A Gallup poll last year found that the percentage of Americans who said they were conservative or very conservative on social issues was at the highest level in a decade. Like zombies and the mullet hairstyle, social conservatism won’t stay dead.
For all the talk of burying social conservatism, the future of the Republican Party is now said to be in the hands of Mr. Vance, someone more like Rick Santorum than Ric Grenell. Yet maybe it isn’t so strange. Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey put the percentage of Americans who consider themselves socially conservative at 38% and those who consider themselves socially liberal at 29%. Thirty-eight percent is what you call a solid base.
Radicals on both left and right share the mistaken assumption that progress, if that’s the right word for it, runs only in one direction. The dirigistes of the new right have difficulty accepting that most Americans support free-market economics and a muscular foreign policy. They sneer at what they call “zombie Reaganism” and say they too aren’t going back. The progressive left has trouble swallowing the reality that sexual liberation hasn’t dimmed humanity’s natural attachment to traditional sex roles and family structure. They consider it a remnant, a dying cultural ember.
The reality is that traditional values are still very popular and widely practiced. The Neelemans have made a fortune selling pictures of it to their millions of followers—most of whom, if I had to guess, are women.
Social conservatism isn’t buried. It isn’t even dead.
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