Since Reagan and the Moral Majority fiscal conservatives (FCs) and cultural conservatives (CCs) have held to a non-aggression pact that has allowed them victory after victory in elections at every level across the country. But it's been an uneasy alliance. FCs have always looked down on their CC brethren, thinking them to be illiterate boobs and hicks. CCs have always seen FCs as materialistic and godless. They tolerated each other because each saw the means to their ends in the other. FCs had the political power that CCs lacked while CCs provided the masses of rabble wielding pitchforks and torches at the voting booth.
It was a marriage of convenience with large doses of cynicism on both sides of the relationship.
As far as FCs were concerned, the CCs could agitate for anything they wanted - they could be anti-choice, pro-gun, anti-gay, pro-school prayer, bigoted, racist xenophobes - as long as they provided sufficient numbers of agitated villagers at the ballot box to carry election day and didn't accumulate too much political capital. It was easy enough to hold one's nose and pay lip service to a CC agenda that, in a diverse culture, was pretty obviously going nowhere. Even a cursory glance that the CCs agenda was enough to demonstrate that virtually every iota of it was unconstitutional, illegal or fattening and therefore a non-starter.
CCs, on the other hand, hoped that the FCs political experience, connections and clout could help them change all that.
Then came George W. Bush, a born-again, belligerent illiterate with an Oedipal complex. After eight years of profligate spending on an unnecessary war, an expansion of government beyond the bounds of imagination, maxing out the national credit cards and a spectacular trashing of the economy through fiscal policies of deregulation designed to give any adult involved in the financial sector the mentality of a six year old turned loose in a candy store, the FCs started to have some serious second thoughts.
The election cycle of 2008 is a marvel of re-alignment. FCs (the segment of the unholy alliance of fiscal and cultural conservatives with the functioning brain cells) has suddenly discovered that they have more in common with the "Librul Left" than they do with the CC right! They agree with Progressives that the important issues confronting us are in the money - how it's gathered, how it's spent, the size of government, fiscal policy, monetary policy, economics, economic stability and the Market. The disagreement lies in the details but, at least they're speaking the same language. Confronted with ample evidence that totally unregulated free market capitalism and "trickle-down" economics are simply not viable, we suddenly see hard line ideologues becoming open minded pragmatists willing to exploring other ideas that might get things back to a "normal" they can recognize.
If you're wondering why an almost unending line of bright, intelligent, sincere Republicans are suddenly lining up to endorse Barack Obama, there I believe, is the reason. If you ever wondered why so many people of so many stripes see Obama as a real "uniter not a divider", I believe that is the reason.
The economic crisis is real and the CCs agenda does nothing to address it. Economics is simply not on their list of priorities. They don't have words for it or a frame of reference that recognizes it. (Eskimos have twenty seven words for snow - people who speak Aramaic have maybe one.) Figuring out who can marry who or whether the government should take over the conversation between a woman and her doctor furthers nothing to dig us out of the rubble of an economic meltdown.
Figuring out how to get out of this mess is everything - and all the details are negotiable if you can work with someone who at least speaks the same language and agrees on what the important issues are.
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