It’s a peculiar sensation to stand on a submerged sandbar at the edge of the ocean and feel the tide go out around you, while you stay fixed in place. The ocean is immense, and the tug and pull of the tide is intimidating in its power. To resist a strong tide is difficult, even for a strong swimmer in peak condition. Resisting an outgoing tide successfully can bring on a strange feeling, akin to defying Fate or having a narrow escape from danger.
So it must feel to be among America’s various groups labelled as ‘social conservatives’ in 2023 as the tides of public opinion shift around them while they remain, more or less, fixed in place.
Greymantle’s last two posts have focused on trends within American conservatism, as have several others posts since we launched this site at year-end 2020. Future trends within conservative social and political movements are a recurring topic on this site, and an obsession of the lead author.
The challenge we face in regards to this topic is how to make many different observations while telling a single, coherent story. Our last post argued that American conservatism, at least of the William F. Buckley-Russell Kirk variety, is more or less finished, and Trumpism is a transitional phase on the road to some new kind of right-of-center political philosophy, as yet undefined.
We also argued that conservatism, as an idea, has been greatly weakened in American political discourse, and may never recover its former influence. The GOP is likely to hold on to a number of core policy stances favoring low taxes, smaller government, and states’ rights. But it is unlikely to package these ideas under the ‘conservative’ label, and will more likely bear the standard of nationalism and secure borders for a generation or more.
What Greymantle would like to focus on now are the probable pathways and fates that lie ahead for America’s self-identified ‘social conservatives’ now that the Republican Party is moving away from old-school conservatism and appears to be modulating its stance on legalized abortion in the wake of several voter-driven policy defeats in plebiscites focused on abortion access.
As of July 2022, 37% of Americans described themselves as conservatives – particularly on social issues – a clear minority in a country where the majority has become comfortable with gay marriage (71% approve), favor some degree of legalized abortion, are becoming more open to drug legalization, and are generally trending in a ‘socially liberal’ direction on a host of other formerly ‘hot button’ issues.
THE GROUND HAS SHIFTED, DECISIVELY
Two generations ago, prior to President Reagans coming into office in early 1981, clear majorities (88%+) of Americans were opposed to drug legalization, a large majority (56%) were opposed to interracial marriage, and the legality of same-sex marriage was not even an issue in the public mind. If you had asked someone in the early 1980s if they believed gay couples should be able to wed, they most likely (if memory serves) would have asked you if you were crazy.
Since the early 2000s, however, the ground has shifted decisively on a number of hot-button social questions, with clear majorities of Americans changing their positions on several of these issues. As of 2021, 68% of Americans polled by Gallup were in favor of decriminalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes and 52% favored marijuana legalization for recreational purposes only. Since 2019, more than a dozen states have legalized medical marijuana. Majorities still oppose legalization of most other drugs, but by smaller margins than previously. In 1969, only 12% were in favor of legalizing marijuana.
Shifts in attitudes concerning marriage have been most dramatic. Whereas only 45% of Americans approved of mixed-race marriages in 1980, support for interracial marriages reached an historic high of 94% of Americans in 2022. Only 4% of American adults had approved of mixed-race marriages in 1958, a mere 65 years ago. On the subject of same-sex marriages, the shift in attitudes has been equally dramatic. As recently as 2003, 58% of Americans were opposed to same-sex marriage. By 2022, opinions had shifted so dramatically that 71% were in favor.
It’s only on the issue of legalized abortion where pollsters and other observers can point to a kind of stasis in opinions between the mid-1970s and the 2020s. In 1974, approximately 60% of Americans favored legal abortion in most cases. Another 28% were generally opposed to the practice, with allowance for certain exceptions such as rape, incest or the life of the mother. The remaining 12% of respondents were opposed to abortion in virtually all cases.
