Tim kaine is one to lecture on social issues after doing Obama bidding for the last year. Give me a break

Just look at Santorum, who is as big of a SoCon as they come, yet he is still defending earmarks, which is as anti-FisCon as they come.

And do I even need to mention the War On Some Drugs, which is a SoCon staple, yet a colossal waste of money and unconstitutional to boot?

You can keep claiming that social conservatives are the fiscal conservatives all you want, but the reality is quite different.

China continues, and will continue, to buy our debt (along with Japan), because they can’t do much else with all the dollars U.S. consumers have sent them.

Our debt looks looks funky to us, as it should, but to another country it’s still the safest haven. Not for nothing the U.S. has such a mighty military.

was that “government cannot create morality, but it cannot exist without it.” This is the most accurate statement that I have heard regarding this subject in a long time.

The problem is that too many fiscal conservatives and social conservatives enjoy poking the other one with a pointy stick any time they get a chance. Already one commentator on this diary has done so.

Have some social conservatives been asleep at the wheel when it comes to fiscal conservatism and limited government in the past? Yes. But within the last decade or so they have all had a significant awakening. So give it a rest.

Conversely, a society that does not embrace morals and virtues is destined to crumble. Fiscal conservatives cannot reduce the strength of a country to only dollars and cents.

The finger pointing and nasty jabs must cease. We are all on the same team and we need to band together to educate a largely woefully ignorant public on the importance of limited government, fiscal conservatism, and social conservatism. When these three things are in place, America is at her best and her strongest.

Thad,

Your argument is essentially sleight of hand (or bait & switch, or a straw man, whatever term you prefer for pretending that the argument you are refuting is something other than what it really is).

Re: Can you explain why transferring intergeneration debt so large that devalues every hour of labor for generations to come is wrong without making a moral appeal?

No, I can’t. And no one does, least of all us fiscal conservatives who do not consider ourselves full-fledged social conservatives (I think many FiCons are like me — with social conservatives on some social issues, but opposite them on others). We make the moral argument that running up huge debt to be borne by future generations is selfish behavior that imposes great harm on innocent people without any conceivable justification.

But this rational, secular morality has little to do with religion-based and tradition-based “morality” which brands particular behaviors as immoral not because of consequences, but rather simply because it breaks a rule one considers “divine” or breaks with tradition.

First of all, the entitlements driving most of our projected growth in deficits and debt are not related to children out of wedlock, but rather to demographics (the retiring baby boomers, and increasing longevity) and medical inflation (the causes and potential cures of which are debated and disagreed upon by many reasonable people with conflicting theories and priorities, most of which not involving the types of behavior of which you speak).

Secondly, even to the extent that out of wedlock births contribute to our debt, it is far from clear that this factor would be significantly (if at all) mitigated if social conservatives got what they want on social issues. Yes, if everyone were abstinent outside of marriage, that would obviously mitigate it, and it’s possible that the availability of legal abortion has some effect of encouraging out of wedlock sex, but of course by far the larger factor is contraception (condoms and the pill — and I’m NOT speaking of RU-486), and I don’t think social conservatives in America are calling for banning contraception, and if it were banned, I think it’s highly likely that out of wedlock births would increase, even net of any reduction in sexual activity. Even the availability of abortion (whatever one thinks of it on moral grounds) probably has had the net effect of fewer out of wedlock births and related costs.

As for “dishonoring traditional marriage”, I suppose you’re arguing that letting gays marry will cause more promiscuity and in turn more out of wedlock births, plus more divorce, and related costs of both, and that these costs contribute significantly to our current and projected debt levels.

Overall, you’re arguing (as best I can see an argument) that we face current and projected debt levels primarily because gays can (or will be able to) marry and abortion is legal, which produces a culture of sexual promiscuity, which in turn leads to more out of wedlock births and divorces, and related costs to taxpayers. For reasons I’ve indicated above, I just don’t see anything resembling a strong argument to that effect.

If I’ve missed something, please help me understand what I’m missing. Please walk me through your logic: What policies are you saying are causing our current and projected debt levels (and how), and what policies would solve that problem, and how?

Please spell it out for me, as in X leads to Y, which leads to Z.

As a note, I think I have some software glitch that prevents me from using “Reply to This”, so if I reply I think I’ll have to reply in a new comment, so please scroll down to check.

The linkage between the paternalism and lack of personal responsibility is clearly there, at least I can follow the golden thread of logic that far. But I have a problem trying to understand just what government is supposed to do about that, other than start to unwind all the programs so people have to start taking responsibility for themselves and their own choices. In the end, there really isn’t anything we can do about what people in a free society choose other than lead by example without doing our own version of trampling all over our founding document and end up with unintended consequences of a different spin.

