Rallying the Religious Right

Through RealClear Politics, I found a pointer to an interesting article by one W. James Antle III scheduled to appear in the April 11 issue of The American Conservative. The title of the article, which appears on the internet just days after the long-overdue death of Terri Schiavo's body? "Republican Stepchildren." The subtitle? "Message to social conservatives: Thanks for the votes. We’ll call you in four years." I said the other day that the battle symbolized by Terri Schiavo was not over and this article, a sort of rallying of the troops, proves me right. I am surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't be) only that such an article has appeared so soon after the attempts to keep what had been Schiavo's body alive became permanently futile.

This is a worthwhile article to read for several reasons. First of all, it attempts to rebuild any momentum that the religious right might have lost when its recent power grab failed. Second, it reveals just how unimportant the goals of secular Republicans are to the religious right. Third, it attempts to demoralize any conservative opponents of the religious right. I plan to demonstrate this by example here, but I think it is important for secular conservatives to read this article. The first and last of these goals are interrelated, and depend on making the religious demographic seem bigger than it is.

One interesting fact came up after the illegal attempts by Congress, the President, and the governor of Florida, to reinsert the feeding tube into Terri Schiavo's body: These maneuvers were resoundingly unpopular with the American public. Although many social conservative pundits attempted to discount these polls, they all, oddly enough, had similar results. (As Joe Gandelman put it, "This unfavorable poll must also be 'biased,' right?") How do you combat this little problem? If your troops are outnumbered, one thing you might choose to do is make up for their small number by making them more ferocious. Since being outnumbered can certainly be demoralizing, one way to buoy the troops is to convince them that they aren't really outnumbered! This is what Antle tries to do.

While some of the post-election chatter about values voters was exaggerated [link supplied], the designation describes a real and growing electoral phenomenon. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly four out of five white evangelical Christians supported President Bush in 2004, representing more than a third of all ballots cast for him. When traditionalist Catholics and members of other conservative religious communities are factored in, it becomes clear that the voters usually lumped together under the banner of the Religious Right form the largest single constituency of today’s Republican Party.

How many evangelicals are there? What percentage of the electorate would this be? How many show up to vote versus other groups? How many vote only or even mainly on the basis of their religious beliefs? No answer. Antle does mention that one figure to the effect that about a third of Bush's ballots came from white evangelicals, but there is no further elaboration on why they chose to vote for him. (In fact, only 18% of all Americans supported what Bush and the Congress did to castrate the judiciary -- I mean, save Terri Schiavo's "life." At the extremes, either the evangelicals all approve of what Bush did, and make up only 18% of the electorate or many (or possibly most) of them didn't approve of what Bush & Co. did. See also the postscript.) The real figures on who voted for Bush in order to establish a theocracy are presumably nothing to crow about, or we'd have heard about them long ago, and not just from someone "preaching to the choir" as Antle is doing in this magazine. (More on this below.) In fact, the religionists have already tried to make the rest of us believe that they were why Bush won the election. The Charles Krauthammer piece I link to above pretty well rips that assertion to shreds.

The total lack of concern for the goal of small government on the part of Antle and other religious conservatives permeates the article. Recall the subtitle of the article and the fact that the article shows up so soon after Schiavo debacle. What the hell, really, does Antle mean when he says this? "As the euphoria from November begins to fade, however, some conservative Christians are starting to ask hardheaded questions about how much clout they are getting in return for their stalwart support." Is a bald attempt to override the system of checks and balances not enough? Apparently not. And if you were to point out that gutting our system of government would interfere with the various small-government goals of other conservatives, I'd wager that Antle wouldn't really care based on the following passage:

Even some on the Left are beginning to argue that the GOP’s appeal to social conservatives might be something of a shell game; Republicans employ pro-life and pro-family rhetoric to win elections but don’t deliver once in office. In What’s the Matter With Kansas? Thomas Frank wrote, “Historians often attribute the withering and disappearance of the nineteenth-century Populist movement to its failure to achieve material, real-world goals… Yet with the pro-life movement, the material goal of stopping abortion is, almost by definition, beyond achieving.”

