"Social Conservatives" are not Conservative

The American Conservative movement is an alliance of three factions: economic libertarians, foreign policy hawks, and the so-called “Social conservatives.” Economic libertarians want to reduce regulations and shrink the national debt. Foreign policy hawks wanted to contain Soviet expansion; now they want to confront Russia and China. The people who call themselves “social conservatives” oppose abortion, assisted suicide and gay marriage.

The American Conservative movement got its name because it sought to conserve the norms of America in 1900, against the disastrous policies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. However, there has been so much social change since 1900 that now the Conservative movement does not seek to conserve the status quo, it seeks massive governmental and social change.

The people who call themselves “social conservatives” like to imagine that they are the only one of the three factions which stands for the values of pre-1960 America, but they are totally wrong. Economic libertarians want to restore the legal norms which the USA had from 1600 to 1930. Those norms were a big part of American culture, because the entrepreneurship which they fostered allowed for unrestrained individual initiative and independence which has been lost in the modern era of bureaucracy and HR.

Furthermore, some of the social views of today’s “social conservatives” are very different from the social views that prevailed in America and Christendom pre-1960. Economic libertarians are “conservative” in the sense of wanting to return to a previous way of doing things. “Social conservatives” really are not “conservative” in that sense. In some ways “social conservatism” is actually a post-1960 phenomenon.

Down Syndrome

So-called social conservatives like to put people with Downs Syndrome in the public eye. “Social conservative’s” attitude toward mental retardation is almost celebratory. It’s disturbing.

In the 1950s, which “social conservatives” sometimes imagine to be the Halcyon days, mentally retarded people were kept out of sight in specialized institutions. “Social conservatives” today want to force retards upon the public. The retard rights movement was a 1960s phenomenon like the sexual revolution, 2nd wave feminism, racial integration, and the movement against formal clothing in public.

When toy manufacturer Mattel created a Down Syndrome Barbie in 2023, conservative commentator Steven Crowder mocked the doll and condemned it as “woke.” Crowder got slammed by his own side. “Social Conservatives” and professional Christians Lila Rose and Ian Haworth accused Crowder of “embracing pro-abortion rhetoric” because he laughed at the doll and the obese Down syndrome woman who promoted it.

Writing for the Washington Examiner, Haworth used language with clear echoes of the woke left. “Humanizes… people with Down Syndrome are valid humans… the pro-abortion movement’s view that people with Down syndrome are not equal”. Rose praised the Down syndrome barbie doll as “real inclusivity.”

The professional Christians’ rush to condemn Crowder was motivated by their Christian ideology. Crowder’s response to the Down syndrome Barbie - to laugh at it - was instinctive. Crowder’s instinctive response is the correct one. It is very wrong to celebrate ugliness and disease.

Opposition to Gay Marriage

Gay marriage is a fake issue. Once homosexuality is legalized, cohabitation is allowed, and gay bars are allowed, marriage is a moot point. While some people on Christian Twitter talk about bringing back sodomy laws, the vast majority of Christian public figures - including all Christian intellectuals in universities - hold the incoherent view that sodomy and cohabitation should not be illegal, but homosexual marriage should be illegal.

The tax benefits which adhere to a “marriage license” are not the reason why this is a fraught political issue. The reason is that the granting of “marriage licenses” is considered a symbolic act of social approval. To activists for the sexual deviancy movement, the achievement of marriage licenses is a triumph over those who opposed them. To Christian intellectuals with university positions, homosexual marriage is a convenient and polite battleground to fight on without having to take genuinely radical positions in favor of bringing back laws against cohabitation and fornication.

At least before the social media age, opposition to homosexual marriage was a rearguard action by “social conservatives” who lost the battle on sodomy, fornication, cohabitation, etc. but were too timid to revisit those older issues.

It brings to mind what Robert Dabney said about the “respectable conservatives” who accepted women’s suffrage:

No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses [donkeys]. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

To be clear, I’m not saying that homosexuality is okay. I believe that those who are incurably homosexual should keep their affairs discreet. Those who can overcome homosexual inclinations should do so. Homosexuality does not have to be totally removed from society, but it should not be presented as normal in the public square.