As of 2023, the attitude surveys on abortion have changed very little, even as the legal and statutory status of abortion nationally and in the states have gone through a number of changes. Gallup’s May 2023 polling update on abortion revealed that 34% of Americans favor legal abortion in all cases, including late term, while 51% of Americans favor legal abortion in many cases, with some amount of differentiation as to the term of the pregnancy. Most of the 51% favored first term abortions and, in some cases, second term abortions, but were opposed to late term abortions. As in 1974, some 13% remain completely opposed to abortion in virtually any circumstance.
There is evidence of both dramatic shifts and stubborn stasis in these polling numbers. But the overall meta-trend has been towards an embrace of attitudes that were seen as “socially liberal” only two generations ago. In a definitive sense, the 1960s have vanquished the 1950s and prior eras.
Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of this victory took place on December 8, 2022, when Congess passed the Respect for Marriage Act by votes of 258-169 in the House and 61-36 in the Senate with three Senators abstaining. The Respect for Marriage Act established a legal right to same-sex marriage in all 50 states, and also codified similar protections for mixed-race marriages, though arguably no such protections were necessary as mixed-race marriage was already legal in all states. Republican House members voting against reacted with disbelief. Some wept openly.
TRADITIONALISTS WALK IN A NEW SOCIAL LANDSCAPE
It’s clear from the above that social conservatives lack the voting power to reverse recent gains made by supporters of socially liberal causes and ballot initiatives, or could easily overturn the legal rights won in recent years by social groups on ‘the Left’, such as non-heteronormative citizens (Greymantle prefers this term to the unwieldy ‘LGBTQ+’ acronym, which is subject to frequent revision and re-definition and suggests that a quite disparate group of individuals possess a common identity).
A reasonable and informed person must conclude, then, that socially conservative voters, even if allied with ‘economic conservatives’, ‘barstool conservatives‘ opposed to ‘Wokeness’ and activated by free speech issues, and a motley group of ‘far right’ extremists are unlikely to ‘turn back the Clock’ on the social gains made by women and racial and sexual minorities.
Rather, the shoe is now on the other foot.
Having been defeated in the courts, at the polls, and in the arena of public opinion, social conservatives now find themselves in the novel and very uncomfortable role as minorities in a new social landscape. They have become ‘Strangers in Their Own Land‘ as one author wrote in 2016 to some acclaim.
What next, they ask?
The fear on their part is that they will become subject to official persecution by the groups whose rights they recently opposed the granting of, and for whom they still feel considerable distrust and hostility. And all things considered, that’s a pretty likely scenario in the long run.
Like the conquistadors whom they surely despise, the social justice activists of the ‘Social Left’ as I call them (to distinguish them from the ‘Economic Left’ of socialists and Marxists) are eager to keep pushing the boundaries of their empire of justice farther and deeper. They won’t leave the ‘Trads’ alone for long.
CONSERVATIVES VERSUS TRADITIONALISTS ON THE RIGHT
It’s becoming clear that pro-abortion groups, racial equity advocates, and ambitious activists hailing from the non-heteronormative population are focused on penetrating the ‘Red Citadel’ of GOP-led states who have put in place abortion bans, limits on teaching ideas derived from or inspired by Critical Race Theory (CRT), and prohibitions on sex change procedures for kids below 18. It is therefore pretty close to a metaphysical certitude that activists of the Social Left will soon be clashing with social conservatives on their home turf, and playing an aggressive offense.
A pressured GOP with strong regionalist loyalties in many of the Southern and Western states is likely to resist this pressure for some time, but perhaps not forever. Greymantle would wager they will resist some of these pressures for about 10 years, and perhaps as long as a generation in the Far West and Deep South, but parts of the Red Citadel are likely to be shorn off over time.
What happens during the period of conflict? For the short term, economically-oriented conservatives who support the GOP out of hatred of ‘the Left’ and the Democrats are likely to continue making common cause with social conservatives, broadly defined. After all, the ‘Trads’, as Greymantle prefers to call them, have in some ways been taking the lead in selecting the wedge issues and causes embraced by the GOP during the MAGA period.
