This Washington Post article suggests that there might be a division between fiscal and social conservatives in Iowa and elsewhere. (It’s February 3rd, 2011; do you know where your next President is?) Considering coinages like “Teavangelical,” not to mention the population of GlennBeckistan, I’m not sure that this will be much of an issue as Republicans try to figure out who will carry their banner in the 2012 presidential election.
All the candidates will present themselves as fiscal conservatives and it, thankfully, remains the case that no forthrightly pro-choice candidate can win the Republican nomination. Just as in the afterrmath of several years of trillion-dollar deficits, even the most “compassionate” of conservatives would not do anything thing other than talk the talk of fiscal responsibility, so in the aftermath of the Gosnell case, it’s hard to imagine a Republican speaking to fulsomely about the right to choose.
February 3rd, 2011 | 5:44 pm
The Washington Post is trying to divide and conquer. There are probably bigger tensions in the Democratic party than in the Republican party.
February 3rd, 2011 | 6:41 pm
I agree with Mike P.
The economy seems way more important – the question of “gay marriage” is not yet at the point where it’s ready to be the focus of any attempted political solution (one way or the other), and, as mentioned, abortion is not something any pro-choice conservative is going to want to touch right now.
February 3rd, 2011 | 11:03 pm
Oh, good.
As long as all of the candidates keep talking as though their social and fiscal conservatisms are sincere, then I guess we all win, even as while such lip service proves totally ineffective in terms of policy?
The three-legged stool is broken. “National defense” conservatives broke it by selling out all of the beliefs of the other two constituent groups while pursuing illegal, immoral, and ultimately budget-destroying military adventurism in the Middle East.
February 3rd, 2011 | 11:17 pm
As a Nutmegger, I’m used to pro-abortion Republicans. It is certainly possible that the party would be worse off in my state if they ran more anti-abortion candidates, but I don’t think it would be much worse off. The GOP currently holds no constitutional offices, no federal offices, and about 35% of the seats in the statehouse (this is a high-water mark in the statehouse for recent years, however; up from 25%).
Of course, one of the reasons that some ‘social issues’ -such as marriage or capital punishment- are not big federal issues is that authority on the questions are reserved to their proper location: the states. If that changes, it could end up creating another abortion situation, with it being an intense and intractable national controversy that lasts several decades. Let’s stick with federalism!
Beyond that, there are certainly some pro-abortion elected Republicans, but relatively few on the whole, just as there are some anti-abortion Dems. There are, however, no federal Republican elected officials who support same-sex marriage, and nearly none (e.g. in single digits) at the state level either. They reflect, in some capacity, the people in the party. Divisions on that issue are much more intense in the Democratic party than in the GOP.
February 5th, 2011 | 6:38 pm
If you have to pick, choose fiscal conservatism. Fiscal conservatives may not overtly back conventional morality, but their policy of limited government ensures that the state will lack the power to impose its moral views on the rest of us.
On the other hand, social conservatives simply refuse to recognize that attempts to legislate morality generally fail because the extrinsic power of the state is, by definition, amoral.
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