One diagnosis I have heard is that the immorality has something to do with the economic problems we have, but I am not sure I agree with that, except to the extent that the paternalism has gotten way out of hand, in the form of piling on program after program and government making promises it can’t keep. These problems come straight from government, and I believe they have more to do with self-serving politician/power brokers doling out favors for their friends by squashing the little guy with the regulatory agencies, and doing whatever they have to do to stay in power than anything else. I suppose to them it is better to be kings of chaos than never have power at all.

Capitalism and free markets can take a certain amount of interference and still function, but there is a point beyond which it really isn’t capitalism anymore, and it becomes an unworkable mess of central planning. It doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to come to the conclusion that economic hardship is harder on a family than anything else, and if we can’t get our economic engine restarted and revved up again, things are only going to keep getting worse for the family unit before they get better. And it’s because of this that I put economic issues ahead of everything else, and I will be voting for Newt, even if I have to write him in.

Not because you don’t make a good point – in many ways, you do – but because it’s based around a conception of conservatism that simply cannot be construed as ideologically consistent.

There is a very real rift on social issues between liberals and conservatives, but it isn’t as it is normally portrayed. It isn’t a fight between tradition and modernity, but rather a battle between those who feel that individuals should be responsible for their own actions, and those who reject that notion. The root of social conservatism isn’t tradition, although tradition does play a key role (I’ll get to that in a moment), it’s self-responsibility. The antithesis of the “modernity” presented by the liberals isn’t tradition, it’s self-responsibility.

The root of conservatism is that individuals are responsible for their own actions, and the consequences entailed thereof, and that government does not and should not exist to mitigate this responsibility. The liberal world view is the opposite – that individuals are not responsible for their own actions precisely because government exists to mitigate this responsibility. Although many conservatives, having not taken the time to break down their beliefs further than “liberal bad, conservative good!” will argue with this premise, I would challenge them to present a coherent and consistent political doctrine that is also conservative. Without ultimately relying on self-responsibility, the only fall-back is tradition, and I doubt any thinking person will argue that something should remain the way it has only because it has always been that way. Such an argument is intellectually bankrupt. But where does that leave tradition?

I said before tradition is important before I rejected it as the basis of a political doctrine, but I did mean that it was important. The traditional lifestyle became tradition because it worked well, and it provided a blueprint for future success. In recent years, conservatives have claimed that tradition is under a fundamental attack, and they are not wrong to do so; however, the enemy of social conservatism isn’t an anarchistic social construct as promoted by the liberals, but it is the very ordered nature of the liberal social construct. To phrase it differently – liberals aren’t permissive socially, they merely reject tradition as it allows for bastion of autonomy from the regulatory power of the State. For the left, everything begins and ends with the power of the State.

A conservative rejects that notion of the State. Therefore, it is counter-intuitive for a conservative to embrace the State as an agent to promote a particular lifestyle or tradition. Rather, a conservative embraces the traditional lifestyle personally, promotes it personally, but seeks to remove the facets of state power that allow non-traditional lifestyles that fail to flourish through public support. A conservative would have a State where an individual chooses his or her lifestyle, and accepts the consequences thereof. Under such a system, traditional values persist because they work – if they don’t persist, it’s because they don’t work.

So, with all due respect Mr. Hunter, I’d posit that you have your argument reversed. The proper “fiscal” solutions – less government spending, a smaller state, et cetera, are the solutions to our social ills. It is also why, on a truly ideological level, I see no substantial difference between conservatism and libertarianism, (with perhaps an exception made for foreign policy) since both are based, fundamentally, around the idea of individual responsibility. It is also why I reject “big-government Conservatives” like Rick Santorum, as the idea is fundamentally an oxymoron and we already have a moron in the White House.

You suggest that the lack of personal responsibility stems from a rejection of tradition and Christianity. You provide a largely historical argument that suggests that, since modern liberalism argues against tradition and religion, conservatism must necessarily embrace the opposite. You do not take into account any underlying motivations of either movement, you merely take what they say at face value. Your argument is largely historical in nature, and relies on the acceptance of the idea that the superficial characteristics of the conservative movement as the true heart of conservatism..

However, your argument is dangerously flawed. To begin, your definition of conservatism puts the movement at odds, philosophically at least, with the Constitution and the ideas of the framers and founding fathers. America was born of the enlightenment. You do not need to partake in a particularly in-depth reading of Locke’s Second Treatise on Government to understand how it provided a basis for our constitutional system, and at the very least, a justification of our rebellion against a sovereign power. The foundation of the United States flew in the face of political tradition, not only in that it rejected a sovereign monarch twice (once in the rejection of George III and once in George Washington’s refusal of ascendancy to an American kingship). If tradition is a hallmark of conservatism, then I guess we here at Red State are all tories, are we not?

