Social Conservatism Explained

Great Debates
1

For those willing to listen, I’m going to attempt to explain the point of view of ‘cultural conservatives’, since there seems to be an awful lot of confusion around what they believe.

Before I do, I need to point out that I’m a social liberal. I don’t believe in God. I believe in equal rights for all, (limited) abortion rights, drug legalization, etc.

However, I come from a very culturally conservative background. I understand it very well. So I’m going to try to bridge the gap and explain it to those of you who think that cultural conservatism is based on bigotry and hatred.

One more point that needs to be made first - some cultural conservatives ARE bigots. Some are homophobes. No doubt about it. But they are a very small minority, just as the bomb-throwers in the ALF and PETA are a small minority on the left. I’m going to talk about the ‘mainstream’ conservatives, and what drives them. Take from this what you want. Feel free to debate it. Anyway, here we go.

The main difference between cultural conservatives and urban liberals is the way their society is structured. If you look at a county map of the U.S., it becomes clear that the ‘cultural divide’ is not between the left and right coasts and ‘middle America’ - it’s the difference between urban voters and suburban/rural voters.

The organization of rural and suburban society looks like this: Family, church, community. Rural/suburban people tend to build their lives around strong family units and a strong extended community. The federal government is an outsider.

Cultural conservatives see the bedrock of community as being the traditional institutions that go back hundreds of years. Take marriage, for example. Why are so many people opposed to gay marriage? For most, it’s not because they hate gays - it’s because they are very protective of a fundamental institution in their society. Cultural conservatives think that marriage has been under assault for a long time by liberal culture. A hollywood culture that makes jokes about marriages lasting a week. Policies that make divorce easy, that want to define marriage down to just another lifestyle choice. To cultural conservatives, marriage is sacred. It’s an institution that has evolved into a fundamental aspect of the culture, and for good reason. To them, marriage is an unbreakable bond between two people, evolved to bring stability to families and security to children.

That’s why a plurality of people support civil unions between gays, and support civil unions conferring the same legal rights as marriage. But by a large majority, they resist calling it ‘marriage’. They want that bright line drawn between the two not because they hate gays, but because they see marriage as an absolutely crucial institution in their community, and they don’t want it messed with.

Urban voters, on the other hand, organize their lives not around church and community, but through political organizations and other ad-hoc groups of like-thinking people. To them, allowing gays to marry is no big deal.

Another issue: Urban voters support things like federally funded day care, because they are generally career-oriented people, and because they see a lot of young mothers who need a leg up. So they think opposition to federally funded day care comes from people who are cruel and heartless.

But to cultural conservatives, federally-funded day care is yet another attack on the family. They see free daycare as being an easy way for people to abandon their children. They see it as being a wedge between their own adult children and their grandchildren. Do you know what day care was in my community? Grandparents. Aunts and Uncles. The church. Those same institutions I mentioned before. Free day care is a wedge into that community, replacing family with strangers.

Another issue: busing. Back during the forced busing debates, liberals thought that conservatives who opposed busing were bigots. Some small percentage of them probably were, but the vast majority who opposed busing opposed it because it was an intrusion on their communities. The federal government is going to forcibly take my child and pull him out of my community and force him to go to school elsewhere? How DARE they do that?

You can go down the list of cultural conservative issues with these concepts in mind, and hopefully you’ll gain a little understanding of their viewpoint. Cultural conservatives feel as though their very way of life is under assault from a bunch of strangers who don’t understand them but presume to know what’s ‘good’ for them. Television is full of liberal values. Shows like “Desperate Housewives” and “Sex and the City” celebrate lifestyles that sneer at their culture and their values. The Federal government keeps expanding its control of their communities.

Here’s another example: Abortion. Lots and lots of cultural conservatives support some limited abortion rights. But liberals go too far. Allowing 14 year old girls to get an abortion without parental consent? Are you insane? They’re children. They can’t make that choice without their parents being involved. Partial birth abortion? It’s a brutal practice.

