Social Cons, Econo-Cons

Ramesh Ponnuru raises some interesting arguments, building off a debate with Thomas Edsall from May. His original point was that "The relative social conservatism of the Republican party has increased over the last twenty years, not decreased."

This comes up now in the context of a related question: can socially conservative candidates prosper even as society in general becomes steadily more liberal? Ponnuru argues that yes, they can. I'd say this point is self-evident, given the history of the post-war U.S., but let's look at a couple of his arguments.

One is particularly interesting in light of the last post.

Abortion has been the biggest of the social issues. For three decades, Gallup has asked Americans whether they think abortion should never be permitted, should always be permitted, or should sometimes be permitted. The results from 2005 do not look markedly more liberal than the results from 1975. So these polls give us no reason to think that opposition to abortion has lost political power, or is likely to do so.

If this is so, then it's all the more ironic that abortion has lost political power -- not thanks to public opinion, but thanks to the maneuvering of the economic conservatives who have been consolidating their control of the GOP coalition. Abortion was one of the political pillars of the Republican party, and now the party is abandoning it altogether? Either the issue really has lost salience, or the GOP is undertaking a curious strategy indeed. I think it's a little of both, myself, but time will tell.

At any rate, I think Ponnuru gets the larger dynamic right:

A society can simultaneously become more socially liberal and create new political opportunities for social conservatives. It is, after all, the liberalization to which the conservatives react.

Now of course public opinion on an issue can change so much that the old conservative position is no longer tenable, and successful candidates can no longer take it. If only 10 percent of the population still opposes gay marriage in 20 years, it won’t be an issue then, either. When public opinion changes that much, however, the issues get redefined. A new conservative position emerges, more liberal than the previous one but less liberal than the contemporary liberal one. And this new conservative position sometimes has a lot of political power.

This speaks to why I think that social conservatism represents a stronger electoral future for the GOP than economic conservatism. Particularly so considering that the so-called fiscal conservatism embraced by the party's current opinion makers isn't really fiscal conservatism at all, but the weird cult of supply-side economics.

Bigger picture: I think the Rudy Giuliani model represents a very bad option for the GOP. But don't tell them I said that.

Labels: conservatives, Ramesh Ponnuru, Rudy Giuliani

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:05 AM 1 comments

  The Enduring Appeal of the Reactionaries

Last seen proposing a grand alliance between liberals and libertarians (I explained why I think that would be a bad idea here), Cato's Brink Lindsey resurfaced last week to try his hand with the conservatives, taking to the pages of the National Review to offer advice from a "well-wishing outsider." It won't shock you that Lindsey's advice to the right is much like his appeal to the left: an invitation to think like libertarians do.

Lindsey proposes that conservatives set aside their "traditionalist" objections to things like gay marriage and Mexican immigration, commenting that "much of what has defined modern social conservatism — namely, political resistance to the incessant cultural change engendered by economic development — is not authentically conservative at all. It is reactionary." Social conservatism assumes a fragility to American culture that is not borne out by the evidence; more importantly, it's on the wrong side of history, in a sort of historical-materialist sense.

Naturally we progressives will be more enamored of his arguments when he is directing them against the assumptions of social conservatism, though Lindsey is careful to frame his case in a way that flatters the traditionalist preoccupations of decades past -- even as he rightly condemns the right's record of getting it wrong on things like civil rights and the entry of women into the workforce. He puts it this way:

The culture wars are over, and capitalism won. The question now is: Will the Left or the Right be the first to figure this out? The answer may well determine the future balance of political power.

Lindsey surveys post-war American history on a broad level, arguing that we have arrived at this juncture after mid-20th century prosperity first unleashed a tidal wave of cultural change:

As the post-war boom took off, however, the unprecedented development of technology and organization made America the first society in human history in which most people could take satisfaction of their basic material needs more or less for granted.

The story of post-war America is thus the story of adaptation to fundamentally new social realities, particularly mass affluence. Time-honored practices that had developed during the long reign of scarcity were now in need of serious revision or even wholesale abandonment. At the same time, new values and priorities began to assert themselves. Wrenching cultural conflict was unavoidable.

