As readers will know, I’m certainly no apologist for the social conservative movement in either its style or purposes. But it seems to me to be an awful injustice to lay at their feet the defeat of John McCain, in an election almost exclusively dominated by economic concerns:
If the GOP decides to go in the Bobby Jindal direction (fundamental Christianity, creationism, hard-line anti-abortionism, aggressively anti-gay rights), it will be committing political suicide. As much as anything else, this election was a referendum on the social conservative agenda, and the social conservatives did not win.
(LGF)
A fine verdict that I’m entirely sympathetic to…had Mike Huckabee just gone down in flames, beside defeats for his favored anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort happened.
As frustrating and silly as the soc-cons can be, one needs to be cautious of the temptation for blaming them for everything that goes wrong with the Republican party. John McCain is certainly not their creature by any stretch of the imagination, and yet it was the soc-cons in their core red states who arguably remained most loyal to the party.
LGF often understands the silliness of the Democratic penchant for criticizing US allies more frequently and forcefully than avowed enemies. A similar rule might be applied here.
Oh, baloney. This was no kind of judgment on social conservatism. (Huckabee was, of course, not conservative *at all*.) Bobby Jindal or Sarah Palin or anyone else, if they’re small government fiscal conservatives, can be social conservatives without loosing a whole lot.
I would have liked Giuliani… but how many economic conservatives do we have who aren’t also social conservatives? How many social moderates do we have that are not *also* moderate when it comes to the economy and government entitlement programs?
I surely wouldn’t place Republican loses solely at the feet of the social conservatives: the Republicans are crazy if they don’t recognize that the neocons foreign policy has been unpopular. And I say this as someone who is supportive of the neocon foreign policy. Failing to recognize that is to the party’s detriment.
But in the long term, the social cons are a drag on the party. Perhaps its wishful thinking on my part, but I think the newer generation is over a lot of the social divisions that have dominated the last 40 years of American politics.
Not sure why my comment as all that code in it. Sorry about that.
Fixed.
Social conservatives simply make an easy target for liberals to attack. It’s more fun to attack a social conservative than a fiscal conservative, even though both liberals and conservatives can go to ridiculous extremes.
Sorry Lee, I have to disagree. Social cons run the GOP, and the GOP has just been repudiated for the second election in a row. They are now completely out of power. I’m really not sure what additional evidence is required beyond the dissolution of the party itself.
It’s not that there is no place for social conservatism within the GOP, it’s that the party’s primary bias is for social conservatism. This means that whenever there is a conflict between social conservatism and social freedom within the GOP, freedom always loses. This is the dynamic the GOP has been experiencing since Reagan. We still have the drug warriors, flag protectors, marriage protectors and pro-life absolutists while free markets and small government necessary to freedom have been compromised away. And here we are.
~peter
Well, there’s really nothing to disagree with Peter. In an election in which upwards of 66% of the voters stated that the economy was decisive for their vote, it’s not like there’s some kind of reasonable dispute about the causes of the Republican defeat. Social issues weren’t even a prominent feature of the campaign, save for the anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives…all of which were successful.
It seems to me that people are leaping to blame the social conservatives because they understand *how* to do that, and it’s the element of the coalition they would *like* to blame. Hell, I’d love to blame them too. I though the Huckabee campaign in particular was poisonously dangerous. Their defeat was in the primaries, not the general.
I think it’s somewhat cruel frankly to blame them for the general election loss, given that the soc-cons have ferociously opposed John McCain for decades on various matters and had to compromise on far more than any other member of the Republican coalition in order to vote for him.
Lee, John McCain is a social conservative. In fact, it’s the only part of him that is conservative: Country First. And the fact that in an election year where the economy is on voters minds they opted for the Democrats, well, that pretty much encapsulates my point. In 1984 economic troubles would have meant more Republicans elected, not fewer.
>>Lee, John McCain is a social conservative.
It’s alright to say that to me Peter, but I sure wouldn’t around committed movement social conservatives. They’re still gritting their teeth over years of his criticism (and ironically his occasionally blaming them for electoral defeats), his condemnations of Pat Robertson and Falwell as villains, his rather opportunistic “born again” conversion, his opposition to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, the effect of McCain-Feingold on religious-political advertising…the list of grievances is nearly endless. Google “John McCain” and “religious right” and/or “social conservatives” for lists upon lists of complaints. You’ll recall that no less than James Dobson himself bitterly refused to endorse McCain early on in the election.
