So the inestimable Mr. McGuire has responded to the response to the initial post that kicked off the ball. Truth be told, in summation we are not terribly far off:
Just so we’re clear, I’m not asking for social conservatives to be “sloughed off,” or even kicked to an outer circle. They are an important part of the party and of the conservative movement. Kenney in particular is absolutely right about the moral and ethical considerations behind the defense of the free market and of limited government. I am saying that economic conservatives are the ones who – especially in Virginia – seem to be more concerned about mounting the actual defense.
The difference, it would appear, is in first things.
Mr. McGuire never really addresses the dialectical materialist argument, with Marxism on the left hand and Randian libertarianism on the right. One can safely assume that McGuire probably agrees with the distinction, but that social conservatives too (and conservatives in general) when they lean on the side of social justice too often lean into the Marxist end of the spectrum. In short, social conservatives must be leery of the same materialist dialectic — government intervention — in order to address cultural ills, and in that aspect perhaps social conservatives find themselves sharing a common dialogue with liberals, who see no problem at all attacking the social ills of the day with gobs and gobs of your money.
It’s a worthwhile argument, and one that McGuire alludes to here:
The critical problem here, and the tension that exists within both the conservative movement and the Republican Party – is Kenney’s determination to put social conservatism at the heart of both to the exclusion of anything else (at the heart, that is, not within the larger organism). In the process, he avoids the arguments that have actually torn the RPV asunder in this century.
One of the more famous quips used in this argument is that without a moral center, American politics descends into two drunks (left and right) arguing over the bar tab on the Titanic. After $16 trillion in debt, an over-regulated and over-criminalized society, with religious freedom and the rights of conscience under threat, it’s not hard to make the argument that the problems we face in America are not purely economic ones… but rather they stem from a moral rot that seeks to replace culture and manners with rules and regulations.
Instead of churches, we have welfare offices.
Instead of pastors, we have social workers.
Instead of bishops, we have politicians.
Instead of charities, we have employment commissions.
Instead of culture, we have regulations.
Instead of manners, we have cell phone cameras and social media.
Instead of confession, we have civil and criminal courts.
Instead of forgiveness, we have the lidless eye of the press.
Instead of economy, we have a regulated market.
Instead of ethics, we have lawyers.
Instead of morals, we have laws.
It is important to note that the notion of oikonomia stems from the management of one’s household. This is not a function of government, but rather a function of that basic building block of all our social institutions — the family. That family does not gather or build itself on fiscal considerations, but rather in a sacrament where one man and one woman love each other, and in time that love becomes personified in their children. The basis of economy being predicated on family, the fiscal considerations of economy are naturally predicated on the social considerations that forge familial institutions (and hence, why even fiscal conservatives should be radical defenders of marriage in the face of her enemies).
Of course, the true fear of fiscal conservatives is that the heart will stray into fiscal liberalism the more it sees the government as a charitable institution (which it is not). McGuire touches on this with the number of tax increases in Virginia that conservatives have struggled against: “2002 (the NoVa and HR Referenda), 2004 (the Warner tax hike), 2005 (the primary fights over the Warner tax hike) 2007 (HB3202), 2008 (the special session to deal with the Supreme Court tossing HB3202), and 2013 (Plan ’13 From Outer Space)” not to mention the bevy of other smaller tax increases forced upon local governments by Richmond. It’s a rightly placed concern.
Yet the fear expressed by social conservatives is that a purely fiscal conservatism “to the exclusion of anything else” if extreme arguments are to be acceptable, has no room for the moral, the ethical, the cultural, or the social — so long as it serves the calculus of a spreadsheet and a ledger. In fact, in some cases, it leads to the abandonment of any governing principle at all, a notion that Bastiat warned against as a foil often used by do-gooders to decry those who saw the dangers of government expansion into the social sphere, but too often in today’s environment becomes a negligence in areas such as infrastructure, transportation, education, and basic social services and regulations provided to allow the free market to operate.
Conservatism, after all, is a governing principle that seeks to minimize government interference while maximizing liberty. Even Robert Nozick — the philosopher who dealt the death blow to Fabian socialism in the mid-1970s with his epic tour de force Anarchy, State, and Utopia — made the argument later in life that one sacrifices freedom in order to enhance one’s liberty, and hence the importance of some governance. The question remains: when that sacrifice is continually made, on which side does that sacrifice of power fall? Liberty? Tyranny? License?
Fiscal conservatism might well argue “liberty” after a lengthy analysis– but for whom? Social conservatives instinctively argue “liberty!” and respond with “the common good” whereas our fiscal friends have at times (and depending on their flavor of Keynesian, Austrian, or Chicago school of economics) have filtered that liberty to the beneficiaries of TARP, for instance. There is a difference in perspective that, without the heart, the fiscal head will lose its moral grounding — hence the imperative of the social conservative at the core of the movement.
In essence, while the heart of conservatism remains social conservatism, room is made for our fiscally conservative head. The converse is that the fiscally conservative head has very little room for the inefficiencies of social conservatism — which like a cancer ultimately eats and then perversely destroys the moral underpinnings of a free market without social conservatism.
Fiscal conservatism can operate without social conservatism, to be sure — but it does so at the risk of imbibing the waters of dialectical materialism, therefore straying into a whole list of horribles when we focus on the material rather than the cultural: corporatism, socialism, authoritarianism, etc.
Of course, it’s no misplacement to put social conservatism at the heart of the conservatism, anymore than it is to suggest that fiscal conservatism remains the head.
But it does suggest an interesting imperative, namely that if we achieved all the ends of fiscal conservatism, it would not automatically arrive at a just and free society. In stark contrast, social conservatism inevitably arises at the ends of fiscal conservatism, because social conservatives understand that no free society can operate with a government that provides all, ends all, becomes all.
Mr. McGuire is right on his ends, but I fear strays in the means. A purely materialist approach to politics that sidelines the inheritively moral process of lawmaking and polity ends in a dark road, and has never arrived at the libertopia we all strive for as conservatives. Only with firm moral underpinnings does Western Civilization thrive.
As John Adams so famously argued, our Constitution — and by extension, our liberties — were made for a moral people and none other. If we are looking for first things, it is to the moral heart of the conservative movement and not the fiscal head where we find fertile ground for the seeds of a conservative restoration.