The whole structure of big government is tailor-made to look after the interests of urban voters. Welfare? In my community, if someone had a bad crop, neighbors pitched in and helped. Someone’s barn burned down, the community pitched in to rebuild it. Give everyone welfare, and suddenly the community isn’t so important any more. On the other hand, for urban voters who have no ‘community’ welfare becomes much more important. But understand that a program that helps people in New York or Chicago may wind up doing damage to traditional institutions in rural Iowa.

This is the essence of the ‘states rights’ argument. States rights is a way of building a barricade around your community so that you can protect it from the influence of outsiders. Cultural conservatives don’t want large populations of city dwellers telling them how their children need to be educated and pulling the rug out from under their cherished institutions.

2

Notice that in explaining this you won’t get even a hint of bigotry, intolerance, hatred, or close-mindedness. What we’re talking about are vast swaths of people who have built a culture and a society that they love, and who now see it under attack from people who don’t understand them and who treat them like uneducated hicks.

But here’s the good news for liberals: If you can come to grips with cultural conservatives and understand them without sneering at them, there is a lot of room here to modify your policies in a way that retains your liberal goals without alienating the vast swaths of the country that don’t think the way you do. Here are some ideas:

Guns: Focus your efforts on keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. Work for training requirements. If you must pass gun control, do it on an urban basis. Focus on getting your city to enact a gun ordinance, and you might succeed. Try to do it federally, and you’ll get your ass handed to you at the polls.

Abortion: Focus on allowing first-trimester abortions. Work to assure parents that they will have a say in the matter. I think you could even get away with federal funding in hardship cases (rape, incest, poverty). But whatever you do, don’t stand in the way of parents and their children. You’ll lose that fight.

Welfare: Community-based welfare. Bush has it right with his faith-based initiatives. I know you don’t like the faith-based part, so think of alternatives. Fund community relief agencies. Focus on building a new infrastructure that works within communities rather than being imposed on communities from the outside. If you sell welfare as a way to make communities stronger, you’ve got a winning platform.

Gay rights: Focus on strengthening civil unions. Stay away from marriage. It’s another losing issue for liberals.

Above all, take the concerns of rural and suburban voters seriously. That’s the only way you’ll reassure them that you aren’t aiming at destroying their way of life. That’s the first battle you have to win. Because if you can reassure social conservatives that you are interested in helping make their communities and institutions stronger, you stand a chance of convincing them. That’s what Bush has done, and that’s why they turned out in record numbers to support him.

Let the debate begin.

3

Did the small towns resist Ford plants, which would also serve to disrupt such things? Did they resist housing owned and rented by factory owners back in the day? Did they also resist roads being built, telephone lines, and electricity?

I’m not asking this to be confrontational. I’m asking you how they justify these things that they would not give up. Apart from the Amish, even rural people have access to such amenities, and yet, were it not for the city folk, they’d still be living like the Amish. There wouldn’t even be cars to rust on their lawns, or surely none they could afford, at any rate.

It is easy to focus on just the negatives of something, and to resist change once you’ve learned to do something a certain way… quite a universal trait, shared by single people, businesses, social conservatives, and so on and so forth down the line. They are not special in this… do they not realize that? Change is hard… but when it benefitted them obviously, they took it, apparently. People will, governments willing, always be able to associate freely. Have the urban populations actually changed that at all?

By allowing blacks and whites to marry, have we forbid whites to marry whites? By requiring education, have we actually forbidden private or home schooling?

I try hard to see how people could make such proclamations in good faith, rationally, with the information they have, and I quite often fail. They are not resisting change which will force them to behave differently, they are resisting change which will allow others to associate as they please.

No?

4

Rural folk make a lot of noise about the importance of marriage and family, but do you have any evidence that the divorce or illegitimacy rates are actually any lower in rural areas?

5

I’m not trying to portray rural voters as Amish. They’re every bit as modern as you are. I didn’t mean to paint them as some sort of backwards lovers of things in the past. I’m just trying to say that they organize their society differently than do people in the cities.

Do they oppose factories moving in from outside? Some do. There have been plenty of fights over Wal-Marts and the like, for exactly the reasons I’ve been talking about - because some people see these as intrusive influences in their communities (I disagree).

