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What Do SoCons Want?
There’s all this conflict between SoCons and libertarians on Ricochet, but, as far as I can tell, the arguments are usually around SSM and drug legalization. Ok, but traditional marriage and keeping drugs illegal are known quantities and not terribly controversial positions. So what else do SoCons want? I assume more restrictions on abortion, which the way things are going, would also not be very controversial.
Anything else? What do you want the government to do to protect the culture, and especially children? What is the government’s role? There must be concrete issues besides those that I mentioned. I think it’s the unarticulated “other” that libertarians are most concerned about.
Published in General
Speaking only for myself …
I’d like to get rid of … Substantive due process. Living constitution. Rights concocted to appease a political faction, for purely political reasons, and then seeing those heretofore-unknown “rights” suddenly treated as absolutes that only bigots would oppose.
There’s a difference between morality and legality, and my moral views don’t dictate my legal views. That is, just as a lawyer knows the difference between what really happened and what he can prove, morality is one thing, but law is what we can agree on. I believe that capital punishment is wrong, but I also know that the majority favors it, and so I have no trouble distinguishing morality from legality. And by that same logic, legality doesn’t make morality; the fact that the law now allows SSM doesn’t mean I must accept it morally.
Ultimately what I oppose is using law, politics, and media to manipulate society’s position on social issues. If Will and Grace and Ellen deGeneres “won” the “battle” over SSM by assuring people that society would not immediately disintegrate, what does that say about our ability to think through and conduct a moral argument?
If Sandra Fluke wants to have indiscriminate sex, that’s her legal right. Hey, I’m not trying to stop her. At the same time, I have every right to consider her immoral. The legality of her behavior is different from its morality. I support her legal rights, but reject her morality – and I have the right to say so.
What do I want? I want a country that recognizes and supports that distinction.
But instead of making that distinction, the progressive left not only wants me to stop making moral judgments, they want me to subsidize her behavior, and then they tell me that unless I agree with them morally (not just legally), I’m abusing her rights and attacking her in a War on Women!
To top it off, I’m then told … by consultants and other “conservatives” … to keep quiet and just accept it morally because I’m being “morally judgmental,” and that’s inconvenient politically.
The stereotype … repeated in this thread … is that SoCons are trying to impose their morality on others. I beg to differ … jeez …if anyone is getting imposed on, it’s us.
Well, that’s just the point: There are people on both sides of the libertarian-SoCon split wary of being imposed upon and not entirely trustful of the bona fides the other side considers implicit. Libertarians can be as wary of SoCons in this way as SoCons are of libertarians.
That said, the mutual distrust of implicit bona fides can be mitigated somewhat by each side being willing to go out of its way sometimes to make the bona fides explicit.
Yeah, that’s how both sides feel.
Each side feels stereotyped, imposed upon. We have that in common at least ;-)
A good life with truth that balances liberty with responsibilities. That there is something more than the material. Love.
Myself, I’ll settle for nothing less than women chained to stoves, barefoot and pregnant.
I take it that you are a libertarian. Would you like some slaves and concubines too? How hedonistic do you want to live? How young do you want your daughters to be “sold” as chattel? I am glad I am making this comment before a female Member gets the idea that any male Member on Ricochet besides yourself finds your comment in anyway acceptable. Slavery and bondage is no laughing matter period.
To respond in a like way to reflect it back to you. I hope they take people that think like this and put them in a cage and restrict them access. Oh yeah, take away their shoes. Force them to cook and have to wear a pregnancy simulator for 9 months per year for about 12 years. After the first five years that person will be let out with a hearty laugh and be told that we were just joking.
This “other” you speak of is only a concern because Libertarians have conjured up some make believe fantasy that SoCons want to institute a Christian version of Iran. Libertarians are, simply put, anti-Christian bigots. I count my self as a SoCon and I have no problem with the idea of legalizing marijuana, or even heroin for medicinal purposes (William F. Buckley Jr. felt the same way). I see no socially redeemable qualities to crack or speed or most amphetamines for that matter, so what’s the harm in keeping them illegal?