In Lindsey's telling, the prosperity brought by unfettered capitalism triggered cultural changes both positive -- feminism, sexual liberation, the end of legal segregation -- and negative. On the negative side, Lindsey describes "a radical assault on all traditions, all authority, and all constraints" -- a sort of general "Aquarian" madness (I wasn't around at the time, but reading the right's literature I imagine that a typical day in, say, 1971 probably involved packs of cannibalistic hippies raiding churches and boiling peyote in the hollowed-out skulls of former Mouseketeers. But I digress.). Social conservatives, he says, were right to push back against the chaos and crime thus unleashed, but now, in saner times, they have reached a crossroads:

The fundamental question for conservatives today is: What should they be seeking to conserve? The great American heritage of limited government, individual liberty, and free markets seems the only viable answer. As Peter Berkowitz has frequently and wisely noted, a truly American conservatism must have at the core of its concerns the defense and preservation of the liberal tradition. Which makes it a special kind of conservatism indeed: Its function is not to arrest change generally, or even slow it down, but rather to preserve the institutions that are both the chief source of change and the primary means through which we adapt to new conditions.

One obvious flaw in Lindsey's narrative is that he, a committed libertarian, ignores the important role of government investment and social insurance in fueling that post-war boom and widening the scope of its public benefits. But for the purposes of a debate with social conservatives, another problem stands out. Lindsey argues that they, clinging to their traditionalist views, are at odds with the march of history. Yet, as Ramesh Ponnuru points out in a rebuttal, Linsdey has also said that traditionalists were right to resist that march in certain ways at certain times. In that case, each social conservative argument must be judged on its merits; you can't simply dismiss them all with the proposition that, if we take care of capitalism, capitalism will take care of the rest. Ponnuru, in a sur-reply, writes:

[A]nyone who has taken up a social-conservative cause or two, or declines to sign on to all of Lindsey’s arguments, is supposed to don sackcloth and ashes and take historical responsibility for other conservatives’ having been segregationists. (Speaking for myself: No thanks.) The demand makes sense if all social conservative causes are the same, impermissibly reactionary thing, except when they happen to further “the logic of social development under capitalism,” whatever that means.

Ponnuru acknowledges, and I agree, that Lindsey is correct in pointing out that material forces, not just ideas, move history. As Ponnuru puts it, "Feminism didn’t happen when it did just because Betty Friedan wrote a book, which is why anti-feminist books can’t undo it."

Lest I sound too much like a defender of the traditionalists, let me add that we needn't simply let Ponnuru and his compatriots wiggle out from under the historical burden of social conservatives' many serious mistakes -- nor should we allow them to pretend that their arguments really do always resonate on their philosophical merits, when we all know perfectly well that naked bigotry provides much of their constituency. Whether or not Ponnuru wants to accept it, when we judge social conservative arguments on gay marriage, we can and must consider the precedents and legacy of their positions on civil rights and the role of women in society. For that matter, the record shows that a considerable number of the very same social conservatives leading the reactionary charge today still haven't abandoned the racism and sexism of the previous era. Ponnuru doesn't have to wear the sackcloth, but that doesn't mean his movement won't be judged by its own historical sins.

Ultimately, the negotations break down, with Ponnuru dismissing Lindsey's views as marginal -- just as Jonathan Chait did from a liberal perspective. The debate will be between the Ponnurus and the Chaits. I do believe that the traditionalists will continue to lose -- as they always do -- and they will lose in part because capitalism and other large-scale forces will continue to undermine the appeal of their prejudices. But I don't think they'll disappear, or that the right will limit itself to a simple defense of "classical liberalism." The social disruption and insecurity wrought by capitalism's "creative destruction" (to use a favorite libertarian term) mitigate against such reductionist politics. Social conservatism may be reactionary -- a misguided response to those dislocations -- but it's not going away.

Labels: Brink Lindsey, conservative futures, libertarians, Ramesh Ponnuru, social conservatives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:24 AM 4 comments