Social Issues Strike Back

...All this represents a party-wide struggle to replicate the Reagan approach to social issues...

...They support the idea of greater religious presence in the public square...

...They went for candidates defiantly outside the GOP mainstream, Pat Buchanan and Alan Keyes, and thus signalled they will not be easily digested by the Republican party...

...Some Republicans would like to throw the Hail Mary pass on social issues by going for a constitutional amendment...

...But Reed has spent three years trying to create Republican religious conservatives, when in fact many would rather be religious conservatives who happen to vote Republican...

...Moreover, as the Family Research Council's Gary Bauer stresses, recent Republican history, in which pro-life forces have heard brave talk but seen relatively little action, has caused this harder-line camp to raise the bar for candidates who seek their support...

...Reed has therefore been friendly to the most mainstream presidential candidate, Bob Dole...

...Religious conservatives, Reed emphasized, would probably look for candidates who are broadly socially conservative, who prize religion, who will be role models...

...But the large Buchanan and Keyes vote, along with polling data, suggest that many religious conservatives are not looking for candidates who are simply good family men or morally upright...

...The problem for the incrementalists is that going deep gets people excited...

...Pat Buchanan is on the march once again...

...Meyerson fears that the Buchanan message of economic populism may pull religious voters away from free-market conservatism...

...Lamar Alexander is the presidential candidate who has most enthusiastically embraced the civil-society message...

...These and other secular efforts may or may not be good governing agendas, but the evidence so far is that they do not generate political passion...

...For religious conservatives, abortion tends to bleach out all other issues...

...But they also believe that living in a liberal democracy means that moral issues must be addressed within a secular, natural-law tradition...

...Now it has the ability to do something about it, and that has caused a strategic chasm to open up on the Right...

...Reed is not hostile to Buchanan...

...Last year, Republicans and conservatives were united in their efforts to pass the Contract with America...

...We now know for sure that religious conservatives are not easy to command, as the Washington Post once notoriously claimed...

...The amendment would be attached to state constitutions and would read, "The right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children shall not be infringed...

...nationalism is traditionally a passionate issue for conservatives, but it is hard to play that card these days...

...He built a social agenda that appealed to a majority of Americans, not just to those who are explicitly Christian in their politics...

...Going gradual does not...

...Rather, these voters are looking for a candidate who will be explicit on abortion and homosexuality...

...But now the Contract is dormant, and Clinton is a self-professed budget balancer...

...These people-ranging from Lamar Alexander to Newt Gingrich-respect religious conservatives...

...He emphasized, as always, that religious conservatives cannot be delivered as a bloc...

...Accordingly, the Christian Coalition's contribution to the Contract with America was the $500-per-child tax credit...

...After Pat Buchanan's speech at the 1992 GOP convention, other conservatives tried to fuse the concerns of religious conservatives with those of more secular conservatives...

...Again, it is secular, but the effect would be to strengthen the hand of religious groups who sue school districts to prevent, say, the distribution of condoms...

...Tax-free donations could go to organizations that are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or New Age...

...Others adopt the west-coast offense and look for a series of eight-yard completions, like banning partial-birth abortions...

...It is proving very difficult to build a social agenda that appeals both to religious conservatives and to more secular conservatives...

...But that was during the Cold War, when a president could demonstrate his moral bona fides by standing firm against the Evil Empire...

...Another coalition-building device is the Parental Rights Amendment, championed by Betsy DeVos and Jeffrey Bell...

...The Iowa voting patterns suggested that many religious conservatives don't want to stick abortion in with a range of other issues...

...During the two previous years, they were united by their opposition to Clinton-ian liberalism...

...The key explication of the Reed strategy came in an essay he wrote for the Summer 1993 issue of Policy Review called "Casting a Wider Net: Religious Conservatives Move Beyond Abortion and Homosexuality...

...Now foreign affairs does not loom as a moral battleground...

...For the past few years, the executive director of the Christian Coalition has been trying to integrate religious conservatives into the Republican mainstream...

...Legislation in the civil-society mold does not champion specific religious values...

...Dan Coats of Indiana proposes a tax credit for all donations to religious and charitable institutions that address poverty...

...They are pro-life...

...Republicans are fractious, and coalition-building seems an increasingly thankless job...

...They refuse to be smoothly assimilated...

...who have a consistent record on abortion, school choice, tax relief, and budget balancing...

...He can use the social issues to round out his image...

...They would influence tax policies, fiscal policies, welfare reform...

...That is, of course, a fiscal measure, a pocketbook play, not a social issue traditionally understood...

...Reed argued that the "most urgent challenge for profamily conservatives is to develop a broader issues agenda...

...They did not back Bob Dole in large numbers...

...Explicitness is all...

...Reagan could talk about moral absolutes in a way that was secular...

...Unlike special interests that have come to dominate the national Democratic party in recent years," he said, "we will impose no litmus tests, issue no demands, and dictate no terms as a condition of our support...

...A central goal of the civil-society effort, he says, is to keep those people in the broad conservative coalition...

...For example, Adam Meyerson, the editor of Policy Review, champions civil society, the effort to use voluntary religious and civic organizations to rebuild community bonds...

...In the Iowa caucuses, religious voters defied Reed's mainstream approach...

...Moreover, this is an era in which Republicans have actual power in Congress and must concern themselves with issues of governance...

...The language is devised to take power away from such social engineers as school administrators and give it back to parents...

...If you think abortion is murder, it hardly belongs on the same list with the family tax credit...

...They would have a place at the table...

...On the day of the Iowa caucus, Reed gave a speech in Los Angeles reiterating his desire to take religious conservatives mainstream...

...When the party was in opposition, it could talk about abortion day and night...

...The civil-society approach is a secular political agenda that deploys religious institutions in, among other things, the war on poverty...

...But there doesn't seem to be enough oomph there to drive a successful campaign...

...At the moment, Republicans seem to have looped back to the summer of 1992...

...He constructed such an agenda, in which abortion was thrown in with tax relief, welfare, and spending cuts-standard Republican fare...

...That way Christian conservatives wouldn't just wield influence on one or two issues, like abortion and gay rights...

...He'd like to see Buchanan do well enough to keep Dole attentive to the social issues...

...They share regular American concerns, with a pro-family twist...