But they’re modern people. Very few of them are farmers. They’re people doing jobs just like yours and mine. They work in factories. They’re programmers, lawyers, doctors, yada yada yada. They just don’t want to live in an apartment in Manhattan. They’d rather live in the community they grew up in, a five minute drive from their parents and maybe their grandparents. They have a churcch in their neighborhood, and they have bake sales there on Saturdays.

These aren’t just rural voters. Look at this map, which tells the story better than the state-by-state map. On the county map, Republicans are a sea of red across the entire country, with tiny dots of blue representing very densely populated areas. And even in the ‘flyover states’, there are blue areas which represent the largest cities.

6

I think this map is worthy of more debate as well. I just clicked on the 2000 map (there are tabs on the page so you can switch between them), and the shocking thing is that they are virtually identical, right down to the county.

That’s amazing. Think about it - the issues in this election were very, very different than the issues in the last one (remember the ‘lockbox’?) Last time, there was no war to debate. No Swiftvets. Twenty million more people came out to vote this time. And yet, the division of red and blue counties is virtually identical. The changes are very marginal.

That suggests there is a very fundamental difference between those population groups which transcends even the issues of the day.

7

I know you’re not, but I’m saying, if they stuck by their guns that really is where they’d be. You know it, and I know it. Don’t they know it? I don’t want to tell them anything is for their own good. They should be able to look around and see that.

Do they see that they are not alone in this? That many communities oppose this creeping “consumerism” and chain business, not just them? They isolate themselves and wonder why they’re alone. They’re not! Do you think they are, really?

I got that part, really. What I wonder is why they actually think anyone is trying to stop them, to force them to live some other way.

8

I dunno, Sam. I grew up in the same corner of Saskatchewan as you, allbeit I come from jant sied, not ditt sied (of course, from my perspective it’d be the other way around), and I don’t buy this. I can’t think of cases where people opposed socially liberal government policies on the grounds that it was the government interfering with family, community, etc. They oppose socially liberal policies because they think those policies are objectively wrong, and the grounds for that assessment are either religion-based, or because “we’ve never done it that way before”.

Just for example, I have never met a person who opposes gay marriage because “they see marriage as an absolutely crucial institution in their community, and they don’t want it messed with.” The people I know who oppose gay marriage oppose it either because homosexuality is sinful, as revealed by the Word of God, or because they are overtly homophobic bigots. The latter in my experience are, indeed, a minority, but the former aren’t attempting to protect a social institution, they are attempting to legislate their religious views on morality. And the people I’m talking about aren’t even fundamentalist in any significant sense. We’re talking GC Mennos here. I’m sure the MBs are a lot more fervent in these sorts of views.

9

Can we perhaps also address some of the confusion that cultural conservatives seem to have about what liberals believe? There is no secret liberal plan to assault marriage. Daycare is designed just to be an easy way for people to abandon their children. You clearly understand this, but just as clearly the cultural conservatives you describe don’t. For the past two days I’ve been hearing that we mean, close-minded liberals need to understand conservatives better, but we’re the ones being called “evil” and “traitors” in books published nationwide. A little effort to bridge the gap from the other side would do a world of good as well. I’m sure that cultural conservatives are capable of showing understanding too.

Your overall point is one that I agree with. The fact that there is a gulf in opinion between the two “camps” is undeniable, and liberals need desperately to recognize that fact. But there will be more to bridging that gap than just liberals trying to swallow conservative ideas whole. Liberals also need to address the fact that conservative perception of us is just as skewed as our perception of them.

So while we’re recognizing that culture conservatives feel under assault, it would be nice if cultural conservatives begin to recognize that urbal liberals have come to adopt many of the ideals that you describe out of the necessities of being urban residents. Our lives aren’t centered on church and community? Guess what, it’s not because we’re amoral atheist bastards, it’s because urban dwellers are forced to move a lot. I’ve lived in six different cities, on both coasts, in the last eight years, because that’s where the damned jobs in my profession were. We think daycare is a necessity? It’s not because we somehow care less for our children than rural residents, it’s because we often can’t afford for one partner to stay at home. Abortion? I don’t support abortion because I’m a baby-hating killer. I support it because I recognize that in urban life, shit tends to happen, people get raped, or birth control doesn’t work, and suddenly some single woman somewhere is facing a choice between aborting an eight-celled organism or descending into poverty and then bringing a child into economic hell with her.

