Fiscal Conservatism Is Not Enough

After the 2008 election I was invited to attend a meeting of young conservatives in Washington, D.C. to discuss the future of the movement. Although I was flattered to be asked to participate it was unclear why I was included. Out of the forty people in attendance I was, at the age of thirty-eight, the oldest person in the room. But as the discussion progressed I sensed there was something else about me that was different. I asked how many people in the room considered themselves to be “social conservatives.” I was the only one.

As Robert W. Patterson notes , Beltway insiders are all but disconnected from traditional social conservatives:

[N]othing separates the professional class of Republican thinkers and players from the voting public more than the issue of how the party should position itself vis-à-vis the “social issues.” As much as the media like to portray the GOP as beholden to the Religious Right, the reality is that Republican elites, with rare exceptions, are more beholden to economic conservatives and foreign-policy hawks than to social conservatives. Paraphrasing Jeffrey Bell’s observation in The Weekly Standard , Republican elites would rather talk about anything but social issues.

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Conservatives often defend their squeamishness by claiming that matters like sex-based affirmative action, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage laws, abortion rights and federally funded contraception, women in combat, and homosexuals in the military are “divisive.” Television-show host and former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough claims in The Last Best Hope, “the public does not want to hear their national politicians debating divisive social issues. Whether one is pro-life or pro-choice, for or against same-sex marriage, such issues are uncomfortable subjects for most Americans to discuss.”9 His road map therefore not only encourages the party to “turn down the volume rather than turn it up” but also shift public deliberation of issues he considers “inherently controversial and potentially explosive” to the state and local level.

How that strategy works in challenging American elites, who are more than happy to talk about such issues, is unclear. President Obama, for example, has not only spoken against the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 but also called for, in his first State of the Union address, the repeal of the Military Personnel Eligibility Act of 1993 that codified into law long-standing Defense Department regulations proscribing homosexual behavior as incompatible with military service. In fact, GOP elites, namely, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, both of whom served in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, have either joined the assault on the 1993 law or, in the case of former Vice President Dick Cheney, show little willingness to defend it. These Republicans seem to forget that both laws were passed by veto-proof, bipartisan majorities in both Houses and signed by President Bill Clinton.

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The dirty little secret is that social conservatives can be fully trusted to be economically conservative as well, but economic conservatives are unreliable on social issues. The former have enthusiastically joined the Tea Party, but do the latter support the annual March for Life or the World Congress of Families? A study by researchers at Penn State University, using data from the General Social Survey that has tracked U.S. households from 1972 to 2004, confirms this joint commitment of social conservatives, finding a robust correlation between evangelical Protestants and “economic conservatism,” especially among those who are college-educated. The study also predicts that these voting, college-educated evangelicals will become more strategic to the GOP. Perhaps this commitment to social and economic conservatism leads Jeffrey Bell to observe: “Social conservatism is the only mass-based political persuasion that fully believes in the core ideas of the American founding. It has taken over that role from parties, professions, and ideologies that used to perform it, and as a result it is touching a deep chord with millions of American voters.”