Paul Tuns
There are many unhyphenated conservatives in both the Conservative Party in Canada and Republicans in the United States, that is citizens who are both socially and fiscally conservative. I hope to write about conservatism and libertarianism in a future issue of the dead tree edition of this paper. For now I want to bring attention to Ben Woodfinden’s fine essay “A Renewed Social Conservative Agenda” that is worth reading, in which the author warns against market fundamentalism. Woodfinden writes:
Social conservatives deserve blame here too, because they play this game as well. Lots of the loudest socons are “full blooded” conservatives, meaning they combine their stance on a few hot button issues with deregulation, lower taxes, less public spending, and small government. Reducing social conservatism to a handful of separate issues and then wedding the fundamental conservative concern about the social to a hard free market approach is deeply misguided, in my view. Just as the fiscal conservative/social progressive can wash their hands of any hot button issues, the social conservative who embraces this economic libertarianism can neglect the role that economic and material conditions have on the social world. By focusing on a few issues, it encourages a subordination of conservatism, and a concern for the social, to what others describe as “free market fundamentalism.” I don’t like this term, but you get my point.
If we put the social, broadly conceived, first, then it should allow for some flexibility in how we approach things like the state and the market. To quote Sam Hammond: “A non-malleable view of human nature is supposed to be central to conservatism’s self-definition, from which one can easily derive a proactive role for government in nurturing bedrock social institutions like the family.” You can’t seriously say the family is the bedrock of civilization and then prima facie reject, for ideological reasons, government support that might actually help this bedrock institution.
Social conservatives — both in the broad cultural sense and narrower moral issues sense — need to recognize that markets as well as governments can pose a threat to the family and sanctity of human life, and that government can, at least sometimes, bolster both. That said, there is no need to fully embrace the welfare state to accomplish the goal of creating an environmental that allows families to flourish. At Law & Liberty, Sean Speer writes about Stephen Harper’s government:
Harper understood that modern conservatism is more than just the sum of marginal tax rates and government spending as a share of GDP. Conservatives must have a limited yet positive vision for government that addresses bigger questions such as the role of the family in our society, the socio-cultural roots of poverty and purposefulness, and the social costs of crime and addiction.
Speer, a former policy advisor to Prime Minister Harper, explains:
The Conservative Party under Harper proposed restoring a universal child benefit in its 2006 election platform. The UCCB would provide $100 CAD ($78.35 USD) per month for each child under age six irrespective of family income or how the funds would be used. The policy case was primarily about positive externalities: a universal child benefit sought to recognize the difference between the private costs and social returns of raising the next generation. It was in effect a public policy affirmation of the social value of parenting or what has been described in the policy literature as a “parental recognition objective.”
Putting a universal child benefit at the center of the party’s policy agenda was a major departure from its conventional policy and political orthodoxy. Yet Harper and his team (including Ken Boessenkool who had written in favour of universal child benefits in the late 1990s) viewed the UCCB as part of a broader shift in the Conservative Party’s positioning from “economic issues to social values.”
American conservatives are currently debating among themselves the Mitt Romney plan, the Family Security Act, to consolidate child and family tax credits and benefits, and the best way to support American families — or whether it should be done at all.
American Compass has a number of essays examining “Home Building” — that is, how, or whether, to support families, the foundation of a healthy society.
From a purely pragmatic view, conservative parties need to understand that a large part of their base does not share the view of the leadership and professional classes around politics — the journalists, academics, think tankers, activists whose views are amplified — that conservative parties need to be either both socially and fiscally conservative, or fiscally conservative and socially liberal. There are many people who hold some constellation of socially conservative feelings and opinions, especially about family, and favour more government intervention. There are also many people who want larger families but do not think they can afford them and would have another child if there was more government help. Again, this is not necessarily about wanting a large, limitless welfare state. But it is about thinking through what society needs and what government can do to strengthen it. As we’ve written before, Hungary has a number of pro-family policies that seem to be having a positive effect on birth rates. As Speers notes, a pro-worker policy is, in many ways, a pro-family policy. Conservatism needs more G.K. Chesterton and less Ayn Rand.
