I wrote a piece for the Acton Institute's Religion &
Liberty on the question of whether the old Reagan coalition
has a future.
Check it out here.
Here's a big teaser:
As the standard bearer for American conservatism for two
decades, Ronald Reagan effortlessly embodied fusionism by
uniting Mont Pelerin style libertarians, populist Christians,
Burkean conservatives, and national security voters into a
devastatingly successful electoral bloc. Today, it is nearly
impossible to imagine a candidate winning both New York and
Texas, but Reagan and that group of fellow travelers did.
In the meantime, the coalition has begun to show strain as the
forces pushing outward exceed those holding it together. The
Soviet Union, once so great a threat that Whittaker Chambers
felt certain he was switching to the losing side when he began
to inform on fellow Communist agents working within the United
States, evaporated in what seemed like a period of days in the
early 1990s. Suddenly, the ultimate threat of despotic big
government eased and companions in arms had the occasion to
re-assess their relationship. The review of competing
priorities has left former friends moving apart. Perhaps
nowhere is the tension greater and more consequential than
between the socially conservative elements of the group and
devotees of libertarianism.
The two groups have little natural tendency to trust each other
when not confronted by a common enemy as in the case of the
Cold War. Libertarians simply want to minimize the role of
government as much as possible. For them, questions of
maintaining strong traditional family units and preserving
sexual and/or bioethical mores fall into an unessential realm
as far as government is concerned. The government, echoing the
thought of John Locke, should primarily occupy itself with
providing for physical safety of the person while allowing for
the maximum freedom possible for pursuit of self-interest.
Social conservatives similarly view the government as having a
primary mission of providing safety, but they also look to the
law as a source of moral authority. Man-made law, for them,
should seek to be in accord to some degree with divine and
natural law. Rifts open wide when social conservatives pursue a
public policy agenda designed to prevent divorce, encourage
marriage over cohabitation, prevent new understandings of
marriage from emerging (e.g. gay marriage or polygamous
marriage), prevent avant garde developments in biological
experimentation, and a variety of other issues outside (from
the libertarian perspective) the true mandate of government
that cannot seek to define the good, the right, and the
beautiful for a community of individuals. To the degree social
conservatives seek to achieve some kind of collective
excellence along the lines suggested by Aristotle and Thomas
Aquinas, libertarians see a mirror image of the threat posed by
big-government leftists. (READ
ON . . .)