Regarding SSM I want, not a government imposed religious definition to a word to stay in tact, but a guarantee from the government that homosexuals will not and cannot use the power of government to force Christians into participating in or recognizing a same sex union. I don’t want Christians pushed out of the public square by grossly false interpretations of the words “Congress shall make no law establishing…….or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” I don’t want Marxist atheists using courts to sue schools because cheerleaders in a small town in Texas want to use Biblical verses on their banners. That’s all I want.
KC Mulville described my thoughts beautifully. Well done! Midge’s list includes not a single thing I want–well public schools are a long tradition, but I would like to do away with the LEFTIST slant. But to put it succinctly–marriage, life, free speech, federalism, local control and religious freedom. I don’t want to subsidize abortion or other people’s contraceptives or legalize euthanasia. I would be OK with a degree of decriminalization in drug policy, but most drugs serve no social good and do a great deal of bad, so no on legalization.
I want, as often as possible, for children to grow up with their own Mom and Dad in functional families, and I think public policy should encourage this and help parents raise responsible kids. We don’t need draconian laws to make this happen, we just need government to not get in the way of churches and other institutions that teach the values that help it happen. And may I just echo KC emphatically in saying that it is highly ironic that we are accused of forcing anything on anybody, since it sure looks like we are the forcees instead of the forcers.
Wow. I’m sure by most standards I’m a “SoCon” and I don’t want to use government force to make you live a certain way.
The conversation on this thread bears neither of these out.
It’s not a matter of what we want. It’s a matter of what we have, and for which a lot of good people sacrificed, and which is being destroyed. I am not talking “stuff”. I am talking about generations of Americans and millennia of posterity bequeathing to us and to the world this country, the finest example of liberty to have yet been achieved. If you don’t get it or disagree, then we have no common ground, no matter what superficial preferences may intersect, and you are my enemy.
I have no patience for childish theories about how many freely sovereign citizens of the world can dance on the head of a pin.
It’s interesting, however, that when SoCons are asked what they want, the question is oriented to what government policies should be. What do we want government to do about SoCon concerns? What’s the government’s role?
But that isn’t how a SoCon thinks. A SoCon doesn’t think government first. A SoCon thinks society first. A SoCon thinks about morality first; legality comes later.
Morality is about optimal behavior, where government is about minimal power.
And so, let me put forward a debatable thesis: The innovation of libertarian thinking is that it merges the two. SoCons argue that individual freedom is a precondition to achieving moral good, but libertarians argue that individual freedom is itself the moral good.
I wouldn’t put it that way and I think we’re sliding into a discussion slightly outside the SoCon/Libertarian one, albeit one with significant overlap.
* This isn’t relativism (i.e., the contention that all moral principles are equal), rather a reluctance to apply universal principles on others, lest 1) doing so does more harm than good due to lack of knowledge of particulars, and 2) concern that someone in the wrong might try to impose on them.
** I realize this implies that SoCons are “intolerant” which I don’t mean in the pejorative sense. The correct comparison is to their confidence in the quality of the values they espouse. That’s not a bad thing.
On the other hand, freedom is part of the image of God in humanity, and love must be freely given, not coerced, in order to be love. For a Christian to consider freedom not a moral good at all, but only a morally-neutral precondition, strikes me as rather odd. All moral goods can be twisted by sin, of course, but that doesn’t make them not moral goods.
Indirectly, I think you’re proving my previous point. Responding in this bullet, you focused on what sort of authority to bring to the situation. You ask whether tradition is an appropriate authority for the behavior in question? As a SoCon, I don’t even think about what sort of authority should be applied … my first instinct is whether the behavior in question is moral or not.
This is an important consideration in any discussion about what SoCons want. One of the things I want is a home that is a haven from all the evils of the world. The choices I make in my life reflect that goal (no TV in the house, filters on internet and devices, location of home, church attendance and participation, gun for defense, etc.), and it’s my right and privilege to make that a reality.
No home is an island, and so pursuant to that goal, I do support local government’s efforts to promote a virtuous community, including:
Please note those are at local levels; I strongly believe that communities have the right to set certain basic standards of behavior beyond what federal and even state governments are allowed.
