“Social Liberalization” in Opposition to “Social Conservatism”

A couple of days ago, I wrote a briefly about the question of social conservatism in retrospect. Namely, if every prior generation of social conservatives turned out to be wrong about the effects of social liberalization, why should we assume today’s social conservatives are any different?

The replies to that post on social media make it obvious I should’ve clarified what I mean by “social liberalization.” “Mao’s cultural revolution was bad, American social conservatives objected to Maoism, therefore social conservatives were right (at least in that instance) about the dangers of social liberalization” is an objection if my argument had been “Social conservatives are always wrong about the dangers of leftism.” But that’s not my argument.

I chose “social liberalization” carefully. In the crude framing common to American politics, we tend to label anything the left does as “liberal” and anything the right does as “conservative.” But that equivalence often fails to hold. “Social liberalism” does not mean “whatever progressives or leftists want or do.” It means to be more liberal in social matters.

Thus, “social liberalization.” To to liberalize in the social sphere is to lift restrictions preventing people from leading the kinds of lives they want. It’s to make people socially more free. We socially liberalize when society and culture shift to be more open to, and less restrictive of, gay people. We socially liberalize when we turn cultural norms against racism and break down racial hierarchies. We socially liberalize when we embrace religious pluralism, or when we move beyond structural misogyny.

Historically, whenever we’ve sought to bring individuals more social freedom, and particularly when those individuals are members of marginalized groups, social conservatives have told us the results will be dire. Accepting gay people will destroy the institution of marriage. Recognizing gender equality will degrade the very idea of merit. Etc.

But if “social liberalization” simply means giving people more freedom within the social sphere, then we can find plenty of instance when the political left has opposed it. And if that’s the case, then “social liberalization” can’t be a synonym for “progressivism” or “the left.”

Thus, to restate the thesis of my original post, social conservatives frequently tell us that granting more social freedoms will lead to dire consequences. There is more social freedom today than there was in the past, historical social conservatives also said giving more freedom would be bad, and yet few of us want to go back to the reduced freedom of our ancestors. If that’s the case, then we should view contemporary social conservative claims in that context, push for even greater social freedom via social liberalization, and be confident our descendants will thank us for it.

If history's social conservatives have always been wrong, why would we think today's are right?

Social conservatism reduces to two primary claims:

  1. The way we (meaning the social conservative) live now (or at some chosen point in the past) is the best way to live
  2. Deviations from that style of living (whether proposed, or by way of example of those choosing to live differently) are not improvements, but steps in the wrong direction, and potentially quite harmful ones

Social conservatism thus rejects social liberalization, or the increasing freedom of people to choose new ways to live, to express personal identities in increasingly diverse ways, and to achieve social acceptance in that diversity. (Update: I wrote a follow-up post clarifying the distinction between “social liberalization” and “the political left.") The social conservative tells us to trust his judgement that the contemporary forces for social liberalization have either gone too far, or are asking us to go too far, and that if we continue along that path, we will regret it.

But the social conservative’s claim runs into a rather obvious problem: history. For there have been social conservatives before him, stretching back as far as we have historical records. And so in light of his claim now about this time social liberalism has gone too far, or threatens to do so, we can ask, “Were those prior generations of social conservatives right in their echoing claims?”

And there’s the rub. Because if we think back, to history’s cavalcade of social conservatives saying, “Now we’ve gone too far” or “Now is just the right about of social liberalism,” in every instance it’s turned out they were wrong. We didn’t have enough social liberalization a thousand years ago, or five-hundred, or even one-hundred. Every one of those points we can look back on and think it’s a good thing the forces of social liberalization won out, because we (or, at least, most of us) wouldn’t want to go back to that.

If that’s the case for every prior social conservative standing athwart his moment’s history and demanding the liberalization stop, why wouldn’t we assume that it’s the case for today’s social conservatives, as well?

What happens if Trump loses?

As we close in on the election, I’ve started seeing more conversations about what’ll happen to the GOP and the American right if Trump loses and we move into a Harris administration. The two common predictions seem to be

  1. Trumpism is here to stay, and the likelihood of a MAGA candidate winning in 2028, especially if that candidate lacks Trumps cognitive and personality deficiencies, is high. Thus, while four years of Harris is unquestionably better than another four years of Trump, democracy isn’t out of the woods, and could well be in just as precarious a spot in another four years as it is now.

  2. Trump’s loss will take the wind out of the MAGA sails, the old GOP will, over time, reassert itself, and we’ll return to something that looks like the Reagan or Paul Ryan Republicans. This might take a while, but especially once Trump either dies or is so far gone cognitively he can’t really communicate, those reform forces in the party will be able to assert themselves without fearing his wrath.

I’m not convinced either’s correct. A second loss will hurt Trump’s influence, and the cognitive decline we’ve seen recently is real and rapid enough that it will accelerate that. And, given that the MAGA movement is predominantly—though not entirely—a cult of personality, Trump being off the stage for one reason or another will sap far-right enthusiasm, and demotivate his most faithful voters. Thus a Trump loss is likely to weaken the fascist MAGA elements that currently control the GOP. This in turn will make the path to victory for a new MAGA candidate more difficult. Project 2025, which was written as a distillation of MAGA policy, is profoundly unpopular with voters, after all—including with Republican voters.

At the same time, though, the GOP is a party controlled by three forces: Trump, the far-right media ecosystem, and primaries. Remove Trump and the other two remain. Fox News isn’t going to ditch Jesse Watters for David French, even if Trump suffers a landslide loss. They know who their audience is and what it craves. Likewise, anyone who wants to run for higher office needs to survive a primary first, primary voters are the furthest right in the GOP, and many of the more moderate Republicans have left the party. If the people picking the candidates want populists and nationalist fascists, that’s what they’re going to get, and the only way the GOP can stop that is to abandon primaries. Which they’ll have a hard time doing, with the party leadership currently dominated by MAGA diehards.

If I had to guess, then, a Trump loss won’t leave us right where we are today, just with someone else other than Trump a coin-flip away, in 2028, from destroying American democracy. The far-right will be weakened. Nor will it mean the collapse of MAGA as the dominant force within the Republican Party. Instead, I think we end up with a Republican Party that stays MAGA, and maybe gets even worse, but finds it impossible to win the presidency, and has a harder and harder time controlling either branch of Congress. They’ll get some state level victories, and have total control of some parts of some states, but as a national party, the GOP will be both weak and unable to fix itself. From there, I’m not sure what happens. We’ve had parties disappear before, to be replaced with new ones. America’s electoral system structurally locks in two parties, but one of them doesn’t need to be the GOP.