Alas, the soc-cons were stuck with him and they did stick, to their credit IMO.
>> In 1984 economic troubles would have meant more Republicans elected, not fewer.
Doubtful. The better question is if the economy was in the state it was in 1980 and the Republicans held the presidency, would they have reelected them? Doesn’t need to be so hypothetical either. The Republicans soon suffered their own losses in the 1982 mid-term elections. That was after the early Reagan recession, before things had dramatically improved by 1984. And of course, the outcome of the 1992 election under recession conditions is also demonstrative in this respect.
Well let me clarify my terms. McCain might not be a religious conservative, but he is a social conservative in so far as he is motivated primarily by a political ideal of social virtue, just a more secular kind. It’s a fairly common position held by military and ex-military folks. Although these positions are different, they are very similar in their vocabulary, premises and implications, which is why McCain is a Republican in the first place, and also why he was able to win the GOP primary.
Oh, well I certainly wouldn’t disagree with that. Obviously I’m talking here about the more formal agenda and political style of the social conservative movement.
Do disagree with the assessment on how he won the primaries. And I would note for our purposes here, that the only enduring challenge to McCain doing so after South Carolina, was the soc-con supported Huckabee insurgency which continued to soak up that movement’s votes expressly in opposition to McCain. Everyone else had long since folded up their tents. McCain’s victory was a very clear victory over the social conservative movement in that respect. Indeed, it was the only aspect of his success that I celebrated at the time here on ASHC.
McCain did not manage to mobilize conservatives the way Obama mobilized liberals. A new report from American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate found McCain received about 7.5 million fewer votes than Pres. Bush did in 2004. The same report declared, “A downturn in the number and percentage of Republican voters going to the polls seemed to be the primary explanation for the lower than predicted turnout.” From what I’ve been reading Republican turnout was down in counties that historically have voted for Republican candidates. So why did so many conservatives stay home?
The answer one hears from many social conservatives and most nativists is McCain was not conservative enough for them. As you mention, the success of ballot measures against gay marriage provides evidence for social conservatives that their ideology is popular in the U.S. and I suspect we will here more and more blame placed on McCain’s centrism.
The problem with Huckabee is that he really wasn’t anything like conservative about anything.
He was… what is it… a liberation theologist.
And yes, there are social conservatives who are Republican only in the sense that they are social conservatives while being not at all conservative in any other respect at all. Their politics are as socialist as Obama’s, government is the answer to problems, and they don’t have an awareness of issues of liberty beyond who gets to impose their ideas because they got the majority vote.
There are a whole lot of people who need to be informed about the ideas of liberty. This is a different, oh, axis or something, from holding social/moral conservative values. Fighting against the SoCons (or whatever) is fighting against the wrong thing. No one should take for granted that people are informed about the virtues of liberty or how that differs from an acceptance of the paternalistic role of the state. They aren’t going to hear about it in school, in civics class. Few people spend a second thought on the foundation of their political thought… which for most people is an acceptance that anything bad should be forbidden and anything good should be compelled. They’re too focused on what should be forbidden and compelled to question it.
Responding to them at that surface level of what should be forbidden and compelled… disagreements on that level, including such things as gay marriage and what should be taught in schools to their children, only work to obscure the problem even more… which isn’t what things should be compelled or forbidden, but that the proper role of government is not to determine these things. That freedom and liberty demand individual responsibility rather than leaning on the government to define right and wrong. The argument should not be… do we approve of this, or is this bad for people… but is this area the proper domain of government.
Many “good” things are not. Charity, for instance. Charity is wonderful and necessary and a “good” thing… but not something government should be doing just because we agree that helping people is important. As we see, the result of government charity is *not* good in so very many ways. It is actually actively harmful.
Government is used as a moral crutch.
It makes it possible for many people to do what the Bible in Romans tells us not to do… it allows them to “conform to the world” instead of walking the harder, personal responsibility, road.
Yet, social and religious conservatives ought to be persuadable to the fundamentals of liberty if those basics are actually presented.
TYPO:
“…and I suspect we will here more and more blame placed on McCain’s centrism.”
SHOULD READ:
and I suspect we will *hear* more and more….
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