More on state/federal law in a sec…
-E
That misconstrues the argument. Let me come at it in a different way. If you’re asked whether some behavior is morally good, does the fact that it’s freely chosen make it morally good? If you’re asked to evaluate whether abortion is moral, does the fact that the mother chose it freely make it morally OK?
I’d say no. I’d say that, of course, if she was coerced into an abortion, whoever coerced her was morally wrong. But whether she did it freely on her own, or whether she was coerced, is a parallel consideration – what matters is whether abortion itself in morally wrong.
Freedom doesn’t make morality.
Is that a SoCon reflex or a human reflex? It seems to me that most people, most of the time, have a gut response of “Is this right or not?” to most predicaments.
People can be asking themselves the wrong moral questions, but typically are asking themselves moral questions several times a day. Even weenie hipster libertines do this. In fact, they’re great at agonizing over moral dilemmas. Often absurd and pointless moral dilemmas, but moral dilemmas nonetheless.
So then you’ll agree that simply because I consider something immoral, that doesn’t mean that I insist it should be made illegal?
I think that’s a profound, fundamental misunderstanding of what Libertarianism is about. Without those non-legal traditions and mechanisms for enforcing order, you don’t have Liberty, you have anarchy.
No I don’t think it does. Saying that freedom is a moral good isn’t saying that it’s the only moral good; it isn’t saying that anything that was freely chosen must be good simply because it was freely chosen, since the good of choosing freely can be outweighed by other evils in the choice.
The former. From a moral perspective, I largely agree with them. I’d even be willing to consider legal enforcement if it was effective. But there’s ample evidence here in the evening of Western Civ that it’s not.
I think they express themselves well, and not unreasonably strongly.
Fair point. On the other hand if we attempt to capture all nuance in political positions then we’d never stop attempting to do so.
I don’t think that SoCons are totalitarian, and given the choice, I’d personally rather live in a Christian-run country than a Socialist-run country.
But I think that many SoCons are too intrusive into people’s business. Hence the one-sentence summary.
“Libertarians just aren’t concerned with children.” – Merina Smith (paraphrased)
Just to address abortion legality – Part of the problem is that too many have bought into too many lies about its history, or about pre-Roe laws, or about what a more restrictive law set would be. Every time we pro-lifers advocate restrictions we are accused of wanting to punish and jail women, or intrude into the bedroom, etc. These are lies.
Look at the actual historical laws and what reforms and restrictions have been passed – they are aimed at the practitioners, not the women. When we say we want abortion banned or at least much more severely restricted, we are wanting the abortion mills to close or at least face the same scrutiny and inspection regimen as dentists or even ear piercing shops, federal funding for Planned Parenthood to end, harassment of crisis pregnancy centers to end (putting an ultrasound in a center constitutes running an illegal medical practice in some areas for instance), etc.
None of the above is “intruding into the bedroom”, it is dealing with a very profitable industry that enjoys extraordinary legal protections not available to other doctors.
I’m with you on the “repeal and hope” plan. As for “people can willfully deny reality to persist in foolish ways”, they can’t succeed at this if the government is not there to save them. They’ll have to learn some self-reliance.
Do I agree that simply because someone considers something immoral doesn’t necessarily mean that person wants it made illegal? Yes.
Do I agree that you in particular feel this way? Typically I do, and have for some time, ever since I got to know something about you. Though when you hit a particularly stubborn Jesuitical streak, I do sometimes wonder ;-)
The issue here Midge is that, in my experience, when libertarians explicitly state their bone fides on certain issues they are rejected out of hand by SoCons on Ricochet. A good example is religious freedom, many libertarians here on Ricochet have said time and time again we will fight to the end for the rights of religious conservatives to express their religion as they see fit in their private life. Time and time again we have been told by SoCons that either that doesn’t matter or that they don’t believe us. I see far less of this tendency not to take people at face value coming from the libertarians.
That part, I agree with … but then see how that language plays out in libertarian writings. The overwhelming consideration in libertarian discussions is about whether the action is freely chosen, or whether government is coercing it, etc. A SoCon doesn’t think that its freedom is the end of the discussion.
Is freedom a good? Sure, but when we discuss social issues, the role of individual freedom isn’t the quality that makes a behavior good or bad. Freedom doesn’t decide the argument.