Most of that I agree with, but I’m not sure my attitudes are typical of liberals in that regard. A city-wide gun ordinance, though, strikes me as about as effective as Alaska outlawing caribou. My concern is registration. If someone commits a crime with a gun, I want that gun found and I want to know where the hell it’s been. A city-wide ordinance would be useless for that.

Quite frankly, I don’t like third-trimester abortions. I could be happy with outlawing them in cases where the health of the mother is not in jeopardy. But I have no reason to be confident that those opposed to abortion would stop there. The people fighting to change abortion laws and repeal Roe vs. Wade aren’t the Joe-next-door cultural conservatives you’re describing, they’re hard-core politicians and lobbyists who, as best as I can tell, will start comprising sometime after the Last Trump. How can you possibly reassure someone like me that if I give an inch, I won’t end up giving up the last mile?

Y’see, here’s that “misunderstanding goes two ways” thing again. It’s not that I don’t like the “faith-based part”. I just want to be reassured that, now and in the future, if a homeless man needs a bowl of soup he can get one without having to attend a bible study lesson if he doesn’t want to.

I don’t disagree with you about the answer, i.e. making sure that the alternative is provided, but don’t start guessing at my motives.

Here, I can only do what I think is right. This, for me, transcends politics. I cannot and will not tell a gay couple that their love is worth less than my love for my wife. I will not commit that sin of pride.

This I can agree with.

10

Thank you.

I want a lot of the interconnectedness that’s based on personal relations, not formal structural governmental processes, that you’re describing.

As a person uninclined towards marriage and monogamy, I want to construct it elsewhere (I myself want a permanent committed intentional community, aka The Artist Formerly Known As Commune); but yeah I want to grow old within it and find within it my fundamental social support systems.

I think if we understood each other better we could coexist comfortably. But folks like me do need to have the legal and social flexibility to be able to craft the alternative visions we like. We’re scared shitless of social conservatives’ apparent inclination to think their way is the only permissible way, and of seeing alternative-lifestyle folks like me as deviants whose opportunities to live our lives need to be attacked as immoral.

But it helps to read and consider what it is that they value and to see how and why they might think we threaten them and their world.

What would be your recommendation as far as a tactic for bridging the gap? I do admit that I want their sons and daughters to have a choice, is that a dealbreaker for them?

11

Well, that was a giant typo, wasn’t it? That sentence, of course, should have read “Daycare is not designed…”

I hate it when I preview and still miss something like that.

12

“Compromising”! “Compromising after the Last Trump.” crap.

13

Well, the Mennonite-Brethren in my area (Rosthern/Waldheim) ran the gamut of tolerance I’m sure, but I can tell you that the only bigotry I saw from the people I knew was bigotry against smokers. Oh, and I got a few lectures about long hair when I was a kid :stuck_out_tongue:

I guess we’re both operating from a bit of anecdotal evidence, but I can say that my Grandparents were very devout Mennonites, and yet I never heard a bigoted word from either of them. Certainly they thought homosexuality was a sin, but they also believed that God commanded them to love all sinners. And everyone was a sinner, so no one should cast stones, etc. My grandmother especially was one of the most enlightened, unbigoted people I knew.

The Mennonite-Brethren might surprise you. For instance, there’s the Brethren/Mennonite Council for Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered Issues. From their mission statement:

Somewhat funny story: One day my grandfather and grandmother had a fight, and my grandfather said to me as we were driving into town later, “This is what comes from entering a mixed marriage!” I looked at him with a puzzled look on my face and said, “Huh?” He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “She’s Mennonite Conference, and I’m Mennonite Brethren!” As if that explained it all. I said, “What’s the difference?” He said, “Oh, please! She thinks you can be baptized with a little sprinkle on the forehead!”

Great people. Sadly missed.

14

But, Sam, your OP does not answer the single most important question about social conservatism: How can we destroy it?!

And, I mean, destroy it soon. Before the 2006 elections.

