Stop the False Dichotomy
Jerry Newcombe
5/10/11
        Mitch Daniels is considering the possibility or running for president. The Indiana governor said today that if he runs, his chances of beating Obama are “quite good.”
        I understand he generally has a good conservative track record. Great.
        Unfortunately, around the time he gave his speech to C-Pac, the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Mitch Daniels said it’s time to put the social issues on the backburner and just focus on the economic ones. He said we conservatives should call for a “truce” on issues like abortion and focus instead on runaway government spending.
         To me, this is a false dichotomy. “Are you either a fiscal conservative or a social conservative?”
         A lot of the runaway government spending is related to the social issues.
         Short version: The government has helped exacerbate the breakdown of the family. In the wake of the breakdown of the family, the government comes in supposedly to help. But we are being bankrupted by having to shell out for those government services.
         Runaway government spending is caused more by out-of-control entitlement spending than all other expenditures combined. Much of the entitlement spending has to do with fixing problems caused in part by government programs.
         So it all becomes a vicious cycle.
         Try and stop the runaway government bleeding, and you become likened to the Grinch.
         It’s easier to do it Obama’s way. Say that you oppose irresponsible government spending, but then put in your budget all sorts of unsustainable expenditures, with no real brakes applied to entitlement programs. The media applauds him.
        As Church Lady would observe, “How convenient!”
        Whoever runs for president against President Obama needs to build a consensus of different types of conservatives.
        Reagan provides a great model. Reagan built a coalition, like a three legged stool. He welcomed the social conservatives (the pro-life, pro-family values types), the strong-on-defense supporters, and the fiscal conservatives as well.
        If any one of these three prongs had been missing, our 40th president might not have won election or re-election. He certainly would not have won the landslide he did in 1984, when he carried every state but one.
        Recently, I asked Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina about this false dichotomy (between fiscal conservatism and social issues conservatism). I said, “Some people are saying, ‘Let’s just focus on fiscal responsibility, but forget the social issues that the values voters are concerned about, like abortion, same sex marriage, and so forth.’ What are your thoughts on this?”
        He answered, “Well, we have to realize that there is a connection between fiscal issues and cultural issues. In fact, one of the biggest expenditures we have as a federal government is related to our cultural decline of children born outside of marriage and the social implications of drug use and school dropouts and unemployment and incarceration. This is related to cultural decline of social issues. So, we can’t separate the two.”
        He went on to add, “fiscal issues are not going to work the way we want, unless we have a culture with the values and principles that make it work.”
        I asked a similar question to Bob Knight, a syndicated columnist and author of many books. He said it gets back to the government not interfering with the family: “the whole libertarian ethos, the idea that social issues are irrelevant---‘all we want is freedom and we want smaller government’---that can’t happen without strong families. It never can happen, which is why the Left has been at war with the family since its inception.”
        To Bob, battles over marriage, including battles over same-sex marriage, matter. He told me, “I’m always amazed at the blind spot libertarians have for this truth that if you don’t make marriage and families strong, you’re inevitably going to have bigger government to pick up the pieces.”
        The tragedy is that some government policies can actually hurt the family. Let’s take a specific example of the urban family during the time of the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson.
        LBJ declared war on poverty. Sounds commendable.
        But the way they went about it seems to have caused even more poverty in the long run, by hurting the families of the poor.
        They said, “Look, dad, if you stay in this household, we’re going to give this household less money.” So, they basically said it’s better to be divorced or to be single.  Then they said, “Mom, have more babies, we’ll give you more money.”
        So now, all of a sudden, the government subsidized illegitimacy. Today you have a situation where about 70% of children born in urban households are born to single moms, and that’s a social disaster. Even most liberals would agree that that illegitimacy rate is a social disaster.
        That’s not good for anybody, including the children----especially the children.
        There is such a thing as the law of unintended consequences. I’m sure there are some situations where people meant well, but it didn’t work out well.
        We now have enough data that we should never go down this dead end again.
        We have to change our policies.
        I hope that fewer conservative politicians will fall for the lie that you can separate conservative fiscal policies from conservative social issues.
 
 

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Jerry Newcombe is the senior producer and host of The Coral Ridge Hour. He has also written or co-written 21 books, including The Book That Made America: How the Bible Formed Our Nation. Jerry co-wrote (with Dr. Peter Lillback) the bestselling, George Washington's Sacred Fire. He hosts the website www.jerrynewcombe.com.