It was only a matter of time. First
Sarah Palin and the
Wasilla hillbillies were charged with spending John McCain’s
political capital faster than they could max out credit cards at
Neiman Marcus. Now blame for the Republican electoral debacle has
been extended to all the rubes who are said to populate the
religious right.
Even some right-leaning pundits are getting into the act.
Beliefnet’s Steven Waldman
warned before the election that “religious conservatives will
have to grapple with their role in electing Obama” since they
supposedly vetoed pro-abortion Joe Lieberman, whom Al Gore found
to be a sure ticket to the White House, for vice president.
In his post-election
column for the National Post, David Frum counseled
Republicans to embrace “a future that is less overtly religious,
less negligent with policy, and less polarizing on social
issues,” a move that will “involve painful change” on such issues
as abortion. There will be more college-educated social liberals
whose values must not be threatened by Republicans, he argues,
than Joe the Plumbers who are threatened by Democrats.
“Consider the nature of the Republican failure. That old rallying
point, social conservatism, simply didn’t draw the masses in
2008,” Amity Shlaes
concluded. “Truth be told, the pro-life line and appeals to
piety often backfired.”
If the Republicans are ever going to win another national
election, they must engage in less pandering to conservative
Christians on traditional values. Or at the very least,
Christopher Caldwell advises,
stop identifying traditional values with “the values of the
U-Haul-renting denizens of two-year-old churches and
three-year-old shopping malls.”
Actually, that last example comes from the June 1998 issue of the
Atlantic Monthly. A little more than two years later,
the Republicans would retake the White House by nominating an
evangelical Christian from Texas who was pro-life on abortion and
popular among religious conservatives. Four years after that, the
conventional wisdom was that “values voters” had delivered the
Republicans unified control of the federal government. Liberals
were left worrying that the United States — that is, the
cosmopolitan “real America” — had been taken over by a mass of
red states they derisively labeled “Jesusland.”
This illustrates the folly of divining lasting political trends
on the basis of a single election result, as well as the perils
of declaring the death — or dominance — of social conservatism.
Looking back at the postmortems of the 1992 election, it is easy
to find political writers arguing that it was time to abort the
pro-life movement and look toward socially liberal Northeastern
governors like Christine Todd Whitman and Bill Weld (remember
him?) for the Republican future. Coming just before the GOP
congressional takeover of 1994, such analysis — written not just
by smart liberals like the New Republic’s John Judis but
also center-right commentators like Charles Krauthammer — seems
as overwrought as the social-conservative triumphalism just two
years before the 2006 elections restored the Democratic
majorities on Capitol Hill.
In truth, there is very little evidence that the country has
moved left on social issues since 2004, when values voters were
said to decide the presidential election. Polls have been
shifting somewhat more pro-life since the mid-1990s. Even
leftward movement on same-sex marriage, which has gone from being
unthinkable in the early '90s to a live issue today, seems to
have stalled around late 2003. Republicans emphasized their
social conservatism much more in 2004, when they won, than during
their losing campaigns of 2006 and 2008.
That’s not to say that more talk about abortion in the middle of
an economic crisis would have made John McCain president, or that
there aren’t demographic and generational shifts that could
reduce social conservatism’s salience in the future. But there
are demographic and generational factors that cut the other way
too. California’s constitutional amendment reversing
same-sex marriage did better among blacks
and Hispanics than among whites. Black and Latino voters also
broke for similar ballot initiatives in Florida and Arizona.
African-Americans similarly voted
against gay adoption in Arkansas.
In California, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians voted more
pro-life than whites on a ballot initiative requiring
parental notification when minors seek abortions. That’s not to
suggest that social conservatism alone can turn majorities of
these voters into Republicans. But it’s hard to come up with
other issues on the right that have such multiracial appeal. And
while younger voters tend to be much more supportive of gay
rights, they are not noticeably less pro-life
(pdf) .
Social conservatism itself can adapt to changing political and
cultural circumstances. In this election, the religious right’s
favorite candidate was a working mother whose eldest daughter is
an unwed pregnant teenager. Suffice it to say that would not have
always been the case. Social conservatives still campaign to
reverse Roe v. Wade and pass pro-life laws, but few are
working to overturn Lawrence v. Texas and reinstate
anti-sodomy laws.
It’s easy to understand why professional social conservatives
exaggerated the 2004 values vote. But why do pundits and
political analysts so consistently make the opposite mistake
whenever Democrats win elections, even though their epitaphs for
social conservatism are usually refuted within an election cycle
or two? To some extent, it’s the internecine conservative
squabbling summed up by the Dougherty Doctrine:
“If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better
off. It’s failing because it’s like you.”
Other biases also come into play. People who write about politics
tend to live in places like Washington and New York, where even
moderate social conservatism is a genuine political liability.
Even the most socially conservative among them associate
disproportionately with educated professionals who claim to be
fiscally conservative but socially liberal. Inhabiting such a
cocoon, the winning formula always seems to be more Concord Coalition and less
Christian Coalition equals Republican renaissance.
Here’s betting they’re wrong again.
