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A Hard Truth: Social Issues May Not Be Losers
Republican strategists may need to face up to an inconvenient truth: conservative social positions are no longer a thorn in the GOP’s side. We can win with them. Without them, it’s tough to say.
For some, this is a hard pill to swallow. Many Republicans are quite attached to a progressive social narrative, and strategic considerations have long been the justification for telling religious conservatives that they’re on the wrong side of history. Whether that’s true still remains to be seen. This most recent election, however, showed us Democrats desperately trying to gin up some resentment over social issues, and losing. Meanwhile we saw pro-life, pro-traditional marriage conservatives winning across the map, sometimes in fairly blue states.
While it would be wrong to see this election as a referendum on social issues, it’d be equally wrong to dismiss these issues as trivial or unrelated to the outcome. Actually, the social issues are reasonably well-aligned with the broader narrative of Democratic failure. Liberals got too much power, overplayed their hand, alienated much of the public, and were punished. As I explained at The Federalist earlier this week, our job now is to be reasonable, and make liberals pay for their excesses.
Hillary Clinton isn’t going to be able to rein in the wilder progressive factions as they crusade for gender eradication, polyamory, abortion parties and the like. We can profit from that in 2016 by presenting ourselves as responsible and reasonable and asking for explanations of the crazier liberal behavior. The goal here is not to put social issues front and center of the GOP’s platform, but rather to reinforce our aura of reasonableness. Also, if we play our cards right, we may put Democrats in the position of running for cover whenever social questions arise. Wouldn’t that be nice?
I realize of course that many will see marriage as the continuing weak point for Republicans. Hasn’t America basically embraced same-sex marriage, leaving us vulnerable to being tarred as bigoted reactionaries if we don’t comply.
I say more about this in my Federalist piece, but the short answer is that the issue has lost its thunder. Middle-of-road voters don’t seem to care that much about it anymore and — interestingly — the youngest new voters are trending Republican, even though most are fine with same-sex marriage. I think the main explanation is that they are products of their time in terms of their social mores, but so much so that they don’t see marriage as a major voting issue, and don’t seem inclined to punish the GOP for putting forward more traditional-marriage-supporting candidates. Second, many people are bothered by the grossly undemocratic means by which marriage redefinition is being imposed on the country at large. That fits nicely with the broader narrative of “Democratic overreach,” and offers some nice talking points for politicians in 2016, insofar as the issue needs to be discussed.
Third, I’m confident that we haven’t seen the end of the marriage issue. If you’ve paid attention to progressive social change, you know that these central issues never really die. They shift and present themselves again in different forms, generally recycling the same fundamental disagreements in slightly different clothing. Right now we’re moving into a relative lull on the marriage debate, and if we can allow marriage to slide to the back burner, that might be just as well for the moment. But it will flare up again, however — probably within the next decade or two — and it’s good to give at least a little thought to the future.
The precise timing and contours of the next confrontation are hard to predict from the present vantage point. Clearly, one relevant question concerns the Supreme Court, which may decide to “settle” the matter for us, in much the way it once “settled” the abortion issue. That might actually be a gift to the GOP, because court victories can sometimes — as in the case of Roe v Wade — give cultural momentum to the losers.
In any case, the worst thing we can do at this juncture is sacrifice our moral authority by making a formal act of submission to the overlords of Progressivism, at precisely the time when the voters have started to lose interest in the whole business. Voters mostly think it’s over, so we can allow it to slip lower on their priority lists for the next few years. When the next round comes (and it will), we’ll have a stronger hand if we have retained some semblance of principle. It could also help to have been obviously wronged by an overactive judiciary and corrupt, culturally imperialistic progressives.
Meanwhile, white Evangelicals have been turning out in strong numbers for the GOP. Let’s keep that party going.
Published in General
With all due respect, this view fails to recognize that the US legal environment post Roe v. Wade is arguably the most radical in the world, thanks to Roe v. Wade. When the decision came down, it was briefed universally as allowing abortion only in the first three months. It took a little while to discover a right to atrocities like partial birth abortion, or the exclusion of parents from medical decisions of a minor related to “reproductive rights”. The status quo in the United States is savage and barbaric by international standards, and it is taken for granted by buzzword zombies, news readers, et al as a pillar of Progressive virtue.