15

Sam Stone: If your assessment is correct, then why is it that cultural conservatives also oppose “hands-off” government that merely gives people more choice in how they behave? First amendment issues come immediately to mind (and I do recongnize that there are pleanty on the left as well who oppose, to some extent, our First Amendment rights). Whenever some part of government moves towards treating all religions equally, it seems to always be protested by the cultural conservatives. None of these actions have any effect on their ability to worship at their church of choice, so why are they so vocally against any of these measures?
To pound on the religious issue a little more, cultural conservatives are the ones most in favor of school prayer. Do they fail to see that this is encroaching on the lives of the urbanites just as much as they say the urbanites are encroaching on their lives?

16

I don’t believe this contradicts anything I said. If we took a poll of the Sask Valley area, I think we’d find pretty substantial opposition to gay marriage, and nearly all of it would be based on the belief that homosexuality is sinful. I don’t think any of it would be out of concern about the government messing with the institution of marriage.

What this means is that there’s not a lot of room for compromise - not with the people in this particular example, because it’s often pretty easy to convince Mennonites in particular with seperation of church and state arguments, which is no surprise given the historical roots of the movement. However, amongst people who don’t buy into SoCaS (which includes a large chunk of the American Religious Right, who I presume you’re also intending to be talking about), who think that the government should reflect Christian Values, it’s difficult to see where there can be a meeting halfway. Conservative Christians aren’t going to bend on these issues, and so I don’t see why it would be productive from the point of view of someone wanting to advance a socially liberal agenda to unilaterally disarm, as it were.

(For what it’s worth, I got your grandfather’s joke without having it explained. :))

17

I really don’t understand this. Are you saying that a mother who is presented with the choice of leaving the kids with grandma or a total stranger while she works will hands-down pick the stranger? That women somehow prefer to have someone they don’t know caring for their children?

I’m not a parent, but unless my parents were somehow abusive or otherwise dangerous, I’d always pick family over a stranger, even if the stranger’s care is free. I think just about any sensible woman would, if given the choice. (Hell, I even prefer my dog to stay with family while I’m gone, let alone a kid!)

It’s in not having the option to drop the kids off at Grandma’s or Auntie Jane’s that lies the problem: grandparents/elderly folks today have lives. They may work/volunteer themselves, or have active social lives and interests. They have schedules almost as busy as their children’s. Call is a sign of social decay if you will, but there aren’t as many “stay-at-home, cookie-baking grandmas” these days.

If your relationship with your adult children is a good one, then no social program is going to cause a division. It’s silly to blame free day-care for the disintigration of the community. It was an attempt at a solution for a problem which already existed.

Personally, I blame air conditioners, but that’s another thread.

18

Orbifold said:

I don’t think anyone thinks it’s an intentional effort to destroy their community. It’s an unintended consequence, like the rise of the rumble seat, and the change it made in the structure of the family. Before the family car came along, the word ‘teenager’ was unknown. You were a child living under the close control of your parents, then you became an adult, got married, and moved out. The automobile brought mobility that gave young people a ‘third way’ during the years between childhood and adulthood. Society changed forever. That doesn’t mean it was an intentional effect. It just happened that way.

Liberals and conservatives need to take more care to consider the unintended consequences of their actions.

Let’s talk about Day Care. I understand the good and reasonable reasons for wanting to help poor working mothers get quality day care for their children. But there ARE unintended consequences. When you build up new social structures, it tends to cause older ones to collapse. The availability of free/cheap day care is going to cause more people to choose to put their kids in the hands of strangers than otherwise would. Is that a good thing? You can still support publically funded day care on balance while still understanding that it does bring with it some negative consequences.

Look at women’s liberation, and the move of women into the workplace. Unquestionably a good thing on balance. But it did bring with it some unintended consequences. For example, when both parties in a marriage are financially independent, it makes it easier for them to divorce. Women going into the workplace means more children being raised by Consuela the nanny while Mom is at the office. Women’s liberation has been a great boon for women, but I’m not sure it’s been a net positive for children. How much of the rise of teen violence, pregnancy, etc. is due to the structural changes in the family unit created as an unintended consequence of things like women’s liberation?

Now if you can understand that, the next leap to make is to understand that unintended consequences affect different demographic groups differently. In an urban area where there is no community structure, welfare is much more valuable and less damaging than it is to a rural community. Thus the conflict.

