Conservatives believe in conservative ideas

For many liberals in the U.S., one of the great recurring hopes is that a moment will come when social conservatives lay down the culture wars and realize that their real interests lie with supporting progressive economic policies. Such a hope grows from a view, most famously expressed in Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, that predominately white working-class voters are being suckered by "culture war" issues into voting GOP. More fundamentally, it lies in an analysis of the right-wing in the U.S. that sees a distinct "social conservative" base as opposed to the "economic conservatives," who are portrayed as small in numbers, rich in dollars.

Such views are overly simplistic and misunderstand a basic point: conservative activists believe in conservative ideas and such notions for many are based in a worldview that easily encompasses "economic" and "social" concerns. As Seth Ackerman points out in a terrific piece at Jacobin on Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's new book on the Tea Party, "liberals have spent too long condescending to conservatives as if they were the perpetual victims of a bait-and-switch scam." For the thing is, the "social conservative" wing of the party which came roaring to the fore of GOP politics in the late 1970s did not focus on "cultural" issues in distinction to economics, but saw them as wrapped together in an ideological whole. As Michael Sean Winter's argues in his new biography of Jerry Falwell, many on the religious right always viewed laissez-faire capitalist ideas and social conservatism as deeply intertwined, with important origins in mutual hatred of communism.

While the story of the interconnections between the Christian right and free-market ideology has many facets, one piece of it involves conservative Protestants' reaction to the leftward shift of many white mainline Protestant churches in the 1970s on economics, and particularly their challenge to multinational corporations. Starting in the mid and late 1960s, particularly in response to the black freedom struggle, many Protestant churches began looking institutionally, financially, and morally, at their place in the larger economy. The role of church endowments became of special interest and by the early 1970s, many churches were seeing church investments as a tool for fighting for justice.

One prime manifestation of this came in 1974 when National Council of Churches merged two existing projects to create the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. ICCR helped church groups and denominations use shareholder resolutions and other means to challenge corporate policies domestically and overseas. Most prominently, ICCR and the churches took on U.S. multinational corporations over investments made in South Africa under apartheid. Furthermore, it was ICCR that helped to launch the Nestle boycott in the late 1970s, which many corporations (as well as conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation) viewed as a major front in what was seen as a national and global "war" on the free market in these years.

In response, in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, a number of conservative religious thinkers connected to the larger "religious right" began actively formulating arguments tying Christianity to pro-market values. This was an important part of creating the overall ideological message of the Religious Right. For example, in 1982, Catholic conservative thinker (an important part of Falwell's legacy being the uniting of Catholic and Protestant conservatives), released his book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, constructing a theologically-based argument for capitalism. Jerry Falwell's newsletter the Journal-Champion in its early years carried numerous articles defending corporations from government regulators such as OSHA, tying into the sense within the U.S. corporate community that they were under attack at home by a combination of government regulators and leftist activist groups, such as ICCR. Such trends continue to this day; while the Tea Party at first was seen as an economics-focused libertarian uprising, with more careful research and with time the deep ideological and social links between much of the Tea Party base and the religious right have become apparent.

For political activists of all stripes, moving beyond easy cliches towards understanding your opponents is important, whether that is to create a more humanistic and understanding politics or to better crush them in future fights. Whatever the case, progressives should recognize that conservative ideas, as contradictory as one might think they seem, are their actual beliefs.