into it.
What is surprising to me though is that so many groups are arguing the key to success is to narrow the Republican tent rather than expand it. One big key to Democratic success beyond the “perfect storm” was a 50 state strategy. That is in conservative regions they ran more conservative Democrats in Senate and Congress. Contrast this with Republicans who seem content to feel ideologically correct yet shunted out of government. There’s some justification for that since arguably the last three elections (2008, 2004, 2000) with both Bush and McCain all were for figures more expansive. “Compassionate conservativism.” The problem was though that neither were particularly competent (or appeared such) nor were they particularly charismatic (contrast with Reagan, Clinton, and Obama).
My suspicion will be that, barring incompetence on Obama’s part, it’ll be 2014 before we see conservatives get their act together again.
It was the treatment of Mitt Romney by the social conservatives that made it clear that the latter are really theocrats. Romney believes in all of the pro-family social conservative policies as do all of the social conservatives. Not only that, but he lives it in the sense that he has been married to the same woman his entire adult life and has had a large family (6 kids) that appears to be perfectly functional. When he became governor of the most liberal state in the union, he fought gay marriage tooth and nail even though he had zero chance of prevailing. When it was obvious that he could not prevent gay marriage from being legalized in MA, he found an obscure “miscegenation” law from the 1920’s that he used to limit gay marriage to MA residents only, thus sparing the rest of the country from gay marriage under the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. constitution. I say all these things to make it clear that Mitt Romney clearly believes and practices all of the pro-family social conservative policies as much as any other social conservative.
Despite all this, the social conservatives did not accept Romney as one of their own but were actually quite disrespectful of him. This makes it clear as daylight that the issue was never about pro-family beliefs at all, but about religious theology. It does not matter that someone subscribes to the same social conservative beliefs as the christian right. What matters is that they belief in the correct theology.
This makes it clear to me that the social conservatives are really theocrats, despite any claims to the contrary.