Dr. Love said:

Could you explain which first amendment rights you’re talking about? But let me say that there is plenty of wrong-headed thinking on the cultural conservative side. There are also plenty of extremists, just as there are among liberal urban voters. I’m painting with a broad brush out of necessity because I’ve been talking about broad cultural themes, but once we start drilling into the minutae of policy we’ll find all kinds of reasons for people believing the things they believe. Some rational, some not.

I don’t know… I don’t think they see things like attempts to remove ‘under god’ as religious tolerance. I think they see it more as a secular intolerance of their beliefs.

Again, may I suggest to liberals that a winning formula does not include arbitrary attacks on cherished symbols that really don’t change a whole lot? Trying to remove ‘under god’ from a pledge strikes ME as intolerant, and I’m not religious. It’s always been there, why pick up that fight and alienate vast swaths of people? Why not compromise on school prayer and allow a moment of private silence?

Again, the problem is often that liberals go too far. I don’t want evolution taught as science. That’s a reasonable position that most Christians are willing to accept. But when little Johnny gets kicked out of school because he mentioned God in a class project, it tends to make people paranoid. When Christian groups aren’t allowed to form after-school clubs, it sounds more like persecution than tolerance. The constitution says that there shall be no official state church. Liberals have broadened the scope of separation of church and state so much that Christians really do feel sometimes that they are under attack, and for good reason.

There are lots of things christian conservatives want that encroach on the cherished ideals of Liberals. I don’t mean to suggest that this is a one-way street. Both sides need to learn to understand the needs and fears of the other, and learn how to compromise. There are too many lines being drawn in the sand. It’s just that I think that recently the Liberals have grown to be more intolerant, more condescending, more close-minded, and are drawing the lion’s share of lines in the sand. And now the other side is fighting back. This election should be a wakeup call.

Imagine what kind of blowout it would have been if the Democrats also hadn’t engaged in historic get-out-the-vote campaigns. Bush could have won by 15 million votes.

19

Lissa said:

Obviously not if the choice it that stark. But you have to think along the margins. Will the availability of cheap day care sway a decision to move away from the family? Will the lack of necessity to help look after the kids cause the grandparents to choose to travel to Arizona for the winter instead of staying home?

Here’s a concrete example: A lot of people choose to stay at home with their kids simply because day care is too expensive. Let’s say dad works and makes a reasonable living, but mom is considering taking a job to bring home more money. Day care is $600 a month. The job pays $1200. If she takes it, she’ll net $600 a month, and not be able to spend time with her child. It’s not worth it. On the other hand, if day care is subsidized and she only has to pay $200, now suddenly that $1200 job makes a lot more sense.

This is a fundamental law of economics. If you lower the cost of something, you increase the demand. Subsidizing day care will lead to more kids being put into day cares. You can count on it.

20

How about evidence that divorces occur more often in Bush-voting “red states”? Check out these figures:


Rank  State             Pop.  Divorces per 1000
  1   Massachusetts  14,530    2.4     
  2   Connecticut     9,095    2.8     
  3   New Jersey     23,899    3.0     
  4   Rhode Island    3,231    3.2     
  5   New York       59,195    3.3     
      Pennsylvania   40,040    3.3     
  7   Wisconsin      17,478    3.4     
      North Dakota    2,201    3.4     
  9   Maryland       17,439    3.5     
 10   Minnesota      16,217    3.6     
      Louisiana         ***    3.6     



Rank  State             Pop.  Divorces per 1000
 40   Kentucky        22,211   5.8 
      Arizona         23,725   5.8 
 42   Florida         82,963   5.9 
 43   New Mexico       9,882   6.0 
 44   Idaho            7,075   6.2 
      Alabama         26,116   6.2 
 46   Indiana            ***   6.4 
 47   Wyoming          3,071   6.5 
 48   Tennessee       34,167   6.6 
 49   Oklahoma        21,855   6.7 
 50   Arkansas        17,458   7.1 
 51   Nevada          13,061   9.0

Moral of the story? If you want family values, you should move to a blue state. Specifically, Senator Kerry’s own Massachusetts. :wink: