Here’s why in three words: bait and switch. Get elected as fiscal conservatives, then the instant you’re sworn in, rip off that liberty-lovin’, budget balancin’ mask to reveal the only agenda you really care about: using the coercive powers of government to impose your religion on everyone else in joyful anticipation of that blessed day when your religion IS the only law of the land. This is why social conservatism is the antithesis of fiscal conservatism: it is anti-liberty.
To illustrate this point, conservative Republicans in North Carolina are not making their state’s economy their first priority. That can wait. No, their first order of business is to legislate even more inequality for lesbians and gays into their state constitution according to an AP piece in the Greensboro News-Record:
The economy dominated the fall campaign, but leaders among North Carolina’s social conservatives believe the Republican sweep at the legislature should finally permit a vote on a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
North Carolina is the only state in the Southeast that hasn’t approved an amendment restricting marriage to one man and one woman. Democratic leadership in the legislature has refused to consider GOP-penned bills on the issue for several years, and gay rights organizations have offered strong opposition to what it called imprinting discrimination permanently into state law.
Now, with Republicans solidly in the majority in the General Assembly starting this January for the first time in more than a century, chances for a vote in the House and Senate are fairly strong, GOP lawmakers said.
Getting elected as fiscal conservatives and then governing as social conservatives looks to me like the reason that government and spending both grow when conservatives are in power. The paradox that fiscal conservatives are pro-liberty while social conservatives oppose liberty is why so many people on the Left and independents, who OUGHT to be conservatives based on their financial best interests, cannot make sense of conservatism and reject it altogether. Well, that and the fact that fiscal conservatives open every conversation with a Leftist by declaring that the best way to get the federal budget under control is to eliminate Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and the Internal Revenue Service — without a word of explanation of the positive principles behind these proposals. This means that what Leftists hear is, “The best way to get the federal budget under control is to kill the disabled, kill the elderly, impoverish the elderly and free the rich from paying taxes.” For some reason, that makes Leftists love their big government programs more than ever.
Update, 11/12/10, Fri.: Dear Roger Simon asked a couple of days ago, “Is liberalism dead?” If the Republicans we elected were really fiscal conservatives, then, yes — but — bait-and-switch, bait-and-switch — so … no, not by a long shot.
Jonah Goldberg was pondering the nature of conservatives in September (boldfacing mine):
Most conservatives believe in free enterprise, strong national defense, and traditional values (variously defined). To be sure, there is a distinct libertarian faction on the right. But I don’t know that there’s a strong national-defense faction that would otherwise be in the Democratic fold (I can think of a few individuals about whom that is true — Paul Wolfowitz, for example).
Last, Bai writes that Republicans coalesced around anti-Communism. That’s true. But it would be just as true to say that anti-Communists coalesced around being Republicans. The Republican Party became the home of anti-Communists, social conservatives, and free marketers not because that’s what Republicans “are” but because that was the only place for such people to go. Seventy years ago, people of such views were scattered across both parties. As those issues came to the fore, the GOP was taken over by conservatives while the Democrats, over time, became less hospitable to them.
It looks to me like the social conservatives who took over the GOP did a lot to create the current demographics of the Democrats, too, by driving out gays, women and Jews — the majority of whom would be better served by the policies of fiscal conservatism because becoming an entrepreneur is a great way to succeed in spite of discrimination. (I’m not sure if blacks were driven out of the Right by social conservatives as much as they were seduced to the Left by the easy money of the Great Society welfare system and then kept in thrall by the grievance mongers of the race hustling industry. It occurs to me now that the grievance mongers fall into two camps: black ones who dream of domination and nation-building; and white ones — think ACORN — dreaming of using blacks as their pawns in the Cloward-Piven strategy to destroy capitalism to make way for a Leftist utopia.)
Yup. It takes an ultra special brand of stupid to take 31% of the LGBT vote while maintaining the soc con vote (!) and consider that a mandate – nay, an *obligation* – to impose social conservatism completely at the expense of fiscal sanity.
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/11/09/jim-demint-you-cant-be-a-fiscal-conservative-and-not-be-a-social-conservative/
Could they not even *pretend* to be decent human beings? The Democrats/Left will never actually deliver on equality for, well, anyone. But they get the votes because they’re the only ones who will fake it while their opponents make themselves as repugnant as possible. Oy.
And, er, not to nag (lol), but weren’t you going to write about weight loss? A lot of people would love to see your insights. Of course, the fact that I’m writing probably means that you’re already on it.
Liz,
If I haven’t posted about by Sunday, 11/14, please remind me!