Most American politicians of the right are so whipped by the “Woman’s Right” catcall they are categorically unwilling to mount an effective counter, even when handed an example of the horror that results from treating the murder of viable children as an untouchable sacrament to the “blessed” rights of women. Kermit Gosnell came and went and, despite the best efforts of conservatives like Mollie Hemingway, most American voters still have no idea what partial birth abortion is or how out of kilter our laws and practices have become compared to the civilized world. Gosnell is a shining example of how abortion clinics, under the negligent oversight of Progressive civil servants, become horror chambers.
The situation is not newly arrived, Governor Reagan bargained his good name on an abortion bill in California and was never able to collect on his end of the deal from those faithless California Democrats. To Reagan’s credit, the deal ranked high on his list of personal regrets.
Teaching our youth that slaughtering their flesh and blood is a small price to pay to simplify a career path simply assures similarly virtuous conduct with regard to protecting their precious rights to intoxicants, government supplied free sterilization measures in designer colors, and other critical life decisions. City on a Hill? More like a pot of boiled frogs.
As a lapsed Catholic, I will attempt to explain Catholic teaching on this: if I get it wrong, real Catholics are free to correct me :) It is my understanding that the Catholic Church fully supports adoption but is totally opposed to things like IVF and surrogacy-regardless of whether the parents are gay or straight. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a preoccupation with biological ties-all of the conservative Catholics I know take a very positive view of adoption, but creating children in a lab is forbidden. Messing with the natural process of conception is forbidden. Regardless of whether those involved are gay or straight.
Most of the time, I don’t have much time for religion, but in this case, I agree with the Church’s teaching. There is something very wrong with a society where we can create and destroy human life at will, and where children under a certain age have no intrinsic value beyond whether they are wanted or not. Maybe this view makes me a wacko who will lose elections for the republicans, but that is my view. :)
Sisiphus, you’re anti-abortion. Got it. You can reel off anything you want about it; it makes no difference to what I wrote, which is the American people dislike abortion but don’t want it outlawed. They already know what abortion is. They aren’t going to wake up some morning and discover how they really feel. We know how they really feel. They had the clout to elect a president–twice. Don’t argue with me; argue with reality. Do you think even one voter in 2012 didn’t know which was the anti-abortion party? I don’t–and we lost in Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia.
In 2014, who embraced “personhood amendments” and who backed off from them? How did they do? Argue with them.
You seem to think that the horrors of Gosnell will change people’s minds. It might be in the opposite direction to the one you want. You’re right, women don’t want to go to poorly regulated abortion mills; they’d rather go to any non-religious hospital–say, the one closest to you–to have it done there safely in “approved” medical surroundings.
People are increasingly comfortable with restrictions on abortion. Pocket your gains and don’t kid yourself; they aren’t going to end abortion at the ballot box. If you want to end it, start a winning moral crusade. Leave politics out of it.
Pro-lifers made a huge mistake when we decided to tie our wagon to the republican party. I live in a very blue state, and I know plenty of folks who would vote for a pro-life candidate who was moderate or liberal on economic issues; such a candidate would probably do well with many Latino and African American voters too. Economic conservatives are so convinced that pro-lifers are holding them back; let’s stop holding them back and just leave the party. I am sick of being lectured to by those who obviously don’t share my concerns.
I think there is a major demographic wave shaping up. The US moved right appreciably in the 80s, which was about the same time the Boomers were turning 30, getting real jobs and starting families. The Woodstock people had to suddenly pay mortgages. Moreover, the 70s had been a horrible period of crime, decay, and stagnant economy, not to mention a fashion disaster. Most Boomers I know tell me never to ask about that decade and that they try to forget it.
Currently, the Millenials are starting to reach their 30s. They are a large generation, much more numerous than Gen X. The economy has not been good to the bulk of this generation, which is saddled with student loan debt and has few of the assets that have appreciated so much in the last few years. Rachel had an article about the “right” time to have children, and how this is a poor concept. I agree. But how are people who have $200k in debt and average jobs supposed to afford children?
The upshot is that what happened in the 80s is happening again. The Democrats’ economic performance has been woeful. The 2ks (2001-2010) were in many ways like the 70s– terrible world events, poor economy, a detested Republican President who was pro-big government followed by a hapless Democrat, oil shocks, and a general sense of malaise. The Millenials were in college in the 2ks just as the Boomers were in the 70s. And a new tech boom was beginning at the tail end of both decades.
