Social conservatives, populism and confused Republicans

Many noted that issues such as abortion, marriage and the so-called “culture war” were largely ignored at the recent Republican convention. Hulk Hogan and an OnlyFans model were present, but like Kayla Bartsch at National reviewthe RNC said, “Goodbye, social conservatives.”

Nor was this a tactical decision limited to Congress. 2024 republican platform differs significantly from the 2016 version in harmony quiet to same-sex marriage And Remove Support for a national abortion policy. This shift is “not merely aesthetic,” Bartsch continues, but “represents the substance of the new Trump platform on social issues,” which has traded conservative commitments “for a short-term burst of populist power.” As much as JD Vance has denied social conservatives their permanent place in the “the table”, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the GOP has submissively sold its principles and many of its members to rage against Elites and Democrats without reputation for pretty much everything. For some time now, the GOP has made room for symbolic performance art — Congress as a government of middle schoolers, but with social media — and now parodies the old Groucho Marx quip: “These are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

I have it on good authority that we shouldn’t put too much faith in princes, and I’ve long doubted the “commitments” of many pro-abortion and pro-marriage GOP politicians, so I’m not particularly surprised by this betrayal. I’m also fully aware that politics is the art of the possible, that the point of a political party is to win elections, and that the old fusion between conservatives, libertarians, and anti-communists has frayed, even broken. I’m open to the possibility (though I have doubts about its effectiveness) that a long-term pro-life game requires the view of some on the New Right that we need to support labor, give more child tax credits, strengthen unions, develop industrial policy, and make birth free. I consider such proposals to be reasonable options and accept that they can be coherently integrated into an overarching pro-family, pro-marriage, and pro-life movement, although I find them largely incapable of delivering on their promises and fraught with moral hazard. But these are normal disputes about the wisdom and viability of morally legitimate policy options among other things, and they do not bother me in the least. Perhaps, despite recent appearances, JD Vance is working on a pro-life master plan. Perhaps.

I’m happy to admit all of that. Yet the Republican establishment seems to be turning away from social conservatives, perhaps because they are convinced that the current state of the Democratic Party leaves conservatives no choice and they can be virtually certain that they will vote as they have for decades.

But we should not simply fade away into oblivion, not for tactical reasons involving electoral power or influence, but because social conservatives, even though they have fallen from grace and diminished their influence, proclaim and teach valuable truths without which the commonwealth cannot fulfill its proper function.

It is important to remember that the most basic claims made by social conservatives are true, and that policies based on outright falsehood or ignoring basic truths introduce irrationality into the laws and ultimately cement them. For example, while reasonable people of good will can and do disagree on contentious issues in the abortion debates—such as what to do in cases of rape and incest, or when a pregnant woman has non-life-threatening health problems—it is biologically, scientifically, and philosophically completely untenable to claim that an embryo or unborn child is merely a clump of cells, or not a human being, or simply a part of a woman’s body. These claims are indisputably false, and have been known to be completely false since the advent of modern medicine. embryology. Quite simply, there is nothing to argue about these claims, and to pretend that they are true, even possibly true, distorts and detracts from reasonable debate about the real issue: namely, do the unborn possess rights and therefore deserve the protection of the law? And under what circumstances do those rights override the will and wishes of a pregnant woman? And under what circumstances do the rights and needs of a pregnant woman justify accepting the death of the unborn child? These are difficult issues, and social conservatives are right to insist on their place in the political and moral deliberations of a decent, serious, self-governing people. A decent and serious people think soberly and consciously about such things, and disagreement is not a cause for alarm. per se Obstacles to consultation – that is the task of a self-governing people.

Or, to take another example, conservatives do not support traditional ideas about marriage, sexuality, and family because they are whiners and prudish people, ruled by a rigid moralism. They are not worried about someone, somewhere, having fun and venting their disapproval. Rather than the narrow-minded moralism of bourgeois sensibilities, conservatives are for the full and complete development of every human being, and as it turns out, the sexual revolution was not the answer given the social and physical nature of human beings and our vulnerabilities and needs. harmful for all – men, women, old, young – and, in addition, the breakdown of marriage, family and fertility poses significant challenges for the prosperity and promises of our way of life.

The central task and contribution of social conservatives, it turns out, is to remind their interlocutors of the full range of human well-being and to insist that it is unreasonable to overlook, shortchange, or neglect any aspect of that range. Human well-being cannot be understood in only parts, and if one pays attention to some aspects of well-being and ignores others, one not only misunderstands the whole and cannot help but misunderstand the whole, but one tends to give undue importance or weight to this or that aspect which, while perfectly good and valuable in itself, cannot carry the full meaning and is itself misunderstood and damaged. Both the whole and the parts of human flourishing are damaged when we neglect any of the parts or shortchange the whole, which is precisely what many moral and political views tend to do. Social conservatives insist that everything about humans is important, both morally and politically, and they are right in this.

Political institutions exist to secure, to the extent possible, those conditions that enable and promote human well-being. And while political institutions cannot replace institutions such as the family or religion without incompetence or injustice, properly designed and practiced politics supports the conditions of flourishing. It is easy to limit our understanding of flourishing and its conditions to the economic and material, and easy to bemoan our failed and corrupt elites. But our elites have failed in part because they were poorly trained and shaped by an education that, being purely technocratic, procedural, and rule-based, cannot possibly understand and serve people in their entirety. Even if Rawls’ world, effective altruism, deliberative democracy, technology, a rule-based order, or rationalism helped to enable effective, efficient, and just governance, we would still need to think about the goals and purposes of these systems and whether they are consistent with human well-being. After all, a system in the service of an unjust end can be effective and just, and refusing to consider the ends of being human may seem sober and objective, but is in fact a form of willful unreason. Our best and brightest minds, it turns out, know shockingly little about human welfare and think themselves smart for not knowing, while ordinary Americans, who worry about the cost of pornography and the state of marriage, know far more about human things.

Like every other political observer and participant, I shake my head at some of the people on my “side” and recognize that social conservatives can be shrill, tyrannical, dogmatic, naive, and didactic. That’s the way it is, and while I find that embarrassing and disgusting, not only are they entitled to their views, but their advocacy, even when it is clumsy or offensive, serves the political enterprise by reminding us that there is more at stake than GDP, corporate tax rates, and Supreme Court term limits. At stake are human things, the very things that justify the existence and power of government in the first place.

Social conservatives serve a noble cause, and populism that ignores their concerns is not worth supporting.

Image by Bilal Ulker and licensed through Adobe Stock. Image resized.