Well, if the OP asked what Republicans were right on, I wouldn't have said balancing the budget. This goes back to we don't really have a conservative party. True conservatives want a balanced budget, and to a degree they're right in my opinion. We should aim to be balanced on average over the long-term by running deficits in recessions and surpluses during growth.

That they can rape the future of the greatest superpower ever and win elections with minority eternally and there wont be a single revolt about it by the population.

Well maybe not right for long.

END IT NOW

Democrats are bad at politics

The corporate (but not individual and especially not individual top rate!) tax rate probably did need to be a bit lower for our corporations to compete better internationally and not relocate. That’s really about it.

Edit: Ponied.

This is what came to mind for me also.

I also think there is room for debate about whether some of the GOP criticisms of Obama’s policies on Iran and Syria were correct, although I probably come down more on the Obama side of the fence.

GOP didn’t speak with a unified voice on consumer credit and home ownership in the mid 2000s, but those who argued that the government was contributing to an unsustainable bubble in housing prices were probably correct.

We could come up with an endless list of tactical moves that the GOP has been right about. That’s not even an interesting question.

The easiest way to improve economic metrics is just to deregulate everything.

I fixed your post

No one giving social conservatives their due? I'll hot take this **** up: secularization of society was hugely destructive. I ain't talking about things like school prayer, and I'm certainly not talking about fealty to the religious right, but I mean that whatever social forces have seen church attendance fall to record lows and replaced it with nothing.

Peter Beinart put it best imo

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...-faith/517785/

Seems another bullet point for social contact theory and that capitalism's "individuals are everything" mindset has led to huge amounts of social segregation and a giant drop in public ethics and morals, tons of simmering anger and draws a direct line to Trump style politics.

This is obviously complicated, not the least of which because tons of the religious right are in fact self-destructive racist selfish goons themselves, but insofar as whatever sincere social conservatives existed and expressed antipathy at the destruction of religious traditions, we have all been made the worse for it.

And yes I recognize that for instance many traditional religious institutions have contributed to their own undoing (e.g., the Catholic Church and running an accountability-free sex predator regime), don't @ me.

For lots of people, church is like the one civilizing institution in their lives, when the state has been captured by rent-seeking capitalists who are going to destroy your schools and dismantle your communities and trade unions, mocking the religiously pious was utterly and fantastically dangerous, and insofar as sincere critics (mostly conservative?) recognized this, we should have heeded the warnings.

DVaut,

Post above is very good and worth discussing. Although you probably would agree that it does not reflect the reasoning of most who self-identify as social conservatives.

I think the phenomenon you describe above is also influenced by the pervasiveness of social media, consumer electronics, and geographic mobility. As a society, we largely have exchanged a more narrow, but deeper, set of social connections for a much larger, but more shallow, set of social connections.

The problem with this analysis is that there's no conservatives, like zero actual people that hold these views. They've proved this by deciding that, even if they hated trump, he was a better choice than hillary, even though she literally held these same views. You can also just like, read what they write, their op-eds and blog posts and see that that's true.

ISIS and the Proud Boys agree that isolated young and middle age men need to belong to something bigger than themselves.

But America's youth have non-unionized Uber jobs and Twitch and Reddit communities and 4chan so I guess it will work out just fine.

It might be true but I don't love this explanation. I think it is essentially a post hoc ergo propter hoc. I think both phenomenon (institutional degradation, technological gains) are symptomatic of finance capital but humans understandably conflate the two because one sort of followed the other; that is, technology gains have been huge because incredible amounts of capital driven into technology firms and then they spit out ever new innovations, and then what follows are a bunch of big cultural changes and institutional transitions. But I maintain the real, genuine causative agent is changes in our economic system, policy changes around how we accumulate capital, what we do with surplus, etc.

Without getting into tedious 15th/16th century European history but historians still have functionally the same debate: did the printing press cause the Reformation or were both the products of an earlier causative factor. I think the proper (admittedly leftist) reading is that both were in fact caused by the dawning of modern capitalism, itself in its early infancy at the time. That is, study Gutenberg and other inventors all clustered around solving printing and movable type and you'll recognize that demand for books was entirely market driven, not the other way around. That is, the printing press was the result of market demands for books, it didn't create the demand itself. Why the demand for books? Rising literacy among the middle class and students and industry. Why all that? Why the existence of students and universities at all? Why is there a middle class? Because at the same time, you're seeing innovations in banking, insurance, accounting, the emergency of double-entry book keeping, urbanization, the height of the enclosure movement sending labor into cities, etc. It's really the start of early mercantilism and early capitalism and the end of feudalism. All of that is producing the need for technical experts, specialists, a labor market -- and the resulting demand for literate workers and books. Boom, the printing press.

Then over the next 50 years or so you start to see huge shifts in religious thought and essentially a revolution of organized religion in Europe culminating in the Reformation because of a lot of the same factors: rising literacy rates, growing cities, more capital.