The question is, what happens when the economic and ‘barstool’ conservatives and other GOP voters who are more motivated by nationalism, anti-globalism or racial grievances find that their continued advocacy for socially conservative causes is threatening their hold on power, as they have started to notice around the abortion issue since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022? Do they continue to stick together with the ‘Trads’, or do they go in search of new allies?
Ultimately, there has always been something of a divergence between old-school small-government conservatives obsessed with low taxes and opposing gun restrictions and religious conservatives more concerned with restricting abortion, resisting gay and trans rights, and banning pornography. In the coming years, Greymantle expects this divergence to widen considerably as Trads as a share of the U.S. population decline further before reaching a floor, and as continued defeat of Trad-supported issues at the ballot box and in the courts lessens their relevance as a core GOP constituency.
WHICH AMERICAN SOCIAL GROUPS QUALIFY AS TRADITIONALISTS?
As mainstream political conservatives gradually abandon social conservatives, the lines of demarcation between traditionalists and the rest of American society will harden and the gulf between their sensibilities and those of mainstream society will widen. A society wherein 45% of the general population actively practice orthodox Protestant, Catholic and Eastern Christianity or Judaism and only one-third of those practice these faiths in a form that might be termed truly traditional is a very different world from the one of 1960, when over 90% of Americans would fall into the first category.
Given the hardening lines of demarcation, it is useful to specifically name which groups we are talking about here when we use terms like ‘traditionalist’ or ‘conservative dissenter’. For example, Greymantle would not apply the term traditionalist to mainstream Roman Catholics or fairly large numbers of Mormons and Southern Baptists. All of the aforementioned tend to be reliably politically conservative, but each contains a sizable minority of politically left-leaning voters, e.g. while right-leaning, Mormons have voiced surprisingly high support for gay marriage in recent years, and are internationalist in outlook.
Greymantle includes the following religious denominations and social groups under the header of ‘traditionalist’ or ‘social conservative’:
- Methodist Revivalists
- The Mennonite Church, USA
- The Amish in their various sub-groups
- ‘Plain People’ that include Anabaptists, Conservative Friends (i.e. Quakers), the Moravian Church, the River Brethren and the Cooperites
- Hutterian Brethren
- Mormon Fundamentalists
- Modern Orthodox Jews
- Followers of Haredi Judaism (e.g. Satmar Hasidim) aka ‘Ultra-Orthodox’
- Traditionalist Catholics of the Pius X Society
- Catholics who follow the Latin Rite in various pre-Vatican II practices
- Russian Orthodox ‘Old Believers’
- Jehovah’s Witnesses
- Seventh Day Adventists
It’s probably possible to add a number of Islamic groupings present and active in the United States today to this list to reflect their rejection of a number of important contemporary social norms that have emerged since the late 20th century (e.g. co-habitation by unmarried couples, gay marriage, etc.). The list above is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather suggestive of the kinds of religious and social groups who are likely to persist in staying ‘traditional’ in their social and cultural norms even as society continues to change around them in ways that are not consistent with their core beliefs.
HARD TRADITIONALISTS VERSUS SOFT TRADITIONALISTS
Another way to think about the groups referenced above is to see them as ‘hard traditionalists’ in the sense that the leaders and members of these groups brook no compromise on a number of key issues that divide them from the larger society. In addition, many of the aforementioned are distinguished from mainstream society by a number of cultural practices that set them apart, in dramatic fashion.
The Amish and Mennonites provide one set of examples. The Amish, in addition to their very strong religious doctrine, maintain a lifestyle that has barely changed since the 18th century. They do not use electricity in their homes or on their farms, and do not drive automobiles, but rather use horses and buggies for transportation. The Amish also maintain minimal to no connection to the Internet and do not watch television or (mostly) use cellular phones.
