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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
Some of the things that I supports as a SoCon at a state/federal level are (beyond SSM, drug laws and abortion restrictions, which Mike already mentioned):
Returning to KC’s point in #43, there are a lot of things that I think are wrong with society, but I don’t see government as the vehicle to fix them. That’s where SoCons need to be careful. There are plenty of nominally social conservative policies that have gone too far (NCLB, faith based initiatives, etc.).
-E
Well I’m glad we’re not being simplistic.
Shrink the government? Wonderful. But, no mention of protecting individual rights (which is my reason for wanting the government to shrink), only responsibility and obligation. Just “families”, “communities”, the “culture”, i.e., collectives.
If a SoCon is more concerned about these than individuals, then they will, per force, when they have to choose between them, throw the individual under the bus. Won’t they? It’s implicit, right?
I’m trying to pick the right words without violating Ricochet’s standards for civil conversation. Have you checked lately to make sure the blood is flowing to your head?
I’m a Libertarian, and a Christian. Calling me a anti-Christian bigot is therefore nonsensical, at best, at worst it displays a complete lack of understanding of both camps (since Libertarianism derives almost entirely from Christianity).
Of course alternatively you could have said, “You’re mistaken.” I note that you did not.
Yeah, I know. I get ornery. Slowly I turn …
But seriously … this uncertainty about the motives behind SoCons is a little mystifying to me. All you have to do is mention Rick Santorum’s name, and you get the feeling that you’ve hit a nerve. Which is funny, because as a native Pennsylvanian, it’s very hard for me to forgive him for protecting Snarlin’ Arlen Specter. I like the talk about families, but … but … Specter! I have very mixed motives about Santorum.
An action cannot be moral if it is not freely chosen. A coerced action would be amoral.
At present, we want to be able to exercise and express our moral conscience without interference from the government, which is becoming increasingly hard to do. At present, we are rather awash with culture and politics that appear to lean heavily toward iconoclasm.
We see there is worth in preserving tradition ideals and mores, but until the last few decades never really conceived that we’d have to defend them so vigorously. We’re sort of playing catch-up now.
I think if the question were, “If you could throw a switch and elevate the individual to the highest pedestal but it would as a result destroy the family, community, and culture would you do it?” Then, no, I don’t think “socons” could willingly do it. But then, the rights of the individual and the desire to preserve at least the family and what we have generally considered “American” culture aren’t diametrically opposed to one another I don’t think.
(note: I had to edit this a couple of times because apparently today grammar utterly escapes me)
Agreed, but the freedom of the choice isn’t the only consideration. You can freely choose to shoot a bullet through some innocent’s head, but the fact that you freely chose it doesn’t make it moral. The fact that you freely chose it is only the first step.
Skipsul in comment #56 mentioned pro-life advocacy. Pro-life advocacy is misunderstood in part because of the seeming single-mindedness of many pro-life advocates. People wonder, “Do they ever think about anything else? Does their whole life revolve around abortion?” Anyone who advocates so strongly for a specific cause risks others wondering if that’s all he sees in life.
But that doesn’t make strong advocacy for a specific cause bad. In fact, a group might get more accomplished if some members engage in one-hit-wonder advocacy because of division of labor.
It would be hard to tell a pro-life advocate “there’s more to life than abortion” without coming across as patronizing (in all likelihood because it would be patronizing). Perhaps libertarians sometimes feel similarly patronized.
I think we’re going around in circles here but the freedom needs to exist as a precondition for the moral choice. This is what (most) libertarians mean when they consider liberty as a moral end unto itself.
The harm is that you’re violating individual rights. That’s also immoral.
Jamie, not to wade into that particular topic in detail, but the rejection you speak of is a practical consideration, not a principled one mostly. The argument goes: loss of religious liberty, freedom of association, and some speech too, will be the result whether you agree or not. Furthermore, these results could be prevented by you refraining from supporting change to civil marriage to begin with. It’s about weighing the lesser of two evils: status quo marriage with the discrimination that your perceive versus new marriage with the resultant loss of teh aforementioned liberties (not to mention social costs, but those are debatable too).
And the paraphrase is the whole problem. That is absolutely not what I said. I said it is hard to fit the needs of children into libertarian philosophy. Can we just quit name-calling now?
I see this, however, in the end most of us believe in fighting for the rights of both sides in this debate.
