Teddy Kupfer hosted a roundtable at City Journal on that perennial question, the future of conservatism, featuring our own Alexandra DeSanctis discussing whether social conservatives are really “junior partners” in the coalition:
I think it’s fair to call it a junior partnership. Something that I appreciate about the conservative perspective is that cultural problems are not, first and foremost, something that the government solves. Families, individuals, communities, civil society: those are the first bulwark against cultural problems. The federal government does not need to come in and solve every social issue that we might have. That’s why I would say that, if there’s a junior partnership, it exists at the federal level.
For example, a few years back, we had Republicans in control of the Senate, the House, and the presidency. They’ve been promising for something like ten years to defund Planned Parenthood. Did they defund Planned Parenthood when they were in charge? No, but they passed a tax cut. I’m perfectly happy for them to do that, but Republicans tend to run at the national level on “defund Planned Parenthood” or other social-conservative promises, and then they get in office and forget about it. I don’t think that means that the conservative movement or the Republican Party as a whole doesn’t care about social issues. It’s just at the national level that it’s a problem.
Things like education and defunding the police are social issues. All these things that have been hot-button issues — identity politics, abortion — the Republican Party’s starting to notice, “Hey, wait a minute, as the other side goes crazy like I said before, we can push back against that in a way that resonates with the average American, even if they might not be as conservative as us.” So I see that shifting quite a bit in a way where social conservatives actually have a leadership role to take.
It is, of course, fair to raise one of the recurring critiques of conservative politicians on social conservatism: that all they seem to do is slow things down and never reverse the advances of progressives, especially on a matter such as what they government funds. Saurabh Sharma, for example, notes that “if all the Right can muster in the United States is the idea that after the Left wins decades of victories, we’ll marshal the tiniest response to slow them down a little bit, that’s not a governing agenda.” This is a complaint as old as Benjamin Disraeli asking, in 1844:
What will you conserve? . . . Everything . . . that is established, as long as it is a phrase and not a fact. In the meantime . . . the rule of practice is to bend to the passion . . . of the hour. Conservatism assumes in theory that everything established should be maintained; but adopts in practice that everything that is established is indefensible. To reconcile this theory and this practice, they produce what they call “the best bargain;” some arrangement which has no principle and no purpose, except to obtain a temporary lull of agitation, until the mind of the Conservatives, without a guide and without an aim, distracted, tempted, and bewildered, is prepared for another arrangement, equally statesmanlike with the preceding one.
To those who ask this question, I offer two partial defenses. One, of course, is Alexandra’s point: conserving and restoring the culture is not principally the job of politicians and government, and asking the government to hold back changes in the culture is like asking it to hold back the tide.
But the other is this: sometimes, slowing things down has value in itself. That is not just because older people, who are often the chief constituency for social conservatism in any society in any age, dislike change and find it disorienting. Conservatives understand that civil society has a fabric developed over time, much of which consists of custom and culture and common understanding rather than prescriptive law. Shifts in demographics and culture can have concrete harms for the lives of individuals. When society and culture change — and they are always changing — it is healthier for them to change gradually, giving people, families, institutions, and their habits time to adjust. Change often has unforeseen consequences; human beings, individually and collectively, often need to work through those consequences before they are prepared for additional change. A textbook example of this is how we have pitched headlong into the increasingly surreal debate over transgenderism before we have even finished working out the ground rules for how free speech and freedom of religious exercise can survive collision with the novel, freshly minted social institution of same-sex marriage. Why do we have such a debate over “cancel culture”? In part, because the rules for what sorts of speech get you fired or pilloried keep changing so rapidly that ordinary Americans can’t keep up, and even people in their twenties get roasted by the censorious for things they said online in their teens. The time factor in social adjustment to change is valuable in itself in protecting individuals as well as institutions from more change than they can process.