When Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels was considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination, he suggested—and then repeatedly defended—the concept of a “truce” on social issues.
Daniels was making the point that the country’s fiscal challenges were so great—he likened them repeatedly to a “red menace” of our time—that everything else would have to take a backseat in the name of practicality. The main problem with this approach, as Bill McGurn pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, was that a truce among Republicans on such issues would be meaningless:
To begin with, the aggression on social issues today emanates mostly from the left, whose preferred vehicle is a willing judge inflicting his private social preferences on the law. Anyone who believes that a Republican call for a truce will end this is living in dreamland.
If the culture wars have followed any blueprint, it’s that the left initiates the battles and the right plays defense, only to have the media scold the right for engaging in the culture wars to begin with. As James W. Caesar wrote in a 2007 essay on conservatism:
The Religious Right objects to liberalism’s secularism. Secularism goes well beyond the espousal of an interpretation of the Constitution, where it has sought to erect a famous “wall of separation” between religion and the state. Its fundamental objective extends far beyond the legal realm. Liberal secularism is a project in its own right that is bent on eliminating any recognized place for biblical faith as the guiding light of the culture. It will not rest content until faith withdraws from playing any public role, direct or indirect. The conflict of secularism and faith is at the heart of the so-called “culture war.”
If the debates of this weekend did anything more clearly than vindicate social conservatives’ in this regard, I didn’t catch it. The concentration on social issues so flooded the debates that the topic was roundly mocked on Twitter more than any other aspect of the moderators’ behavior. But the moment that typified this was when George Stephanopoulos asked Mitt Romney the following question: “Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception, or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?”