So, it’s not social issues that are going to carry the day. The Democrats foolishly decided that instead of having a good plan for the economy or foreign policy, a pivot to social would work. What voters want is a clear plan to growing prosperity for all Americans and a renewal of the sense that the future will be better, that the best is yet to come, that we are not mired in some grim socialist malaise dreaming of Halcyon times past.
Bumbling Barry got elected twice thanks to historic skin tone and two more rounds of weak opponents from the GOP. McCain vouched for Obama’s competence and stopped his campaign for three weeks during the critical finale. Romney folded like a cheap tent on a BS out of bounds “correction” from Candy Crowley. Rather than risking appearing mean by standing up for himself and his campaign. I like both men, but they ran poor campaigns and the republic has suffered for it.
Winning moral crusades usually have a political component, and vice versa. These are not unrelated activities. The GOP as currently constituted has a very mixed record in this area, so if they want to trim this particular issue from their platform, I’m up for it. The grassroots are more than ready for an alternative to channel their time and money into.
Good analysis. I absolutely agree that the economy is the number one issue, no question. Before Reagan, the last previous president with an economic plan worth executing was JFK. Kids without perspective were easily convinced by Carter that the economic armageddon was at hand. When we saw what Reagan was able to do in just one term, many suddenly started noticing just how awful Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter were on the issue.
No campaign can survive with just one issue, and the notion of a “social” free platform is a pipe dream.
Jolly Roger is really on to something. In 2007, I was on a plane re-reading a nearly forgotten book by David Frum, “The 70s–The Decade that Gave Us the Modern World”. I was in my twenties in the Seventies, and I can attest to the book’s overall accuracy. One of the lines was, roughly, “At no other time–not even during the Great Depression–were Americans so pessimistic about the future.” I put the book aside and thought, thank God we’re unlikely to ever see times like that again. There are always ups and downs but I can plan with confidence.
A few months later, Great Depression Lite began its dive. More than six years in, it’s still with us.
BTW, not all the 70s clothes, culture, cars, etc were awful; but after the disillusioning failure of the zooming optimism of the postwar age we grew up in, it was very much like today, a time of disappointment, anger and decay, full of the shame of losing nationally in all sorts of ways. Yes, this decade is more like the Seventies than anything we’ve seen since.
Yes, and all throughout the Obama years I have seen teenage girls wearing clothes that Snooks wore in the 70s.
Amusingly over on the member feed RedFeline has a thread about the brave new reproductive, genetically engineered world that is here and growing. Some seem to kind of like the idea.
In other words, call a truce among each other on social issues?
Who exactly do you expect to find this a hard truth?
They may not be losing issues. If we don’t put them front-and-center and agree among ourselves to cultivate an atmosphere of reasonableness towards those who disagree with our side.
This sounds like nothing new, but instead the old Conservative fusionist project between SoCons and, well, non-SoCons (including FiCons and moderates along with the libertarians).
If there is a problem with it, it might be that people who don’t strongly identify as SoCon don’t entirely trust those who do strongly identify as SoCon to not put these issues front and center. Kind of like how I don’t entirely trust a certain type of pro-lifer to properly discourage single motherhood – I’ve witnessed some pro-lifers get so caught up in glorifying the act of simply not having an abortion that they end up unduly glorifying single motherhood.
How does it benefit the pro-life movement to be completely enmeshed with the Republican party? It isn’t realistic to expect social issues to be front and center of any political platform, but there is no reason why there can’t be both pro-life conservatives and pro-life liberals, and pro-life moderates as well. Why should those whose main goal is to defend life make a “truce” with those who could care less? Why?
If economic conservatives really believed that they would be better off without social conservatives, they would drop us yesterday; they are doing absolutely nothing to further our cause, and they undermine us at every turn. Why are we helping them? How in the world does this alliance help save unborn children?
Well, only if it’s the sort that involves staying unmistakably pro-life and pro-traditional marriage. That’s not usually what people mean when they ask for a “truce”.
If one faction seems to want to keep putting traditional social issues on the front burner and other factions would prefer to see them taken off the stove entirely, then yes, I think moving those issues to the back burner counts as a truce.
