I’m not sure about the first sentence. Libertarians are extremists on matters of personal freedom; those who are socially liberal but embrace basic fiscal conservatism like reasonably limited government, balanced budgets, and business and market regulation if and only if clearly necessary are generally called moderates. Only if you consider “economic conservatism” to consist of making government “small enough to drown in a bathtub” – per Grover Norquist’s famous quip – would that equate to being a libertarian.
I agree that you can’t be a libertarian and support heavy state involvement in social affairs, and neither can you be a classic conservative and support those things. That’s why “social conservatives” are inherently contradictory. As conservatives they believe that government must be restrained from becoming intrusive to personal freedoms (or preferably drowned in a bathtub), but as “social” conservatives they believe government must do exactly that on the particular hot-button issues that they are obsessed about, but on nothing else.
It’s deeply ironic that social democracies like Sweden, embodying the classical large-government cradle-to-grave welfare state, also enjoy among the greatest libertarian-like personal freedoms in the world on matters of gay relationships and abortion.
What you suggest would be anathema to social conservatives.
What I think is inevitable in the long term is that the Republican party is going to lose the social conservatism and Tea Party baggage that has afflicted it in recent years like a bad case of shingles, and return to the more traditional conservatism of its past. The “social conservative” hot-button issues will die out and become irrelevant just as they have in the rest of the world. When this happens, the Democratic party will likewise return to its historical roots and differentiate itself by moving back to the left. As Thomas Mann and Normal Ornstein have pointed out, the party system today is really comprised of one centrist party and one far-right fringe party.
In the long run, social issues just don’t matter. A deeply conservative country culturally saw a dominant Democratic Party. The rise of social liberalism saw a resurgence of the Republican Party.
In both cases, it was primarily economic and foreign policy and performance in office that saw these parties rise and fall. The parties carefully calibrate their social positions so that one is a bit to the left of the average voter and one is a bit to the right. All that will happen is that the Democrats and Republicans will both get more socially liberal as time goes on. And that’s exactly what’s been happening over the past 30 years and will happen for the next 30. Parties, at their core, represent the public opinion of their voter bases. Neither party will let themselves get too far behind what their bases think.
It’s not true in Greece, either: the biggest gains in the election two years ago were made by the Communists, the Golden Dawn far right, and another hard left party less extreme than the Communists. The center left and center right lost a lot of support.
Slavery mostly disappeared from western European culture, gradually, after the Roman Empire collapsed (it was replaced by serfdom). It made a comeback after Western European armies took Palestine from the Arabs during the crusades, and another comeback when western Europeans conquered the Americas. If we experience enough of a decline in birth rates, I can see popular support building for at least a partial return to traditional gender roles. Et cetera. Probably the clearest example of a mostly secularized society becoming more religious is post-communist Russia, which has experienced a rising interest in both Orthodox Christianity and in social conservatism. I don’t think I can say what the future might bring, in the long term, in terms of social attitudes, and neither can you.
Yes, it is going away. Once you pass a certain threshold of education and affluence, religion becomes irrelevant. A game.
I give religion a hundred years, tops, in developed Western countries, 150-200 years in Third World underdeveloped nations. With ever-decreasing influence as they approach extinction.
I don’t think it’s really education that’s linked to lower religiosity, it’s IQ. Higher IQ people tend, on average, to be less religious. (They also tend to use drugs and cheat on their spouses more, so one should be careful before assuming that whatever more intelligent people do, must be right). Over the last century or two, IQ scores in developed countries rose (the Flynn effect), and that might possibly have been linked to increasing secularization. Flynn effect - Wikipedia
The problem with your argument is that you’re extrapolating the trends from the last century or two, into the future. However, a number of people have argued (I’m not knowledgeable enough to assess the arguments, but they’re supported by a number of studies) that in developed countries, the Flynn effect has maxed out, and that (barring pharmacological interventions, gene therapy, eugenics or some even weirder alternatives) we’re more or less as smart as we are going to get. If that’s the case, then it’s unlikely that the tide of secularization in the past is going to continue. (And of course we have, on the other side of the ledger, the fact that religious people tend to have somewhat higher fertility).
