The Paradox of the Conservative Voter (Original)

There are two dominant ideas at play in the political landscape of the right: that the country is naturally and overwhelmingly predisposed to conservatism, and that Republican political leaders are not true conservatives.

Get into it deep enough with any conservative worth his salt, and he’ll cite the 40/40/20 makeup of the American electorate (40% conservative, 40% independent/moderate, 20% liberal). This statistic, unchanged over decades, is rightly trumpeted as evidence of the profound sympathy the country has for conservative ideas and principles. Yet often it raises profound questions about where and how the generally accepted political center is formed.

Likewise, conservatives are far quicker than liberals to lament their elected leaders as inauthentic Johnny-come-latelies or nefarious liberal wolves in conservative sheep’s clothes. Look at the questions being asked of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, or even Rick Perry by conservative figures, and you will search in vain for congruence from the left. Even as Obama’s support on the left wanes, the questions are about his political judgments and the tone of his speeches, not about whether or not he’s truly a liberal.

The problem is that these two narratives don’t jibe. You can’t argue that the country is predominantly conservative while the country’s intellectual leadership is predominantly liberal without inviting some skepticism. The left has used the natural assumption of competence that most Americans grant their elected officials (or at very least the natural deference they at feel to the institution which those elected officials serve) to spin the narrative to their liking. If the ruling class is intelligent and liberal, and the conservative majority is under-represented in the ruling class, it evinces a dearth of intelligence in the conservative majority. Hence, NASCAR, pickup trucks, flag-waving, and rural living have degenerated over decades of liberal assault into one amalgamated caricature of the toothless yokel. Add to this the massive leftward tilt of academia, and you have the undying refrain that liberals are simply more intelligent and refined than conservatives.

For their part, conservatives have come up with their own explanations for this phenomenon. Though most are plausible, they fail to dissuade the nagging dissonance that results from these simultaneous facts. The two most frequent arguments are that the liberal media dampens the conservative majority’s impact at the ballot box and that the liberal media pulls conservative elected officials to the left through classical Pavlovian conditioning. I happen to believe that both are true, but even with both factors at work, the cacophony of contradiction remains.

The conclusion that I draw from this is not complicated: Republican voters are simply more demanding than Democrat voters. Whereas Republicans need to see a candidate show an easy fluency with the core principles that comprise conservative thought, Democratic voters look only for assurances on their own individual issues: abortion, immigration, gay marriage, pro-union, anti-war, class warfare. No liberal president since Johnson has clearly articulated the progressive agenda, and Obama actively avoids speaking of it. I’ve written before that I did not vote for John McCain in 2008 despite greatly fearing the Obama presidency. I reasoned that McCain would act like a liberal under the banner of conservatism. Liberal policies in the guise of conservative thought are far more damaging than liberal policies openly acknowledged as liberal. That reasoning still appeals to me today. Yet that vote exacerbated a paradox that causes constant damage to the conservative cause.

This should be a lesson for Republican strategists (and Santorum backers). When conservatives get mired in the wedge issues, they lose. It’s not a matter of having the better argument; it’s a matter of the composition of the voting base of each party. Abortion should be the last thing a conservative talks about in a national election. Not only is it a losing issue for conservatives, it’s also completely irrelevant, seeing as it’s entirely a judicial matter. Similarly, conservatives should uniformly acknowledge gay marriage as a state issue in a half a sentence (or two words: “state issue”) before promptly changing the topic to more important issues—and no, gay marriage is not an important issue. The resolution of the paradox can come only if Republicans stop swinging at pitch-outs. The wheelhouse is the discussion about the size and scope of government. Republicans win that argument ten times out of ten. When Republicans get caught fighting elections around the periphery of core conservative thought, we all lose.