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Fiscal conservatism is not enough: What social conservatives offer the party of Lincoln

By Alliance Alert

Robert W. Patterson writing in The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy: "Indeed, nothing separates the professional class of Republican thinkers and players from the voting public more than the issue of how the party should position itself vis-à-vis the 'social issues.' As much as the media like to portray the GOP as beholden to the Religious Right, the reality is that Republican elites, with rare exceptions, are more beholden to economic conservatives and foreign-policy hawks than to social conservatives. Paraphrasing Jeffrey Bell?s observation in The Weekly Standard, Republican elites would rather talk about anything but social issues . . . A Washington Post poll conducted last November found that 66 percent of Republicans consider themselves 'conservative' on social issues; nearly half of this subset (or 32 percent of the sample) consider themselves 'very conservative' on social issues. Reviewing a Pew Research Center study, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam claim that staunch social-conservative convictions stand at the core of GOP popular support . . ."

Full post as published by Constitutionally Correct on April 15, 2010 (boomark / email).