Okay, I understand what I did there was a rhetorical trick, a slight-of-hand, but it illustrates an important point – conservatism cannot rely on historical arguments as a basis of its justification. What you’re doing is providing very specific historical contexts (the French Revolution, for example) and explaining the roots of political conservatism from that lens, but much in the same way that the rhetoric surrounding Obamacare cannot be taken out of its historical context, the particular superficials of conservatism cannot be taken out of their historical contexts.

Next, you attempt to shift the topic, ever so slightly, from a discussion of a foundation of political beliefs to another historical argument, You say, specifically, that liberalism’s rejection of personal responsibility comes directly from a rejection of scripture and the incorporation of Darwinism. Your logic, basically, says that personal responsibility comes from Christianity, and without it, you just have bohemianism and decadence.. There are a few problems here:

One, you do not need to be a Christian to believe in personal responsibility, nor is a belief in Darwinism really an indictment of the idea of personal responsibility. You’re conflating a rejection of scripture with a rejection of everything in scripture. If the Bible were to mention that the sky were blue, people who reject the bible as a basis of their moral compass are not rejecting that the sky, in fact, is blue. Rather, they reject a particular tradition of cultural heritage for whatever reason. That does not make them not conservative. If it did, I wouldn’t be here, as I don’t believe in god, I believe even less in your particular god, and I wholeheartedly believe in evolution. Yet I still believe that, fundamentally, the basis of human interaction is individual responsibility and choice, I believe that traditional family structures are far superior to many, if not all, of their alternatives, and I probably have a stronger moral compass than many who do believe (insofar as many believers simply use their religion as a shield to justify their poor behavior and bring meaning to a life that they cannot distill meaning from on their own).

Two, Christianity itself does not teach personal responsibility. Look at the Catholic Church as an example of this.

Religion itself is a good thing, because it does give people something to believe in, helps them find a purpose, and promotes social voluntary cooperation and creates a sense of community, but to claim that religion itself can cure all the ills in our country (since, according to you, the rejection of it seems to be the cause) either vastly overstates the impact of religion on the formation of political beliefs or vastly understates the gravity of our nation’s problems. I posit that there is something much deeper at play.

The State, in practice, is an institution which monopolizes the use of violence and the exercise of power within a defined territorial jurisdiction. The liberal view is simple – the State exists primarily to obtain the fulfillment of the universal will viz. the state exists to move it’s citizens forward in history. This is fundamentally a progressive concept because it rejects the State as a vehicle to protect rights (in fact, it its most distilled form, Marxism, this Hegelian idea suggests that rights are granted by the State). Any institution that challenges the State’s hold on public morality is dangerous because such an institution can undermine the State’s “progress” towards its goal.

The question we must ask ourselves is whether or not we accept that definition of the State. If we do, then we simply wish for the universal will to be conservative political positions, but have no problem with Leviathan in principle. If we reject it, then we must present a counter-argument, but this isn’t too difficult since the counter-argument predates the origin of the liberal line of thought by quite some time. As conservatives, we fundamentally embrace the same view of the State as the founding fathers, a limited government meant not to progress us in history, but, in essence, to protect our individual rights from violation, to provide a peaceful and fair environment for social cooperation through certain laws and regulations that limit people’s absolute rights, but only enough to protect the rights of others, and a public sphere of free and open discourse without fear of retribution or indictment simply for political ideas that may be outside of the mainstream, or that differ from those of those in power.

Many conservatives lament the growing divide between Christianity and public morality, and they are not wrong to do so. Even though I am not a Christian, religion has many good things and Christianity has many valuable things it can teach people. However, if the solution you embrace uses the government to strengthen Christian ideas through legislative or executive fiat, you embrace the same fundamental view of the State as liberals, and seek to use it to progress society to a point which you believe would be beneficial. This is not a conservative ideal, and it is the reason that I cannot call Rick Santorum a conservative. Rather, and I think we can all agree on this, we need to remove government supports that allow for non-traditional lifestyles to become viable when they otherwise would not be. Like I said in my above post, traditional values never would have become traditional if there was no benefit to them, and if incentives for abandoning them are removed, they will flourish. In the end, we all get what we want, without creating a dangerous precedent for the expansion of government power. That is unless such an expansion is your goal, but since you’re here at RedState, I have to assume that it is not.