Only Social Conservatives Can Lead America Out of Decline
In 2008 the Democrats won everything by moving the party boldly to the left. The entitlement society in America followed the lead of welfare-steeped Europe. Once “free” disability checks and food stamps start rolling in, people will never return to traditional values. You can count on their votes to turn back austerity whenever it shows up, no matter what.
Liberal Republicans, represented by McCain and Romney, choose to remain near the center: close to the Democrats in terms of promising enhanced economic lifestyles. Neither party wants to get close to the social conservatives, now seen as “far right.”
But George Will, in his interview of Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, argues that emphasizing only fiscal issues is an exercise in futility if the American family continues to decline: “To those who say conservatives should set aside social issues and stress only economic ones, Pence replies: Economic problems are urgent, but social problems remain important in a way that blurs the distinction between social and economic issues. With the fluency of a former talk radio host, he says: ‘You would not be able to print enough money in a thousand years to pay for the government you would need if the traditional family continues to collapse.'”
Government will surely try, by collecting more taxes to “throw at the problem.” The already obese bureaucracy will continue to expand, along with inflated pensions and salaries. University faculty will pour over government funding opportunities to help “research” the problem and recommend federal and state programs for dealing with the every-widening social chaos.
Meanwhile, what’s left of families will be buying more cell phones and big-screen televisions, eating out every day, and shopping for designer labels. Families will have disappeared as we know them, replaced by new definitions of what relationships will be. It might still be called a “family” but no person from the past would recognize it as such.
As Mark Steyn reminds us in After America, “Congressman Pence’s doomsday scenario is already here: millions and millions of American children are raised in transient households and moral vacuums that make not just social mobility but even elemental character formation all but impossible. In an America of fewer jobs, more poverty, more crime, more drugs, more disease, and growing ethno-cultural resentments, the shattering of the indispensable social building block all have catastrophic consequences.”
The church once provided moral guidance to the masses, but it has been marginalized by the left, without providing a replacement, as anarchists never do. America can’t regain a moral compass by being socially engineered by television shows or Hollywood movies.
Similarly, the traditional family provided the “free” social glue that, Pence argues, will never be replaced by Big Government. Social conservatives instinctively know this.
But, then again, those deeply embedded in the entitlement world don’t read anyway. They neither understand or care. Entertainment is their opiate.