Because of these practices, the Amish have consciously chosen to cut themselves off from the larger body of America culture and contemporary society. They maintain a high degree of social cohesion within their own society, while keeping the larger society at arms’ length.
The Modern Orthodox and Haredi Jews provide another set of examples. Modern Orthodox tend to participate more or less fully within contemporary society and institutions, but follow a strict set of religious laws that require them to absent themselves from commercial or non-religious social activities during certain times of the day or week, or certain periods of time. The Haredim live together in common neighborhoods and communities in a somewhat insular fashion and act together as a common economic and social unit under the guidance of their religious leaders.
The lifestyles and practices of these groups contrast with those whom Greymantle terms ‘soft traditionalists’ such as socially conservative mainstream Roman Catholics who don’t celebrate the Latin Mass, members of mainstream Mormonism who use all modern conveniences and may hold elected office or run companies that employ non-Mormons as a majority, and followers of the Conservative school of Judaism who adhere to less strict rules than their fellow believers among the Haredim or the Modern Orthodox, but may hold many, or most, of the same views on social topics.
Why is the distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ traditionalists important?
In Greymantle’s view, the distinction is relevant in a very practical sense relating to political and social power given that many ‘hard traditionalists’ have consciously chosen to recuse themselves from active political life. You don’t see Amish guys running for public office in Lancaster County, PA. The same holds true for Mennonites, Haredim, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The wider culture is impure in the view of these communities, and to actively participate in the political process and seek the votes of non-believers while making campaign promises to them would be akin to having lunch with the Devil.
‘Soft traditionalists’ by contrast, see no contradiction between holding their beliefs, which are rather similar to the beliefs of the ‘hard’ factions, and being actively engaged in the political institutions of mainstream society. That may entail running for and holding political office, sitting on the board of directors of a publicly-held company, or being appointed to a judgeship. A prominent traditionalist of the ‘soft’ school today is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Members of the ‘soft’ faction are mostly religious believers, though a handful may also be agnostics, non-practicing religious or even, very rarely, atheists who nevertheless oppose many of the social norms and cultural practices of the broader, secularizing society. We will contemplate these highly unusual ‘dissenters among the dissenters’ in a future post.
In the coming years, Greymantle sees the ‘soft’ traditionalists playing the role of buffers, protectors, advocates and intermediaries between the broader American society and the ‘hard’ traditionalists. Without their continued presence high within the power structure of government and corporations, it is likely, in Greymantle’s view, that the ‘hard’ factions would come under greater scrutiny and persecution both sooner and harder than they otherwise would with members of the ‘soft’ faction occupying key roles in the higher echelons of power.
Taken together, both the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ factions make up what Greymantle will henceforth term ‘conservative dissenters’ against the new social majority. That is to say, they are people who will refuse to go along with, and will sometimes openly defy the social majority. Many will express their dissent in a fairly passive manner, while others will clash with the wider society more openly and with greater levels of overt antagonism.
THE COMING QUEST FOR GROUP RIGHTS
One of the central ways in which modern, Western society has developed away from the norms still held by the conservative dissenters is in its articulation and development of the concept of ‘the rights of the individual’. Individuals are assumed to be rationale agents capable of pursuing their own interests in an informed and enlightened manner. When it comes to what is right or good (i.e. what is termed moral) the individual’s own conscience and choices are considered to be of paramount importance.
Individual rights have everywhere overthrown the older authority of community leaders, religious authorities and traditional understandings of proper personal conduct throughout the West. The current and arguably most revolutionary phase of this process of development in all likelihood commenced with the extension of the voting suffrage to women in the early 20th century. The revolutionary process then accelerated beginning with the emergence of the New Social Movements (NSMs) in the 1960s.
The NSMs included feminism (and extension of earlier movements for women’s rights), the gay rights movement, the environmental movement, and the Counterculture write large. Social movements seeking greater rights for and better treatment of ethnic and racial minorities fall under the NSM banner to some degree, but these were highly idiosyncratic and particular to the situations of various nations.