I actually believe that libertarians are completely genuine in this assertion. It’s just that they cannot see how some things that they support–genderless marriage for example–are at odds with religious freedom.
Except its not and you were being overly simplistic.
It’s not necessarily that socons are more concerned with collective entities than individuals, it’s that we’re also concerned with collective entities. In some ways individuals are more important than collectives, and in some ways collective entities are more important than individuals. This is unlike libertarians which put individuals higher than collective entities and unlike progressives which put collective entities higher than individuals. For us government is limited in favor of individuals by establishing the structure and margins based on natural law or something like it, while government works in favor of the collective by being enforceable and participatory within the established limits.
There was a very nice discussion of this on the other thread in which, as I recall, at least one of your more moderate fellow libertarians conceded this point.
I suspect some SoCons similarly feel that their bona fides are rejected out of hand by libertarians. Making our bona fides explicit to one another isn’t a complete solution; nonetheless, it does help enough to sometimes be worthwhile.
I, too, am puzzled that a SoCon around here would call libertarians all anti-Christian bigots, for example, oblivious to the fact that he is actually talking to several Christian libertarians on this site. (What, when one of us points out that we’re Christian, too, are we not believed?) I, too, find it darkly humorous when I get treated as a scarlet woman for labeling myself “libertarian”, even though chastity is one of the few Christian virtues I can claim any unusual success with.
We libertarians have an advantage, though: We are at least used to being dismissed as disreputable, so we’re less shocked and mystified when people blame us for being untrustworthy. Many SoCons aren’t. Apparently, they’re still genuinely confused by others’ distrust of them.
Aside from the basic ‘if all men were angels then we wouldn’t need government’ sense, I don’t view government as a necessary evil. I view it as a useful and legitimate tool for organizing society. Not the only tool. Not always the best tool in the toolbox. Of course it can be misused. Of course there is disagreement over how it should be used. Of course we can’t please everybody. I don’t think, though, that either eliminating/ignoring dissenters (ie progressives) or refraining from using the tool (some libertarians even short of anarchists) are very good responses to these truths.
Agreed. I must say (not to open another can of worms – uh oh) that’s also why I don’t flinch when Pope Francis says that we have to be more about life than just being against abortion. People thought he was denigrating the pro-life cause … I didn’t see it that way at all.
It’s funny that we’re all suddenly walking around each other on eggshells. Maybe it’s because we sense that The Right might actually win in November, and in 2016, so we don’t have the evil Democrats to unite us.
Whenever I see or hear the Cultural Marxist adjective, “social”, I slip the safety on my pistol….
;)
O.K. You’ve declared that the implementation of the public policy you mentioned in the first sentence is to be achieved by keeping the government out of things. Good. Very clear. Well said, and I agree. But, “public policy should encourage this and help parents raise responsible kids”, in the first sentence, sounds exactly like a call for overt government interference to achieve that end. Had you not explained further in the second sentence, that’s what I would’ve concluded, and I maintain, given the language, I would’ve been right to do so.
This is exactly my reaction to this kind of language. What is also curious is that when libertarians advocate the exact same thing: get government out of peoples lives so that people can raise their families morally and according to their beliefs, we are labeled as unable to successfully integrate families and children into our philosophy. This mystifies me.
There are always at least 2 discussions going on, usually concurrently, and intertwined/confused: the argument about the ideal and the one about the practical here and now, and how to approach the ideal from where we are. So, I agree with your comment.
I think both discussions are important, but it’s very important to keep them clearly distinct in the spirited, back-and-forth frabba-jabba of the comments.
1.) Return control over abortion, marriage, and other traditional “general welfare” policies to states and localities and I will go home and lead a happy a life and bother you no more. I am happy to dismantle the federal war on drugs, but in the same way it is not my concern whether the county to my immediate south is Wet or Dry (I happily live in a wet county, even though I do not drink), it is also no concern of mine whether the county to my immediate south has drug prohibition or not (I would not happily live in a county with legal heroin, cocaine, or amphetamines -and I’d have to think about marijuana).
2.) John Locke argued that individuals did not thrive in the state of nature, and it was only when they formed communities that good lives were possible. States succeeded commonwealths, which in turn succeeded families. I feel quite comfortable in the Lockeian Liberal tradition.
3.) It is not that I do not believe libertarian insistence that they will defend me. I believe they will defend me, but they will still destroy my commonwealth. I’d rather they kill me along with my people.
You have that exactly right, in my case at least.