Ramesh Ponnuru has an article up at NRO, "Scapegoating the Religious Right", that I think deserves some attention. DemFromCT mentions it in this morning's Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up.
I wrote Ramesh and the gang at NRO this little response, which I would be shocked if the NR prints, so I'll take that editorial discretion out of their hands. Enjoy.
National Reviewers,
Perhaps I can help Ramesh Ponnuru and your readers understand some of the reality underlying his article on "Scapegoating the Social Right" if I color a bit outside the lines of the pretty picture he constructs.
"There is no question that social conservatism repels some voters."
Why would that be? Of course, there's Ponnuru's implied answer, that places where social conservatives are thin on the ground, where the godly dwell not, must be full of the ungodly, who hate the virtuous for their virtue. No doubt some wicked people vote Democratic. Can't let the party whose base consists of Malefactors of Great Wealth have the wicked demographic all to themselves. But perhaps the majority are upset, not so much by what the godly think of themselves, but what they think of the rest of us, the "ungodly" majority. Ponnuru seems to understand that the godly can't put their condemnation of the ungodly majority too explicitly in what is still, unfortunately perhaps, a democracy, and so argues implicitly.
But I would suggest that holding forth your own godliness as your qualfication to lead this nation has a problem quite a bit deeper than the fact that thereby accusing the majority of ungodliness is bad PR. I am old enough to remember a time when the Southern Baptist profession of godliness was remarkable mainly for what it required, above and beyond the norms of secular society, from Southern Baptists themselves. The rest of us may have thought it at worst somewhat odd and perhaps unnecessary to true virtue to deny oneself alcohol, tobacco, pre-marital sex, dancing and divorce (I hesitate to add deodorant to the list, for fear that it might be mistaken for disparagement, but I have a genuine fondness for the memory of that old-time religion Southern Baptist, Earl Long, and his stated preference on the campaign stump to "stink like a man" rather than use "fancy deodorants" like his opponent from that Sin City, New Orleans.). But what are we to think of their spiritual heirs, who deny themselves nothing of the arguable excesses of the world we live in, and seem to find that virtue requires publc policing only in others, and only against predilections that they themselves would conveniently not even want to indulge?
To find this behavior repellent, we don't have to appeal to the hatred of the wicked for the godly. We need look no further than the New Testament, which has whole chapters and books against finding fault in others. Yes, you can find in the Bible a passage here or there, in which, if you overtranslate and mistranslate strenuously enough, you can smoke out a condemnation of homosexuality. Whole books that argue for tolerance of others, and severity of judgment only when you judge yourself, against one isolated passage, right there next to the sanctions against house leprosy, which maybe condemns homosexuality, and social conservatives ignore the former injunctions, which might interfere with their political games, but are all over condemnng others about the latter. What could anyone possibly find repellent in that behavior?
To move onto the poltical gamesmanship that really is what the social conservative morality-for-others-only movement is about:
"There is no question that social conservatism repels some voters. But there is no real reason to think that it costs the Republican party more voters than it brings..."
When we get past the pretense that social conservatism, as a movement, has anything to do with morality, we get to its reality as an electoral strategy. So let's drop the language of morality and do some political nut-cutting.
All parties are coalitions of many different groups. In a bipolar poltical system such as ours, the two dominant parties have to include many groups indeed to stand any chance for a majority at the polls. But, as this passage indicates, while you build your coalition by adding different groups, you can also subtract from it if a group you add repels more voters from other groups already in your coalition than it adds from the new group. The Civil Rights Act gave the Dems a new group, the blacks, for its coalition. But it lost us the Bubba vote. No, not just Southern Bubba, and not because of any simple or direct racism. What made it possible for the Republicans to peal off Bubba, not just Southern Bubba, but Southie Bubba, and yes, suburban Bubba, from the Democratic coalition, was a systematic scape-goating of blacks. They were blamed for all of the social changes that threatened Bubba at home -- drugs, pre-marital sex, divorce -- but were too close to home, and too intractable, to bear much self-scrutiny.
It's called the Southern Strategy, but really, it worked because it successfully scape-goated blacks in jurisdictions all across the political landscape. The racism thing was more of a bug than a feature, since the majority in this country is explicitly anti-racist. The scape-goating all had to be done by dog whistle. Racist stereotypes had to be appealed to, and reinforced, for the scape-goating to work, but these appeals, and this reinforcement, all had to be merely implied, not at the surface or in the open.
It would have collapsed of its own contradictions eventually anyway. Tell the same scary lie to people often enough, and they eventually quit merely reacting to the lie long enough to realize they are being manipulated. But when the Dems were either smart enough, or just dumb-lucky enough, to nominate a black for president, it inevitably brought the race thing to the surface. Your side was forced, in response, to so far overplay all of the more surface respectable markers of the scapegoating in order to get away from the inescapable fact of Obama's blackness, that the whole heap of lies collapsed of its own weight.
I know that you people, having lost your black scapegoat, hope to make gay the new black. Or maybe make Hispanic the new black. But, what you're facing, as Ponnuru notices, then spins furiously away from the truth, is the reality that Bubba is the new black. Being identfied with folks who judge others, but not themselves -- folks who scapegoat -- that's going to get you folks politically scape-goated. Yes, Bubba is a stereotype, and no, no one deserves to be reduced to a sterotype. But the difference between scape-goating people for who they are, whether that's black or gay or Hispanic, and scape-goating them for their moral choices, specifically the choice to rise to worldly power by slandering the downtrodden, is the diference between Evil and Good. Or don't you people acknowledge that difference anymore?
Self-scrutinizingly yours,
Glen Tomkins