Remember everything we were told about the 2004 election? You
know, the one held on the day the
Enlightenment died, when America was conquered by Jesusland.
The religious right had already taken over the Republican Party;
with the re-election of President Bush and GOP gains in both houses
of Congress, it seized control of the entire United States
government.
Karl Rove, Garry Wills informed us, was a brilliant strategist
who correctly “calculated that religious conservatives…would be
the deciding factor.” Sitting next to Wills on the New York
Times op-ed page, Maureen Dowd pouted that Republicans
prevailed “by dividing the country along the fault lines of fear,
intolerance, ignorance and religious rule,” thanks in no small part
to a “devoted flock of evangelicals.” The values voters’ message
was clear: make way for the emerging fundamentalist majority.
Now forget all of that, because the old conventional wisdom has
been supplanted by the new: the religious right is dead — or at
least anachronistic. Karl Rove foolishly bet this year’s midterm
elections high turnout by voters who care about conservative social
issues and lost. The GOP was a casualty of religious conservative
overreach.
The most interesting theory of social conservatism’s reduced
political relevance is that the GOP has tilted too far in the
direction of the evangelical South and alienated the libertarian
West by pursuing policies that fuse religious fundamentalism with
big government. This idea originated in journalist Ryan Sager’s
book The Elephant in the Room and it has been spreading
ever since the 2006 returns came rolling in.
Hotline editor Chuck Todd warned
that “the libertarian West” is “more up for grabs than it should
be. And it’s because the Republican Party has grown more religious
and more pro-government which turns off these ‘leave me alone,’
small-government libertarian Republicans.” The last two Lexington
columns in the Economist have been devoted to this meme,
the first noting that “this election cycle was a dismal one for the
so-called theocrats,” the second speculating that “non-southerners
have grown particularly impatient with the South’s brand of in-your
face religiosity.” David Weigel, Reason’s smart political
analyst, predicted, “In future elections, that skeptical segment of
the country will only grow larger.”
Perhaps it will. But for now, the libertarian West versus the
fundamentalist South meme seems like a new twist on an old staple
of post-election commentary. Whenever the Republican candidates do
well, there is hand-wringing about the power of the religious
right; when the GOP loses, these social conservatives are surely to
blame.
The 1992 elections, with “The Year of the Woman” and Bill
Clinton’s 33-state victory, was supposed to ratify a new socially
liberal consensus. If the Republicans wanted to hold power ever
again, they would need to jettison culturally conservative
positions on abortion, homosexuality and religion in the public
square. Just two years later, Republicans took control of Congress
with significant help from conservative Christians holding these
same forbidden positions. Similar predictions of the religious
right’s demise in 1996 and ‘98 ended up being equally
unfounded.
And the most recent spate of commentary about the Republican
Party’s religious right albatross may prove no more prescient in an
election cycle or two. The Economist’s Lexington hedged
prudently, proclaiming Christians conservatives “down but not out.”
But like most bits of conventional wisdom, the recent commentary
about declining Dobsons does contain a grain of truth — as well as
some oversimplifications.
Republicans are indeed having trouble in states like Arizona,
Montana and Colorado while mostly maintaining in the South. It was
a bad
year for socially conservative ballot initiatives and a few of
their favorite candidates. The experience of holding power made all
conservatives too comfortable with government.
But the difficulties are in the details. Voters in the so-called
libertarian West didn’t want the government to leave them alone
when it came to the minimum wage. Colorado elected a pro-life
Democrat governor. If the Arizona marriage amendment had been
worded more carefully or if the South Dakota abortion ban had
included exceptions for rape, incest and fetal deformity, it is
easy to imagine both results turning out differently.
Neither the obsessive social conservatism of the GOP nor the
refreshing new libertarianism of this year’s Democratic candidates
holds up under careful scrutiny. Religious rightists won a largely
symbolic and ultimately futile bill forcing federal courts to hear
Terri Schiavo’s case; they were rebuffed by the
Republican-controlled Congress on the federal marriage amendment
and embryonic stem-cell research.
Likewise, the Libertarian Democrats rarely did more than make
promises about Iraq and the Patriot Act their colleagues are
unlikely to help them keep while acceding to their regions’
political consensus on gun rights. And in Bob Casey, Pennsylvanians
got a senator to the left of Rick Santorum on economics who would
ban abortion even in cases of rape and favored the Terri Schiavo
intervention.
None of this is to suggest that Republicans should go back to
believing the post-2004 aggrandizement of the values vote. Just as
rugged
individualism isn’t the same thing as libertarianism, a broad
cultural conservatism doesn’t necessarily translate into full
support for the Beltway religious right’s agenda.
Yet pundits should be more skeptical of analysts who draw
electoral maps in which the Bible belt is ostracized. The Christian
right’s recent history is full of resurrection stories.
