Let us play a game. We will call it The Smoke-Filled Room.

Here is the set-up: No candidate has a majority of delegates coming into the convention. We are all grizzled machine politicians gathered in a smoke-filled room to broker the convention by coming up with a winning slate. (Neither our own preferences nor the good of the country come into the game, just winning.) We propose alternatives, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, argue with each other, and see if we can come to a consensus.

Today we play the Republican edition. Tomorrow we will pretend to be Democrats. I’ll go first:

All right, I think our evil cabal is all here. Mr. Burns, Krusty, come on into the hotel room. Karl, do you have a light for my seegar? Where are the Halliburton and Exxon representatives? They have to approve everything we do, you know. Let’s get started. . .

McCain and Huckabee would be good together, but that would leave out a big part of our base: conservatives.

How about Huckabee and Romney? Or should it be Romney and Huckabee? Or would that be seen as the weird religion ticket?

We could do Thompson and Giuliani–the Law and Order ticket! C’mon, help me out here. . .

In Jeffrey Bell’s article discussed below, he makes an even more important point, one of those obvious-if-you-think-about it points that nevertheless may come as a revelation. The social conservative’s emphasis on culture is crucial because cultural change–not economics–is the main agenda of today’s leftists.

At first it was widely assumed that the collapse of Soviet communism, and of government ownership and/or direction of business as a serious economic recipe, had dealt a devastating, possibly mortal, blow to the left. But after a brief period of licking its wounds the international left found itself far from devastated. The truth is that old-fashioned, state-administered socialism had become something of an albatross for the left, impeding rather than advancing its ability to benefit from the worldwide political and social upheavals of the 1960s.

Indeed, not long after those upheavals peaked in 1968, it became obvious that the enduring, truly revolutionary impact of the 1960s was moral and cultural, not economic. By the end of the 1970s a new and adversarial form of politically engaged feminism not only became all but unassailable among North American and European elites, but also took a central political role almost everywhere the left was strong.
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But when it first arose in recognizable form in Europe in the closing decades of the 18th century, the left was primarily about other things [than economics]. Among these were ending monarchy, eliminating or at least circumscribing the role of traditional religion in society, and liberating humanity from what it saw as repressive institutions. Often included among such institutions was the traditional family, anchored by the Christian ideal of monogamous marriage.
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The striking thing about the history of the left is its singleness of vision amid a breathtaking variety of means. The goal of the left is the liberation of mankind from traditional institutions and codes of behavior, especially moral codes. It seeks a restoration (or achievement) of a state of nature, one of absolute individual liberty–universal happiness without the need for laws.

The proposed political way stations chosen by the left in its drive toward this vision have varied greatly. To name a few: abolition of private property (socialism); prohibition of Christianity and/or propagation by the political elite of a new civil religion to replace it; confiscatory taxation, especially at death; regulation of political speech to limit the ability of certain individuals or classes to affect politics; the takeover of education to instill new values and moral habits in the population; confiscation of privately held firearms; gradual phasing out of the nation-state; displacement of the traditional family in favor of child-rearing by an enlightened governmental elite; and the inversion of sexual morality to elevate recreational sex and reduce the prestige of procreative sex. This is, it must be emphasized, a partial list.

While many conservatives in Europe and the United States focus on free market economics and small government, they do not realize that hardcore leftists do not really care about such things! Meanwhile, they are marching through the culture unopposed. This is why the country needs social conservatives, since there is no one else to counter the left’s assault on the culture.

What do you think of this analysis? How could social conservatives be more effective? To what extent is this a political issue? Might there be other forms of cultural activism that social conservatives might pursue?

Thanks to Rich Shipe for alerting me to this article in “The Weekly Standard” by Jeffrey Bell entitled: “Alive and Kicking: Reports of the Demise of Social Conservatism Are Greatly Exaggerated. Mr. Bell notes that social conservatism has taken hold nowhere but in America, that the conservative parties of other Western nations have acquiesced to abortion, sexual permissiveness, the decline of marriage, and other cultural changes, concentrating instead on economic issues. Then Mr. Bell says this:

But there are several offsetting factors at work that have made and will continue to make social conservatism hard to marginalize. For one thing, social conservatism is the only mass-based political persuasion that fully believes in the core ideas of the American founding. It has taken over that role from parties, professions, and ideologies that used to perform it, and as a result it is touching a deep chord with millions of American voters.

Most social conservatives believe that the central principle asserted in the Declaration of Independence is true: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” While almost all Americans respect these words at least as a sentiment or metaphor, it is a fact that most–not all–social conservatives believe them to be literally true, while most–not all–opponents of social conservatism do not believe them to be literally true.

As long as these key assertions of our nation’s founding document continue to be taken literally by many Americans, social conservatism will resonate among Americans in a way that competing philosophies cannot–and in a way that, given the very different founding narratives of most countries in Europe and elsewhere, cannot easily be replicated beyond these shores.

Does this explain social conservatism? What would you add?