Reagan never put social issues front and center, and neither did the Bushes; most pro-life candidates that I am aware of do not put the issue front and center. I am not sure what you are talking about :)
Either traditional social issues are front-and-center in the Republican platform or they’re not. Even when they’re not front-and-center, they’re more a part of the Republican agenda than they are part of the Democrat agenda. Many successful Republicans do have voting records and beliefs that are socially conservative, while at the same time not harping on it.
Yet is having the beliefs, but not harping on them, enough to satisfy the most vocal social conservatives? Probably not.
Mitch Daniels, for example, actually had a pretty good pro-life record. Yet he committed the cardinal sin of giving the irenicism and politesse many Republican politicians already put into practice regarding their own socially-conservative convictions a name – a “truce”.
It’s worth keeping in mind that social issues don’t belong to Conservatives or the Republicans. You may prefer to put these issues (marriage, abortion, homosexuality) on the back burner, for reasons of internal truce or external messaging, but your opponents may not cooperate. What then? What’s your Plan B?
I can’t speak for other social conservatives, but I don’t expect any politician to put social issues front and center, and I am not aware of any successful politicians who do. At the same time, I see no reason to form a truce with those who don’t share my goals. It is easy to see how such a truce would benefit economic conservatives; whether it would further the pro-life cause is much less clear.
The movie “Braveheart” is playing in the background, and right after I finished writing my last comment, Longshanks said “I shall offer a truce”. Made me laugh :)
Zafar is exactly right. There is no such animal as a one-sided truce. That’s why Mitch Daniels’ idea was so dumb. But back-burner ism is perfectly possible.
Merina- What do you consider “back-burnerism” to entail as a practical matter? Is it significantly different from Mitt Romney’s approach in 2012 or Corey Gardner’s approach since he disavowed personhood amendments and supported over the counter contraception?
It strikes me that both Rachel and Merina are in the somewhat odd – but not necessarily inconsistent – position of expending nearly all their political energy bringing these “back burner” issues to the fore, while at the same time saying they should be “back burner” issues.
The reason this position isn’t necessarily inconsistent is because of division of labor. Someone has to take care of tasks that are relegated to the background, after all. But, while not inconsistent, this position is potentially confusing. It is easy to mistake people who are constantly pushing an issue to the fore for being people who hope to make that issue foremost in everyone’s mind.
Midge: I’m not a politician. A lot of what I write is more along the lines of “social criticism”, not policy reform. I’m not trying to shut anyone up, nor offering to pipe down myself. And anyway, as you say, division of labor is always part of the plan, and it doesn’t seem to me that there are that many Ricochet contributors who write regularly about the social issues.
And the things people do say often strike me as quite wrong. We have Rob Long dropping bombs on us, like, “The social issues just weren’t there this last election” (which seems wildly untrue to me). People suggesting that we should pre-emptively submit on SSM to increase our electability. Social issues are complicated, and people who are quite savvy to other subjects sometimes fail to understand them rather spectacularly.
So anyway, my biggest goal right now is not to downplay social issues per se, but more to help people understand that it’s possible to handle them sensitively and with integrity, without being obnoxiously in-your-face. That’s really not a truce in the sense Daniels seemed to mean, because I still think we should talk about those issues, incorporate them into our platform, and confidently stick to our guns when Democrats choose to bring them up. The 2012 thing, where we technically maintained conservative positions but seemed ashamed of them and unwilling to bring them up, is bad strategy.
Really all I’m saying is that it’s possible to keep the party socially conservative without being defined mainly by those positions.
As far as the “hard truth” part… basically, I think a lot of Republican elites are themselves quite socially progressive. They’re fiscally and politically conservative, but socially they’re products of the same progressive culture as liberal elites, and it’s annoying to them to have to put up with countercultural religious conservatives who they (along with their liberal peers) mostly view as backwards and reactionary. The “staying electorally relevant” point is the favorite way of trying to bludgeon religious conservatives into compliance with a more progressive policy.
For some of those people, I think it’s actually distasteful to consider that maintaining conservative positions on abortion and marriage may still be the best way to keep the party electable.
It’s quite possible to put in the platform larger concepts that encompass some of these issues without getting into fist fights over them and at the same time to make it perfectly clear that lefties are the extreme ones. Think of the 2012 D convention. I call it the yay abortion, boo God convention. Republicans need to point out those extremes, while saying, on marriage for example, that states, not courts, should decide these things. There are lots of ways to maintain truth and integrity while using these issues to our advantage.