Unequally Yoked
March 23, 2009
Is Newt Gingrich’s latest effort doomed to fail?
Last week, USNEWS.com reported that the former House Speaker has created a new organization, Renewing American Leadership, intended to strengthen the weakening relationship between fiscal and social conservatives. Gingrich claims that America is now “…in a crisis in which the secular state, if allowed, will fundamentally and radically change America against the wishes of most Americans…You’ve had such rising hostility to religious belief that I wanted to reach broadly into the country and dramatically raise public awareness of threats to religious liberty.”
Gingrich also believes President Obama poses a threat to religious liberty. In an interview with US News and World Report’s Dan Gilgoff, Gingrich noted that “…The gap between [Obama’s] rhetoric and symbolism and his actual policies is so radically different. The stimulus package had a lot of money in it for sex education and included a prohibition against any money being used in buildings used for religious purposes. Every evidence is that they’re going to move on a Freedom of Choice Act, which would remove every limit on abortion at the state level. He has appointed people with very close ties to abortionists who offer late-term abortions. The evidence we have so far is that he’s going to move methodically to limit the use of freedom of conscience and impose abortion on institutions. So I’m not sure his actions are not fundamentally different than his words.”
Although Gingrich has not been closely aligned with social conservatives in the past, there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of his commitment to this cause. As the New York Times recently noted, Gingrich, who authored Rediscovering God in America a few years back, is in the process of converting to Catholicism; he’s also putting the finishing touches on a documentary about Pope John Paul II’s efforts to conquer Communism. Gingrich is correct in his view that social and fiscal conservatives, when united, can become a near-unstoppable political force.
The problem is that right now, social and fiscal conservatives are not united—and they may never be united again.
According to Gingrich aide Rick Tyler, John McCain captured the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination because social conservatives embraced Mike Huckabee in the primaries, while fiscal conservatives embraced Mitt Romney. Why couldn’t social and fiscal conservatives agree on a consensus choice?
The reality is that fiscal and social conservatives have fundamentally different values. While there are social conservatives who lean right fiscally and fiscal conservatives who dislike secularism, the folks who supported Huckabee in 2008 were primarily focused on limiting abortion for birth-control purposes and reversing efforts to expand same-sex marriage rights, while the folks who supported Romney were primarily focused on the country’s fiscal strength.
Huckabee’s core supporters weren’t particularly bothered by questions about his fiscal record as governor of Arkansas; he was their man on the issues that mattered. Romney’s core supporters blew off controversies surrounding his views on abortion and gay marriage; after all, he was Mr. Fiscal Responsibility.
Decades ago, fiscal and social conservatives were unified by their common opposition to Soviet Communism. Because Communism was the antithesis of capitalism, those who loved money were against it; because Communism was godless, those who loved God hated it. Fiscal and social conservatives became friends only because they had the same enemy.
The bond between fiscal and social conservatives weakened around the same time that the Berlin Wall fell. Nothing, not even the War on Terror, has made that bond strong once again. Social conservatives and fiscal conservatives are, unfortunately, not natural partners. They watch different shows. They listen to different musicians. They read different books. They live different lives in different regions.
While most social conservatives and fiscal conservatives will never admit it, both sides are deeply prejudiced against each other. The average social conservative regards the average fiscal conservative as someone who would happily toss morality out of the window in order to make more money; the average fiscal conservative regards the average social conservative as a Bible-thumping, snake-handling moron.
Because social and fiscal conservatives no longer have a common enemy, they have returned to their natural loathing for each other. It’s a depressing fact, one that will inevitably lead to the full political triumph of Obama liberalism, but it’s a fact nonetheless. Gingrich wants to reunite social and fiscal conservatives, but such a reunification can only occur in two places: in theory, and in Gingrich’s own mind.