Cynthia
OK,
What exactly can we do to stop the switching? Who do we put pressure on? There must be some SoCons who, if not pro-equality, are at least pragmatic enough to focus on economics if they think it’ll keep them their jobs. How do we exploit that?
Havewatch,
People who drop a mask haven’t switched who they are, they’ve revealed who they are. And pressure just makes people cling to their original position. When you want people to move from A to B, then B has to look better than A to them AND they have to see how to get there.
What I’m starting to be able to see — and articulate — is that social conservative is just as good as Leftism is about drawing in good, idealistic people and getting them to surrender their power in order to work as a collective to defeat evil. In the case of the Left, the evils are liberty and capitalism and the good they must establish in their place is secular statism. In the case of social conservatives, the evils are liberty and atheism and the good they must establish in their place is religious statism. One of the main reasons we can’t convert the idealists of the Left who do not want to give up their liberty for statism is that they correctly perceive that the real choice with which they are being presented is between secular statism and religious statism — and they prefer the marginally greater freedom of secular statism. That’s beause religious statism controls the individual’s viewpoint and actions all the way to the soul and eternity, so it is a more comprehensive totalitarianism than secular statism, which requires particular actions but is not as insistent on eternal mind control.
Social conservative politicians are not afraid of losing their jobs. Try and throw a scare into them and they’ll just put the fiscal conservative mask back on until they’re safe again — much the same way that Obama poses as a fiscal conservative whenever he needs to get people to believe he’s not a Leftist. What I plan to do is use this space to examine fiscal conservatism and get people inspired about it as the political philosophy necessary for a society to be prosperous, virtuous and enlightened. This will show the idealistic faction of social conservatives that B is better than A and how to get there. Their totalitarian leadership is welcome to remain at A, deprived of followers.
Cynthia
It’s not bait and switch, Cyn, it’s one faction of the Party flexing it’s muscles, locally. We have a two party system here and it usually works pretty well, sooner or later. You have one huge issue and many smaller ones. Well, so do I, only it’s not the same issue. Call me agnostic on gay marriage. I see that there has never been a major society where it seemed to work and several that failed as gays became more open. Cause or effect? I dunno. Of course we straights have done a pretty fair job of messing up our marriages so, I still dunno.
As it is, I’m against gay bashing because I’m against people bashing. So, I’ll fight alongside of you on that, let you and the social conservatives fight it out and stick with the issues I know something about. Meanwhile, whichever way your big issue comes out, I merely hope that is how He intends.
So, it’s not the Republican Party, no more than the northern antigun Republicans are the whole Party. So, we do things like run for the Precinct Chair positions and work our way into power in the Party. Will it work for your huge issue as it did for mine? Sure.
Those “social conservatives”, and I’m not sure that is the right term but it’s the one everyone uses, have power in the Party because they got in and did the work at the local level. When I got elected to Precinct Chairman I found out how the Party works at the local level and found out why the SCs had as much power as they did. I never once saw someone claiming to be from the libertarian wing of the Party working a phone bank or walking the precincts. Those were the SCs. The money came from the Country Club wing, so they have a bunch of power, too. So, those were the two factions the politicians tried to keep happy. Everyone else got crumbs.
It was right about then that we 2A types started getting involved. Today the only antigun Republicans are like that idiot Bloomberg, a lifelong Donk until he “converted” to win a Primary and then use his money to buy the Mayorship.
Your faction will find it a little quicker than mine did. There are a helluva lot of gays that have a couple of nickles to rub together while we riflemen are always broke. Your faction of the Party won a lot, a LOT of downballot spots. This will show up, not in time for you to like it but, sooner or later. Hell, I still cannot visit New York City armed, legally. Nor Washington, DC. I did not give up, though, my faction is still winning, one little spot at a time. So will yours.
Peter,
That’s very apt advice, Peter — thank you.
Cynthia
I live in NC. I am writing to the state GOP that if they pass this I will change my registration from Republican to Libertarian…and actually work for the Libertarian Party.
In NC, gay rights groups have done nothing to reach out in any way to GOP politicians. The attempt to build a Log Cabin Republicans chapter in the Triangle fizzled after a couple of years.
I also don’t know where they got the 31% of gays voted GOP statistic, and I doubt the accuracy of voting breakdowns by demographic data, because ballots don’t ask race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. But I won’t be surprised when that number, if accurate, keeps rising every two years. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it reached 50% within the next quarter-century.
I have no doubt the GOP will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They still don’t get it. The idea that gay marriage is more important than the imploding economy is madness.
The only thing that will save the GOP from itself is being subsumed by the Tea Party. Become the party of liberty both economic and social and strong property rights. You’ll win every election from now until doomsday.