Prescriptive Militancy Is A Nonstarter

When Paul Weyrich pointed out that the Moral Majority does not exist, one part of me went, “Duh.” We would not be living in a society in which half of our kids lose their fathers if it was still Norman Rockwell’s America out there in the heartland.

Groups like the Promise Keepers have grown not because they appeal to the moral righteousness of ordinary Americans but because they speak to our moral brokenness.

Meanwhile, in the GOP, conservatives are running away from social issues to tax cuts. And moderates want the GOP to speak on social issues, but from a more liberal perspective.

Voters, the same voters who kept Bill Clinton in office, are consistently telling pollsters that they are worried about moral decline. Women in particular have become far more conservative, as a new poll released by the Center for Gender Equality makes clear. Seventy-five percent of women say religion is important in their lives, up six points over just two years. Almost half of women now agree that it is better for society if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of home and family (while the overwhelming majority continue to support equal rights for women who work).

In a sign of the stunning success of the GOP’s partial-birth abortion campaign, 70 percent of women now favor more legal restrictions on abortions, including a majority who oppose abortion except in cases involving rape, incest or to save the woman’s life. “Two years ago,” the Center reports, “45 percent of women held these restrictive views on abortion, compared with 53 percent today.”

Two years ago, 63 percent of women agreed that “religion and politics don’t mix,” while just 32 percent said it would be better for politicians to be guided by religious values. Today, 46 percent of women want politicians guided by religious values compared to 46 percent who think politics and religion don’t mix.

How to reconcile such increasing moral conservatism with steady support for Bill Clinton? Moral liberalism or an exclusive focus on tax rate cuts (the new “conservative” position) are equally irrelevant responses. Historians and politicos will be debating this question for years. Let me offer as a first cut three possible explanations:

If you are going on the moral attack, wash your own hands first. Not only the private sins of GOP politicians but the gratuitously pornographic nature of their public attack (releasing unedited both the Starr report and the president’s deposition) undercut the GOP’s standing as a moral champion.

Public values beat private values, as Dick Morris likes to say. Even a flawed messenger who consistently stands for the right public values agenda will beat a political party with no values plan of action.

Anxious Americans are seeking moral uplift, not angry moral condemnations. We don’t need chastising politicians to feel bad about moral squalor around us. We need leaders who offer hope, solutions, a way to feel good about America’s direction again.

Those of us who see clearly the connection between the privatization of morality (especially sexual morality) and the public squalor we must all live in have to be in the business not of rallying troops but of making conversions, not of condemning the uncertain and worried majority but of conversing with it.

We have to act on the belief that even imperfect people like us can make transcendent moral truths visible, if we continue, with civility, courtesy and good faith, to try.

There are no outside agitators in this culture war, nobody here, as Mary Ann Glendon likes to say, but just us Americans.