Simplified story, sure, obviously, it's a message board. But I think it's ultimately true. But you have a historical antecedent for the process write large: change in economic system and wholesale systemic re-thinking about production and trade --> technological changes --> mass migration, cultural, religious, institutional shifts. Lots of people go back to the technological shifts and stop. But the true causative factor is before.

I think we're essentially in the same sort of transitory period now wherein free market capitalism and financilization of the markets caused big spikes in capital pools and the size of markets, lots of capital flow to tech companies, and they see big revolutions first (computing, networking, the internet, labor changes, commerce changes) and THEN a bunch of cultural shifts, global migration, the reorganization of institutions -- and the resultant temptation to assume the cause is technology when the true cause is what how we produce stuff and what we do with the surpluses we produce (e.g., invest in tech, give it back to zillionaires). And from there, you get a bunch of factors that inevitably disrupt institutions (the political system, organized religions, etc.)

I wonder if social conservatives honestly expected that embracing the market as the means of liberating humanity from oppressive institutions would result in throwing out the existing aristocracy and somehow organized religion would come out unscathed.

A lot of the marks surely did. Insert your ACist /Ron Paul fan jokes here. How many young dudes were frustrated about being powerless outsiders and thought, still think, that the way to storm the gates are to give ever more money to their vassals? There were, in my mind, huge amounts of true believers in their ranks. It shouldn't surprise us if social conservatives fell for the same con; remember there's like a huge industry of think tanks and pundits and whoever else, funded by millionaires, to convince people of just that. There's a whole cottage industry of Prosperity Gospel grifters, Joel Osteen types, selling people on this.

Decent chance that what you wrote above is close to the abstract of some academic article or thesis that you are working on or have already written.

That's a guess, not a criticism in any way.

Conservatives were right when they decided that infilitrating and taking over the Democratic Party in the 1990s was a powerful way to control the entire political debate in the United States.

If only people didn't stop going to church we could have thankfully ended up with Ted Cruz and Mike Pence instead of Trump. Not particularly convincing. Secularism has correlated pretty well with progressive policies and culture in Western Europe, Canada, and Australia.

.

The argument is also that people not going to church is why you end up with a party of regressive sociopaths like Trump, Cruz, and Pence, not necessarily that you'd predict for any single one of them but you'd get that kind of party, but more correctly you'd get a viscous base of cruel people who revel in genocidal fantasies and racist jokes.

Secularism in Western Europe and Canada are coupled with far more robust social democratic policies and also they too have seen far right populist movements, not as drastic as the US, which probably goes hand in hand with the fact that the US really doubled-down on turning the political system over to business interests and the wealthy, and while I'd argue "systemic political health" is better in Europe than the US, it's also teetering.

Also remember that the argument is "where were social conservatives right?" not dispositively and holistically explain the modern Republican Party.

That the average voter is just plain stupid.

DVaut, regarding this part:

So, one, I don't really understand this in the same way I don't really understand the idea of "evangelicals": I thought they're, like, the most religious kind of Christians, the kind who are really into that Jesus ****, so I don't totally understand how a group of people can both be super into Jesus and also not bother going to church?

But, going beyond the primaries where churchgoing evangelicals liked Cruz and non-churchgoers liked Trump: cool story, the ones who went to church liked a different shade of deplorable, but now that the primaries are over and we're living in the Trump presidency, evangelicals as a whole (churchgoers and non-churchgoers alike) are Trump's most reliable demographic, no? Doesn't he have like 80+% approval with those guys? Kudos to the Jesus folks for kinda preferring a slightly less deplorable candidate when they had a choice, but given that they've now all fallen in line behind the Deplorable In Chief, I'm not exactly ready to give them credit for demonstrating that their religious beliefs promote social cohesion.

"Evangelicals" are better described as a collection of certain Christian denominations (and non-denominational churches of a similar style) rather than being the most passionate of Christians.

Most Christians will sacrifice their beliefs for cash and a Pro Life Judge

goofy, RE: that quote, I think they're talking about self-identified evangelicals which is more a taxonomy for certain Protestants than any clear piety or devotional habits. And yes, I think we should find it an interesting sociological phenomenon when people *say* they are really into Jesus BUT they don't go to church AND they favor Trump even more than your average Republican.

But, OK, what if, instead of thinking of the argument as church makes you Good, we assume something like:

People are largely Bad, church or at least some institutional cohesion makes them less Bad. And even making people slightly less Bad would promote social cohesion.

Would that feel better?

And then if you sort of note that capitalism has a way of eroding a lot of institutional things that might, in isolation, on their own, not add up to much but together influence a lot of people and sort them into a "less bad" column (their cities, their families, their schools, their unions, their work), don't we start to approach an explanation for the differences between say the 1980s GOP and the 2018 GOP? Don't we start to explain how the US could devolve from sort of problematic democracy into a failed, fascist mess, right?

I ain't here to sing the praises of the 1980s GOP, but we can at least acknowledge the degradation, right?