Plus we’ve had periods of low religiosity and high. See: Great Awakenings:
The term Great Awakening is used to refer to several periods of religious revival in American religious history. Historians and theologians identify three or four waves of increased religious enthusiasm occurring between the early 18th century and the late 19th century. Each of these “Great Awakenings” was characterized by widespread revivals led by evangelical Protestant ministers, a sharp increase of interest in religion, a profound sense of conviction and redemption on the part of those affected, an increase in evangelical church membership, and the formation of new religious movements and denominations.
I assume that we’ll continue to grow more socially liberal over time, regardless of how religious we are, because there is a seperation between church and state. But I don’t think it’s safe to assume that we’ll grow less and less religious over time.
Hmmm… referring to Dawkins in terms of his occupation is peculiar, sort of like referring to a particular religious person as a “born-again evangelical plumbing contractor”. I’ve never seen any evidence that scientists are any more or less religious than any other group with a comparable level of education and intelligence.
The appropriate point would be that Dawkins is an evangelical atheist, and I have little patience for evangelicals of any stripe regardless of what they’re evangelizing.
What I think is happening with religion is that there’s a long-term decline in organized religion and acceptance of the fundamentalist kind of dogma that creates a homogenous belief system across all members of a particular faith. Religion may not be “going away”, but it may be transforming into a more spiritual personal belief system rather than one of institutional dogma, and that would have a major impact on its relevance as a political institution.
Dawkins isn’t a practicing scientist and hasn’t been one since the early 1990s, as far as I can tell from his public CV (though he did do original research before then). He’s a popularizer of scientific concepts (which he does really well) and his last university appointment was in the ‘Public Understanding of Science’. He’s certainly an important public intellectual though.
This is simply not true. A recent study showed that regardless of who is in power, Congress only votes for the economic policies favored by the rich and powerful. NEITHER party represents public opinion of their vote bases.
Well, the jury is still out on the “Christian consensus”. However, Jim Crow laws and slavery and such are very specific, while “social conservatism” is a much broader concept. Its definition has very vague boundaries which will movie depending on what is considered “conservative”. The political spectrum isn’t digital; conservatism doesn’t just exist either “on” or “off”. It’s a sliding scale. For instance, there are a lot of conservatives in the US, however there are few fascists. Ditto with liberals and communists. The right wing may be losing influence right now, but rest assured it will be back. It always has, and it always will.
I was referring to social issues. On social issues, both parties clearly represent their base. The rich and powerful are rarely culturally conservative. If they decided everything, Congress would be overwhelmingly liberal on social issues.
To answer the OP’s question: no. Although the Republican Party deserves to wither and die, I tend to think it will survive. Once Obama leaves office, the Teabag wing will lose their steam and their influence. After throwing an eight year temper tantrum over a black guy in the White House, they’ll lose their unifying force. The corporate Republicans will still pay nominal lip service to social conservatism, but they know damn well that their far right brethren would just as soon dive into a pool of broken glass as they would vote for any Democrat for any reason. The presidency will be ceded to the Democrats for a generation, but Republicans will continue to use any Senate presence of 40 or more seats to stymie everything a Democratic president wants to achieve.
One thing that will NOT happen is one of the parties embracing libertarianism. That morally bankrupt philosophy is over-represented on these boards by a factor of several thousandfold, but it will never be anything more than a fringe group of zealous devotees.
I don’t think the coalitions change much. The social conservatives will dwindle in numbers (and dramatically dwindle in enthusiasm once a caucasian returns to the White House), but they will always pull the lever that has an R on it.
And . . . there has been another, deeper sea change in the American political party system, one unprecedented but rarely discussed. Michael Lind, again:
Because, straight or gay, marriage is more conservative than bachelorhood/promiscuity? Or what?