Social Conservatives, Populism, and Confused Republicans

Many noticed that abortion, marriage, and the so-called “culture war” issues were largely ignored at the recent Republican National Convention. Hulk Hogan and an OnlyFans model made an appearance, yes, but, as Kayla Bartsch noted at National Review, the RNC said “So long, Social Conservatives.”

This wasn’t a tactical decision limited to the convention, either. The 2024 Republican Platform differs significantly from the 2016 version in keeping silent about same-sex marriage and removing support for a national abortion policy. This shift is “not merely aesthetic,” continues Bartsch, but “represents the substance of the new Trump platform on social issues,” which “traded out” conservative commitments “for a short-term jolt of populist power.” However much JD Vance assures social conservatives of their permanent place at “the table,” it’s hard to avoid concluding that the GOP obsequiously sold out its principles, and many of its members, to rage against elites and Democrats without standing for much of anything. For some time the GOP has made space for symbolic performance art—Congress as middle school student government but with social media—and now parodies the old Groucho Marx line, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them . . . well, I have others.”

I have it on good authority that we oughtn’t put much trust in princes, and I’ve long doubted the pro-life and pro-marriage “commitments” of many GOP politicians, so I’m not much surprised at the 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 fusionism between conservatives, libertarians, and anti-communists has frayed, even shattered. I’m open to the possibility (although I have doubts about the efficacy) that a pro-life long game requires the view held by some in the New Right that we need to support labor, provide more child tax credits, bolster unions, develop an industrial policy, and make birth free. I view such prescriptions as within the range of reasonable options and accept how they might be coherently embraced within an overarching pro-family, pro-marriage, and pro-life effort, although I deem them mostly impotent to deliver on their promises and full of moral hazards. These, however, are normal disputes about the prudence and workability of morally legitimate policy options among others and they don’t bother me in the least. Perhaps JD Vance is working on a pro-life master plan despite recent appearances. Perhaps.

I’m willing to admit all of that. Still, it remains the case that the GOP establishment seems to be turning away from social conservatives, perhaps confident that the current state of the Democratic Party leaves conservatives no other options and virtually guaranteed to vote as they have for several decades.

But we shouldn’t go quietly into oblivion, and not for tactical reasons about electoral power or influence, but because social conservatives—even if out of favor and with diminished influence—proclaim and teach valuable truths without which the polity fails to serve its proper function.

It’s important to remember that the most basic claims made by social conservatives are true, and that policies based on overt falsity, or that sideline basic truths, introduce and eventually cement irrationality into the law. For example, while reasonable people of goodwill can and do disagree about contested issues in the abortion debates—say, what to do in instances of rape and incest, or in the presence of non-life-threatening health concerns of a pregnant woman—it is entirely biologically, scientifically, and philosophically untenable to claim that an embryo or unborn child is merely a clump of cells, or not human, or simply part of a woman’s body. Those claims are indisputably false and have been known to be utterly false since the advent of modern embryology. Quite simply, there is nothing to debate about those claims, and to pretend they are true, even possibly true, deforms and impairs reasonable debate on the real issue: namely, do the unborn possess rights and thus warrant the protection of 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? Those are difficult issues, and social conservatives rightly insist on their place in the political and moral reflections of a decent, serious, and self-governing people. A decent and serious people soberly and deliberately think about such things, and disagreement is not a per se barrier to deliberation—it’s what a self-governing people are supposed to do.

Or, to take another example, conservatives do not support the traditional understandings of marriage, sexuality, and family because they are scolds and prudes governed by a prim moralism. They’re not worried that someone, somewhere, is having fun, and venting their disapproval. Rather than the small moralism of bourgeois sensibility, conservatives are for the full and complete flourishing of each human being, and, as it turns out, given the social and embodied nature of humans and our vulnerabilities and needs, the sexual revolution has been damaging to everyone—men, women, the elderly, the young—and, moreover, the collapse of marriage, family, and fertility poses significant challenges to the prosperity and promise of our way of life.

The central task and contribution of social conservatives, it turns out, is reminding their interlocutors of the entire range of the human good and insisting on the unreasonability of overlooking, truncating, or neglecting any aspect of that range. Human well-being cannot be understood only in part, and to pay attention to some aspects of well-being while ignoring others not only misunderstands the whole, and cannot but misunderstand the whole, but tends to place undue emphasis or weight on this or that aspect that, while perfectly good and worthwhile in itself, cannot bear the entire weight and is itself misunderstood and damaged. Both the whole and the parts of human flourishing are damaged if we neglect any of the parts or truncate the whole, which is precisely what a good many moral and political views tend to do. Social conservatives insist that everything about the human matters, both morally and politically, and they are right about this.

Political institutions exist to secure, insofar as possible, those conditions allowing and promoting the human good, and while political institutions cannot capably replace institutions such as the family or religion without incompetence or injustice, politics correctly conceived and practiced supports the conditions of flourishing. It’s easy to narrow our understanding of flourishing and its conditions to the economic and material, and easy to deplore our failed and corrupt elites. But our elites have failed, in part, because they have been poorly trained and formed by an education that, as merely technocratic, procedural, and rules-based, cannot possibly understand and serve human beings in their fullness. Even if the world of Rawls, effective altruism, deliberative democracy, technology, a rules-based order, or rationalism worked to provide effective, efficient, and fair governance, we would still need to deliberate and know the ends and purposes of those systems and if they were in concord with the human good. A system can be effective and fair in the service of an unjust purpose, after all, and a refusal to consider the purposes of being human might appear hard-headed and objective but, in reality, is a form of wanton unreasonableness. Our best and brightest, it turns out, know shockingly little about the human good, and consider themselves wise for not knowing, while ordinary Americans concerned about the costs of pornography and the state of marriage know rather more about human things.

Like every other political observer and participant, I have occasion to shake my head about some of the people on my “own side,” and I recognize social conservatives can be strident, hectoring, dogmatic, naive, and preachy. So it is, and while I find that embarrassing and off-putting, not only is it their right to advocate their views but their advocacy, even when clumsy or offensive, serves the political enterprise by reminding us that more is at stake than the GDP, corporate tax rates, and term limits for the Supreme Court. At stake are the human things, the very things justifying the existence and power of government to begin with.

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

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