In addition, movements like the Civil Rights movement on behalf of black Americans were not solely concerned with the extension of individual rights enjoyed by white Americans to blacks, but were motivated by a desire to establish a potentially new set of rights for black Americans as a group distinct from both white Americans and other racial minorities in the US. In that sense, the Civil Rights struggle can be seen as a harbinger of the coming struggles for group rights.
Greymantle believes these struggles are now upon us, and that they will be just as turbulent as the social struggles of the past.
How is it that a set of movements seeking to establish new sets of communal rights for discriminated-against groups are poised to inspire a new host of social movements that have as their aim the securing of group rights for the ‘conservative dissenters’? The answer lies in both the legal framework that grew up as a result of the Civil Rights movement, earlier constitutional and legal protections for the free exercise of religion and now, the effect of identity politics, a product of the Left that the Right is starting to seize upon in an effort to ring-fence the interests of various of its affiliated communities.
THE POSSIBLE PATHS AHEAD: LINES OF FRACTURE
Many potential pathways forward are pregnant in the current moment, and the patterns that emerge in the near future will result primarily from two main factors. First, how far the conservative dissenters wish to take their dissent, and second, how the activists of the Social Left conceive of their endgame.
Taking the objectives of the conservative dissenters first, the question to ask is whether the dissenters’ core aim is to strengthen communal rights and even inaugurate new forms of communal rights that are designed to be protective, i.e. intended to keep their insular communities intact against assaults by the outer society, or whether the dissenters’ true aim is to go on the offensive and reclaim the ground lost by their ‘soft’ traditionalist allies.
In a very broad sense, a ‘defensive strategy’ by the dissenters would basically involve tweaking existing laws protecting religious liberty so that some amount of discrimination will continue to be allowed, or even guaranteed under law, against out-groups and heretics within the dissenter communities.
In other words, a Catholic or orthodox Jewish religious school can forbid a gay students’ society on campus from forming, or can fire an employee for having a sex change (i.e. ‘changing their gender’). These types of discrimination serve the purposes of securing the internal integrity of beliefs and enforced taboos within the dissenter communities.
An ‘aggressive strategy’ by the conservative dissenters would be a renewal of their partnership with the ‘soft’ faction and such secular social groupings as are sympathetic to their cause – granted, these are dwindling by the year – so as to engage in a renewed attempt to turn back that proverbial clock and re-litigate the statutory changes that accelerated the socially liberal trends of the 1960s.
What would that look like?
Greymantle could see, theoretically, a move to tighten divorce laws to eliminate ‘no fault divorce‘, moves to restrict abortion nationwide rather than solely in the Red States (this attempt is arguably still in motion even as it seems doomed to fail), a campaign to overturn both state and local statutes allowing for same-sex marriage – in essence making same-sex marriage illegal, and a restriction of other rights of non-heteronormative citizens to return the legal framework back to the early 1960s.
At present, the successful prosecution of an ‘aggressive strategy’ by the dissenters is difficult to envision given the shifts in social attitudes. A systematic attempt to executive such plans would seem doomed to fail in the near term. Greymantle sees the ‘defensive strategy’ as the more probable.
For their part, the activists of the Social Left, and here I mean groups such as NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD and other affiliated and sympathetic organizations, are standing at a crossroads. Having lost on Roe v. Wade, but having won on most other battlefronts, perhaps most notably in the federal statute establishing same-sex marriage as a fundamental right under federal law (making it legal in all 50 states), they can now choose to scoop up their winnings and celebrate a little bit, potentially dialing back the rhetoric and breaking out the peace pipes.
If the conservative dissenters embark on a clearly ‘defensive’ strategy, the Social Left can meet them with reason and understanding and hammer out some kind of compromise whereby every social group across the political and cultural spectrum is guaranteed their ‘safe spaces’. Or, the Social Left can stay on the attack and push to expand its reach ever deeper into schools, government and cultural institutions and take it once step farther: by infiltrating homes in more overt ways than through television.