The crux of Frank’s argument is that conservatives have avoided debates about socioeconomic class by appealing to Middle America’s sense of cultural embattlement. This helps them win middle-class votes by appearing to identify with the moral values of people whose economic interests might be better served by voting Democratic. Once in power, Frank contends, the Republicans cannot address these social issues because they would lose their ability to appeal to these voters once these grievances are removed from the debate.

Antle is not just making an argument based on a well-known leftist screed against fiscal conservatism, he's endorsing its thesis! (The book holds, incorrectly, that the economic interests of "ordinary" Americans would be better served by voting for the socialist policies of the left.) I dare say that many voters regard economic issues as falling under the "pro-family" umbrella, and that they regard the prospect of keeping more of their own money as a good reason to vote for a Republican. I dare say that many "Kansans" noticed when George Bush delivered on his promise to cut income taxes once he was elected, just as many are now noticing that he has failed to curb federal spending. (It seems that I see -- almost daily now -- an opinion column or even a letter to the editor lamenting the fact that the Republican Congress is "Spending money like a drunken sailor.") But economic issues do not matter to Antle, so it's better to make his readers forget about "material, real-world" economic issues long enough to get good and hacked off at the Republicans for not achieving the "material, real-world goals" of the religionists. I also read this as a veiled threat to fiscal conservatives/invitation to socialist Democrats: "We'll vote on Christian morality above economic issues." In addition to getting the social conservatives to focus solely on religious issues, this is partly meant to keep the fiscal conservatives from getting too uppity.

Now one might reasonably point out that this is an article by a social conservative for social conservatives. Perhaps it is true that many or most of these voters don't really care about economic issues that much. But Antle goes beyond ignoring the fiscal side of the Republican coin. Let's consider the following passage.

... Bush personally has a tremendous reservoir of goodwill to tap among the grassroots. “I think we need to give the president the benefit of the doubt on marriage and other issues,” says Carrie Gordon Earll, a senior policy analyst at Focus on the Family. “Wherever he has had the opportunity, he has seized it. People I speak to are encouraged.” Fleming agrees: “I think the president won re-election based on issues like marriage. I hope he delivers, and I believe he will.”

“Pro-family groups are the locomotive on this train,” Earll emphasizes. “We need to be the ones pushing to keep our issues on the table.”

This much is clear: religious conservatives have won their place in the GOP’s big tent. They will be watching carefully to see how the ringmasters perform.

What major event is mentioned here, and what larger context is ignored? The answers: Bush's reelection and the fact that we are a nation at war. And what might this little omission tell us about Antle? That he's being dishonest, and that he regards his theocratic agenda as trumping not just the economy, but the safety of our country. If Antle is so "pro-family," how can you otherwise explain the fact that he downplays economic issues and totally omits the war, arguably the single biggest "issue" facing families in America today?

If the Terri Schiavo case was a wake-up call, this is what we are waking up to. When you wake up to smoke, you face the reality of the fire from which it came or you fall back asleep, never to wake up again.

-- CAV

PS: (1) I failed to make a point on writing this which is especially important regarding how many evangelicals there really are out there. Certainly, the number of social conservatives need not be very large to form a significant component of the Republican coalition. My point is that their numbers are still not so large as to make them indispensible to form a governing coalition. Secular conservatives should start shopping around for new allies now. Hints: (a) The religionists are clearly already doing that. (b) Hillary is making a big pitch to the social conservatives. Secular Republicans should stop lamenting the end of the "marriage"/trying to beg for them to come back and make a pitch to alienated, genuine secularist Democrats and independents.

(2) See this post on Senate Bill S.520, the so-called "Constitution Restoration Act of 2005" over at the Secular Foxhole. The gloves are off. Good work pointing that one out, Blair!

(3) And the General makes an interesting point about more hypocrisy on the part of the religious right over at Benjo Blog.

Updates

4-4-05: Corrected some typos and added a postscript.