No Wonder They’re Angry

Leftists such as Robert Scheer have been wondering out loud why the Republican Right is so upset with the Harriet Miers nomination. Miers may not be ""the brightest of buttons" (as Paul McCartney recently remarked about Yoko Ono–guess the reconciliation is off). But she adores the President, and has but taken a secret oath to overturn Roe vs. Wade…so what’s the problem?

Jonathan Chait at The New Republic has a good idea. Social conservatives have been taken for a long ride by the business interests that fund the dominant party these days, and there’s no sign that they will ever get back to the issues that seem to matter most to the Religious Right: abortion, flag burning, gay rights, and small government. Instead they’ve been Shanghaied into supporting tax breaks for the rich and for big business, along with numerous anti-enviro measures that do no good for ordinary churchgoers:

Bush is far from the first Republican president to enjoy unrequited support from the Christian right. Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointed moderate Supreme Court justices and declined to press hard for constitutional amendments on issues like abortion and school prayer. Instead, those presidents, like the current one, give social conservatives symbolism and imagery but little in the way of actual policy change. Affluent conservative investors, on the other hand, get massive policy changes that they like.

Why do social conservatives keep accepting this rotten deal? It’s not because there are fewer of them than there are economic conservatives. A detailed Pew survey last spring found that "enterprisers," who favor smaller government, comprise slightly less than a third of the GOP voting base. The other two groups, "pro-government conservatives" and "social conservatives," tilt right on cultural values but have moderate or even liberal economic views and outnumber the enterprisers by more than two to one.

Surely the answer has something to do with the fact that the religious right’s political vanguard is complicit in its own subordination. For years, economic conservatives have learned that they can enlist social conservative groups to back their agenda on the flimsiest of pretexts. When business groups were fighting fuel economy standards, GOP activist Grover Norquist convinced Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum to oppose them as well, according to a 1995 Washington Post story, "because the mileage goals could be portrayed as threatening such mainstays of the family as the station wagon and the mini-van." According to its website, the top two legislative items on the Christian Coalition’s legislative agenda are "Passing President Bush’s Social Security reform" and "Making permanent President Bush’s 2001 federal tax cuts."

Where does it say in the Bible that Christians should accept being duped?