This decision, and ultimately the Social Left will provide the critical actors in this drama, will determine the lines of fracture in society for the next 50 years, at least on the cultural side. Greymantle has to admit that he’s not all that hopeful. He finds himself in the camp that believes ‘Peak Woke‘ is still ahead of us. Having made their activist bones in earlier struggles, the current leaders of the Social Left are restless for new conquests, and the generation of youngsters coming up behind them are eager to make their own bones in the vanguard of the next social campaigns.
THE POSSIBLE PATHS AHEAD: LINES OF SOLIDARITY
Against a renewed assault by the Social Left, the conservative dissenters will have to dig in deep, husbanding resources and time and strategizing very carefully so as not to lose their remaining allies among the more nationalist GOP, the ‘soft’ faction, and even a few sympathetic views on the political left and within pockets of the legacy media (and granted, these are few).
The chief danger, the main pitfall opening before the dissenters’ feet, should they be unwary in this situation, is to become too overtly political and align themselves solely to any one political party or faction in the country. It would be a smarter move to alternate in support between a variety of political actors and factions, so as to make their support more valuable and coveted.
Whether by artifice or spontaneously, a number of dissenter factions in Pennsylvania and Ohio more or less followed this playbook in the 2022 statewide elections. Several of the larger Amish and Mennonite factions chose to split their support between Democratic and Republican candidates, possibly having an influence on the final election outcomes.
Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial election between Democrat Josh Shapiro and Republican Doug Mastriano, a hard-right follower of Donald Trump, may have been an early watershed for increased dissenter involvement in U.S. electoral politics as voters. Though actively courted by Mastriano’s campaign, the PA Amish and Mennonites and socially conservative splinter groups apparently split their votes more or less evenly between Mastriano and Shapiro, providing much less of an electoral edge for Mastriano than his campaign had hoped. Shapiro was elected in a landslide with 55% of the vote.
Mastriano believed that his strident rhetoric in defense of traditional social values and opposition to pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates would swing the conservative dissenters firmly into his camp, helping him clinch the election. In fact, many of the dissenters appear to have been turned off by Mastriano’s support of Donald Trump and his involvement in the events of January 6, 2021. Open violence, defiance of the law, and the ransacking of the Capitol by Trump supporters may have disgusted the pacifist Amish and unnerved many strait-laced Mennonites.
In Ohio’s gubernatorial election, a split also emerged between various dissenter factions, with some voting for the GOP candidate and others for the Democratic. Republican Governor Mike DeWine won reelection by an even greater landslide than Shapiro’s, taking 63% of the popular vote. That DeWine has never been associated with Trump and was not involved in Jan. 6 doubtless helped him, as did his able governance of Ohio during his first term in office.
The 2022 election was also notable for putting the dissenters on the radar screen of the legacy media, which has largely ignored them for decades. Whether and how their involvement in electoral politics persists will be a key determinant of how attitudes toward them by the mainstream left and activists of the Social Left evolve over the next decade. Flexibility may serve them well, particularly if they line up with the Democratic Party on issues related to organized labor, healthcare and the environment, making themselves a constituency worth wooing.
Conversely, an implacably hostile Social Left that takes over the reins of federal and state political power and uses the associated levers as a means of bending the ‘conservative dissenters’ to their will may only succeed in creating new bonds of solidarity among the dissenter factions despite their enormous differences in metaphysical beliefs and cultural doctrines.
One can imagine the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Haredim and Mennonites creating informal (or formal) political and legal alliances based on shared social interests (i.e. winning and broadening group rites and exceptions) despite the gulfs between them. How far the broader culture moves in other directions and the level of importance it attaches to bringing the dissenters to heel will determine the final outcome.
Until next time, I remain –
Greymantle
