No matter what ails the Republican Party, social conservatives
will ultimately be held responsible. When Republicans lose
elections, it is because the religious right’s extremism on
abortion or same-sex marriage terrified jittery suburban moderates.
When Republicans win, it is because they cynically manipulated
crazed red-state fundamentalists — who will surely force the GOP
to overreach and lose the next election.
So it was probably inevitable that social conservatives would be
blamed for the GOP’s high-spending, big-government morass. Much of
the finger-pointing has come from pundits with center-right
leanings who find conservative moral issues off-putting and
embarrassing at best and a throwback to pre-Enlightenment zealotry
at worst. In their telling, everything was fine among the
small-government Republicans until the religious right came and
spoiled the party.
Consider the Economist’s Lexington column, where social
conservatism and runaway federal spending are always symptoms of
the same problem. A May piece concluded with praise for Ronald
Reagan because “he never allowed the Christian right to gain too
much power at the expense of the Goldwater right” (Barry Goldwater
himself might have disputed this observation).
Andrew Sullivan is another forceful exponent of this theory.
Since the Clinton years, he has been accusing religious
conservatives of discarding limited government, along with “privacy
and restraint, modesty and constitutionalism,” in favor of
“big-government conservatism and old-fashioned puritanism.” Under
President Bush, it’s “big government moralising, big government
spending and big government inefficiency.” George Will, who is
hardly a moral libertine, recently wrote of the “kind of conservatives who make
conservatism repulsive to temperate people” and warned that
“limited-government conservatives will disassociate from a
Republican Party more congenial to overreaching social
conservatives.”
Even commentators who are more sympathetic to social
conservatives concede that the rise of the values voter has
helped produce a more government-friendly GOP. But this new
conventional wisdom confuses correlation with causation. Over the
past decade, Republican politicians have become less interested in
reducing state power and more interested in wielding it.
The anti-statism of Beltway Republicans peaked in 1995-96, when
the Gingrich-led Congress made a serious effort to trim federal
spending. But the adverse public reaction to the government
shutdown and attempts to restrain Medicare expenditures curbed
their enthusiasm for further belt-tightening. The late '90s
surpluses — the result of the fortuitous convergence of
discretionary spending control, the peace dividend, supply-side
capital-gains tax cuts and the dot-com boom — caused it to
evaporate almost entirely.
Since then, the GOP majority has increasingly indulged in more
traditional pork-barrel politics. But this is hardly the fault of
social conservatives. Few of the 6,300 earmarks in the $286.4
billion transportation bill were designed to appeal to them. The
same is true of the projects folded into the agriculture and energy
bills.
In fact, there isn’t much of a social-conservative mark on any
of the Republicans’ recent big-ticket spending items. The
prescription-drug benefit — the largest entitlement since the
Great Society — was an overture to senior citizens and centrists.
Economic conservatives have always objected to its cost, but many
went along with the concept on the grounds that it would make
free-market Medicare reform more palatable.
Some were willing to make a similar trade-off in education
policy, supporting the mandates and increased spending that No
Child Left Behind and other Bush administration policies eventually
entailed in order to win vouchers and school choice. Again the
price was significant — the Department of Education grew by almost
70 percent between 2002 and 2004 — and again social conservatives
had little to do with it.
The congressional Republicans who are the least supportive of
tax and budget cuts also tend to be among the most socially
liberal. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.), bete noire of
pro-lifers, is an example. In 2004, National Journal rated
him a 58 percent liberal on social issues — and a 52 percent
liberal on economics.
It isn’t a socially conservative senator who is blocking the
extension of the 2003 investment tax cuts. It is pro-choice,
socially liberal Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). In 2001, Congress
ended up passing a smaller tax cut largely to appease Northeastern
Republican moderates like Specter and Snowe, and it was still too
large for socially liberal Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) to vote
for.
By contrast, culturally conservative Sen. Tom Coburn
(R-Oklahoma) led an unsuccessful bid to revoke millions of dollars
in pork-barrel spending. An enterprising blogger at RedState.org
noted that not a single senator who opposed the
federal marriage amendment or cosponsored the most recent bill
promoting federally funded embryonic stem-cell research — both
issues being fair barometers of social conservatism — voted for
the Coburn amendment.
Where, then, does the charge that social conservatives drive
big-government conservatism come from? It is certainly fair to say
that social issues have brought a large number of voters into the
GOP who oppose abortion or favor school prayer but don’t care about
balanced budgets or tax cuts. The Pew Research Center has famously
designated them “Pro-Government Conservatives.” But many who vote
Republican on the basis of law-and-order and national security
concerns can also be so described.
It’s true that social conservatives have in recent years become
more comfortable using government power (they tend, for example, to
be weak federalists). But so have most other conservatives.
Big-government conservatism was originally conceived to
expand the appeal of ownership-society ideas, not win over the
social right. If economic conservatives are willing to flirt with
expanded benefits and higher spending to win free-market reforms,
it is hardly surprising that social conservatives similarly adopt
big-government means.
The GOP’s campaign appeals to social conservatives have also
changed. In 1994, conservative candidates described government as
an aggressor against traditional values and ran against the
National Endowment for the Arts, federal education bureaucrats, and
the pre-reform welfare system. Today, they portray government as a
protector of traditional values and campaign for such policies as
faith-based initiatives. But this is a symptom of the party’s
big-government drift, not its cause.
Republicans would probably be more supportive of limited
government if moral traditionalists hadn’t helped them win power.
Yet that’s the one contribution the social conservatives’ critics
on the right don’t seem to mind.