Not only is “social conservative” opposition to gay marriage a symbolic issue which represents a surrender on the older issues of cohabitation and fornication, but the arguments of today’s “social conservatives” are different from the arguments of the people who opposed homosexuality in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Today, arguments against homosexuality are nearly always based on the Bible, or on a Christian understanding of natural law. But when Richard Nixon complained that the TV show All in the Family was glorifying homosexuality, he didn’t mention the Bible. He said that society should not publicly celebrate homosexuality because homosexuality led to the decline of ancient Greece. John Briggs, the sponsor of California’s anti-homosexual Prop 6 ballot initiative made similar arguments about homosexuality as a factor in the decline of Greece and Rome. One almost never hears such arguments from “social conservatives” today.

Abortion

This is the one issue on which “social conservatives” line up with the historic Conservative movement. But today’s “social conservatives” are much more gung ho about it than early 20th century Protestants were.

Leftist mythmakers have claimed that American Protestants were pro-choice before 1970. That is false. American Protestants always opposed abortion in most cases. The Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist and Presbyterian churches broadly opposed abortion, with some exceptions for rape, the life of the mother or fetal birth defects. The Southern Baptist Convention was more liberal on abortion than other Protestant denominations, but they did not support abortion on demand. They believed that there had to be a threat to the mother’s mental or physical health (or rape, incest or fetal birth defect) to justify abortion.

The idea that life begins at conception and that an embryo is a person came from the Catholic church.

In the year 1950, the wave of mass Catholic immigration to America which took place from 1880 to 1920 was still recent history. It took time for these Catholics to settle in and exert political power. The modern pro-life movement believes that embryos are persons because of Catholic influence.

The Conservative Movement was founded to preserve the norms of 1900 America, at which time America was overwhelmingly Protestant. The moral norms of Old America had never held that embryos were persons. The flagship newspaper of the Amish does not list stillbirths in the obituaries section.

“Social Conservatives” vs. historic American conservatism

Economic conservatives hold views that are closely in line with the views of the conservatives of Old America, such as Henry Hazlitt. I have been putting the term “social conservatives” in scare quotes because the people who call themselves “social conservatives” hold views which are actually not in line with the social norms of Old America or the social views of the historic American Conservative movement.

In Old America, mentally retarded people were kept out of public view. “Social conservatives” think that mentally retarded people are more worthy of public attention than normal people.

Today’s “social conservatives” and Old America both opposed abortion, but today’s social conservatives take the extreme position that embryos are persons and abortion is murder. The fact that modern “social conservatives” take the “embryos are persons” position is a result of Catholic mass immigration, which Old America’s conservatives were suspicious of.

Today’s “social conservatives” and the historic American Conservative movement both opposed homosexuality, but “social conservatives” frame their opposition in Biblical terms while Conservatives from times past were more concerned about the role which homosexuality played in the decline of Greece and Rome.

And many of the social issues which Old America’s conservatives cared about are not mentioned by today’s “social conservatives” at all. Old America’s conservatives opposed excessive alcohol consumption. Today’s “social conservatives” don’t.

Old America cared about upright posture and proper attire in public. The “social conservatives” in today’s megachurches dress like slobs.

Old America was extremely concerned about promiscuity. Today’s “social conservatives” nominally oppose promiscuity, but they lack the strength of character to do anything about it. In Old America, being a single mother was deeply shameful. Today’s “social conservatives” lash out at anyone who suggests that single mothers should face stigma. Today’s “social conservatives” think that any woman with a whorish past can simply be “redeemed in Christ” and move on as if she had never made her past choices. There is no room in the “social conservative” vocabulary for terms like “fallen woman.”

Honor Culture

Many of the areas where “social conservatives” and Old America diverged have to do with a culture of honor. Old America believed that rapists and cattle hustlers should be hanged at dawn. Today’s “social conservatives” are divided on whether to support the death penalty, and they spend no effort campaigning for it.

Other social norms of Old America, like all-male military academies and a culture where it was considered good and natural for boys to get into fistfights, have disappeared and been forgotten by modern conservatives.

The idea of family honor, something that could be violated by disgraceful public behavior, or a daughter becoming a single mother is totally alien to the “social conservatives.”

The term “social conservative” suggests the preservation or restoration of old-fashioned social norms, so the so-called “social conservatives” would be better described as Christian conservatives - and most of them would be happy to describe themselves that way. They represent an extreme form of Christianity, whose value system is quite different from the values of the historic Americans who sailed to the New World, wrote the Bill of Rights, settled the prairie and industrialized the continent.

If we want to preserve and restore the real social norms of Old America, “social conservatives” won’t be much help. We need to resurrect the idea of honor.

Correction 3/17: John Briggs did not (as far as I’m aware) argue that homosexuality led to the decline of Greece and Rome.