Ross Douthat offers some interesting comments on Jonathan Chait’s latest TNR piece about how social conservatives don’t get their props from the GOP (Has Chait talked to his colleague Andrew Sullivan about this? From reading Sullivan, you’d think Bush was a hair’s width from ordering mandatory baptisms for all Democrats, Jews and opponents of the war).

Ross quotes the following from Chait:

It’s not because there are fewer of them than there are economic conservatives . . . Surely the answer has something to do with the fact that the religious right’s political vanguard is complicit in its own subordination. For years, economic conservatives have learned that they can enlist social conservative groups to back their agenda on the flimsiest of pretexts. When business groups were fighting fuel economy standards, GOP activist Grover Norquist convinced Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum to oppose them as well, according to a 1995 Washington Post story, “because the mileage goals could be portrayed as threatening such mainstays of the family as the station wagon and the mini-van.” According to its website, the top two legislative items on the Christian Coalition’s legislative agenda are “Passing President Bush’s Social Security reform” and “Making permanent President Bush’s 2001 federal tax cuts.” . . .
It’s hard not to suspect that a good number of social conservatives have simply been co-opted by the Republican establishment. That would explain why, while social conservative intellectuals and commentators have almost unanimously rejected Miers, social conservative organizations have had a far more mixed reaction. While some criticized Miers, Dobson praised her, and she won unqualified endorsements from Jerry Falwell and groups like the Christian Coalition and the American Center for Law and Justice. With allies like these, Bush doesn’t have much incentive to work harder to reward his social conservative base. No wonder the poor, nutty bastards got hosed again.

There are things to agree with in Ross’s and Chait’s comments, but as Ramesh likes to say, I’ll focus on something I disagree with. First, all objections to the phrase “poor nutty bastards” should be directed to Chait’s email box, not my own.

More substantively, both seem to be overlooking the possibility — or at least downplaying it — that social conservatives aren’t the easily led nutty bastards Chait’s analysis assumes. Perhaps social conservatives are, in fact, economic conservatives too. And vice versa. Last I checked Steve Moore and Larry Kudlow –picking two of Chait’s leading villains — are actually pretty socially conservative. And, off the top of my head, it’s hard for me to see how I would slice William F. Buckley, Rich Lowry,Ramesh Ponnuru, Kate O’Beirne, Kathryn Lopez, Jay Nordlinger, Fred Barnes, George Will et al. Are they social conservatives or are they economic conservatives? To decide, is, as Chait might say, a “false choice.” When you ask Nordinger what kind of conservative he is, he replies, simply “I’m a Reaganite.” I think this speaks to the success of fusionism on the right.

I completely understand the journalistic need to define people as This-but-not-That. We have to speek in generalities from time to time. So using shorthand about social conservatives versus economic conservatives is entirely defensible. But this either/or approach often excludes the possibility of both/and, in effect butressing some cheap stereotypes and indentity politics assumptions. The conservative movement has been around for a while. Social conservatives have no doubt boned up on free-market economics. And free market types have probably thought more deeply about social conservatism thanks to their interaction with social conservatives. My email certaily reflects this. I sometimes think there are a lot of would-be Cotton Mathers out there with the Bible in their right hand and the Wealth of Nations in their left.

It’s funny, the right is far less coalitional than the left, and yet very few people write about whether labor really believes all that stuff about affirmative action or whether pro-abortion feminists are being duped into supporting tax hikes. Something to ponder.