THE TORRENT of commentary on Ronald Reagan’s political career has tended to overlook our 40th president’s cultural conservatism. It was hard to miss, however, when he captured the presidency in 1980. Writing in Commentary a month before the election, political scientist James Q. Wilson observed that “the life and heart” of the Reagan campaign “are not to be found in elite concerns with economic and foreign policy, but in mass concerns with social and moral issues.” Wilson identified some of those issues–abortion on demand, rising levels of crime and disorder, unfettered self-expression, secularization of public schools–and noted that many Americans felt they had finally found a spokesman for these concerns in Ronald Reagan. He was pro-life, for school prayer, for the appointment of judicial conservatives, and for “traditional moral values,” which, he promised, would be “reflected in public policy.”
Wilson saw that “the traditionalists,” as he called them, tended to be religious believers, and he drew attention to evangelical Protestants in particular. He was right to do so. After decades of political quiescence, they had become more active by the early 1970s, and in the 1976 election they had faced a choice between a pro-abortion rights Episcopalian (Gerald Ford) and a Southern Baptist (Jimmy Carter) who was not shy about stating his born-again faith. By a narrow margin–52 percent to 48 percent, according to the National Election Survey–evangelicals opted for Ford.
But the majority of evangelicals in the South preferred Carter, helping him win key states. In 1980, many of these pro-Carter evangelicals decided to support Reagan. Pat Robertson, not incidentally, was one of those who moved from Carter to Reagan. Even though he was in a three-way race against Carter and Independent (former Republican) John Anderson, who also spoke of his evangelical faith, Reagan won 60 percent of the evangelical vote. In 1984, against Walter Mondale, Reagan saw that total climb, to 74 percent.
Looking back, you can see that Reagan was the crucial figure in bringing evangelicals solidly into the GOP. In 1988, George H.W. Bush didn’t do quite as well with evangelicals as Reagan, yet still he won 69 percent of the evangelical vote. Evangelicals have enabled Republicans to hold the House for 10 years now, and the Senate for eight of them. In 2000, George W. Bush, who is commonly seen as an evangelical, won at least 67 percent of the evangelical vote. (The University of Akron’s John Green, who studies the parties and elections, thinks the NES under-sampled evangelicals and that 71 percent voted for Bush.) It’s hard to imagine that Bush will fail to win a similarly high percentage of their ballots in his race against John Kerry.
Evangelicals now constitute the largest religious bloc in the electorate, and they are a hugely important force within the Republican party–40 percent of the Bush vote in 2000 came from white evangelicals, more than from any other religious group. Yet it’s a mistake to think that Wilson’s “traditionalists” have been only or even primarily evangelicals, since they include plenty of mainline Protestants and Catholics (who together gave Bush 42 percent of his vote). Moreover, the best predictor of how people vote may not be which church they go to, but how often they go. As Green’s data show, people who attend services at least once a week tend to vote Republican, while those who go less often or not at all tend to vote Democratic.
This religion gap has its roots in the sixties. In 1968 there was no correlation between church attendance and voting behavior. People voted about the same, regardless of how much or little they went to church. And to the extent that the condition of the culture mattered to voters, there was no reason they should have voted differently. As the political scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio have written, “there was a tacit commitment among elites in both parties to the traditional Judeo-Christian teachings regarding authority, sexual mores, and the family.” That commitment on the Democratic side was shattered with the nomination of George McGovern in 1972. Almost by default the GOP drew the interest of religiously observant voters. Yet it wasn’t until Reagan that the GOP became the explicitly conservative party on social issues it has remained ever since.
Still, what difference did Reagan make–what difference has his party made–on the social issues? In his 1980 article, Wilson doubted that Reagan could make much of a difference. He agreed that there was a connection between, as he put it, “public governance and private morality.” Yet much of what traditionalists objected to, he observed, had been wrought by the Supreme Court (or lower courts). At the top of the list of wrong decisions was Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case in which the Court declared a right to abortion not found in the text or history of the Constitution. Altering those decisions promised to be most arduous, as consider the supermajorities in Congress needed merely to propose a constitutional amendment. While Reagan spoke out in favor of amendments to protect voluntary school prayer and to prohibit abortion, no such amendments, or any others designed to secure goals favored by the traditionalists, were proposed during his two terms. Nor have any been proposed since then, despite the Republicans’ dominance of Congress since 1994.
Yet that is not the whole story. Presidents have the authority to nominate judges, and Reagan wound up appointing no fewer than 382, still a record for one president. Through his judges he undertook to influence the direction of the federal courts from top to bottom–to rein in rights-based liberalism and produce a judiciary respectful of the Constitution. You have to go back to FDR to find a president as philosophically purposeful as Reagan was in choosing judges. Nor did conservative judicial selection end with Reagan, for it continued with George H.W. Bush and is now the project of George W. Bush.
It’s obviously too early to offer a complete assessment of the impact of the judges appointed by the three presidents. Still, it is safe to say that the lower federal courts have proved significantly more moderate than they would have been had those presidents been less intentional about their judicial selection–or certainly had Democratic presidents been doing the job instead.
As for the Supreme Court, here is where, for the traditionalists, the keenest disappointment lies. Reagan appointed three new justices, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy, and George H.W. Bush named two, David Souter and Clarence Thomas. But of the five, only Scalia and Thomas have proved reliable exponents of a jurisprudence of constitutional self-government that would permit traditionalists a voice on the issues that first activated them politically.
A failure of the Reagan presidency–and arguably the greatest victory achieved by the left against it–was the defeat of the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. That became most apparent in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey when Kennedy, who took the seat meant for Bork, joined a five-justice majority (with O’Connor and Souter) in upholding Roe v. Wade. Had Bork been confirmed, the outcome surely would have been different. Likewise, had Bork been confirmed, the Court, with Kennedy writing for a five-justice majority in another 1992 case, would not have extended the school prayer decisions of the early sixties so as to ban prayer at public school graduation ceremonies.
It is also Kennedy who wrote for the Court last year in striking down a state sodomy statute. The result in Lawrence v. Texas was less important than the reasoning. In Casey, Kennedy had written, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” It was hard to know precisely what this meant (Scalia rightly ridiculed it as the “sweet-mystery-of-life passage”), but it suggested a libertarianism whose defense might require denying the states their traditional authority to regulate “health, safety, and morals.” In Lawrence, Kennedy declared that the states may not “define the meaning of the ‘intimate sexual’ relationship or…set its boundaries absent injury to a person or abuse of an institution the law protects.” Scalia observed of that pronouncement that it “effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation.” It remains to be seen how Lawrence will play out, though already it has been cited by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in its decision imposing same-sex marriage on the Bay State. Suffice it to say, a leftward, social-engineering opinion like Kennedy’s is hardly what Reagan would have wanted from one of his justices.
Reagan did other things on behalf of traditional values (though never enough to satisfy the traditionalists). So did George H.W. Bush, and so has George W. Bush. Examples include a pathbreaking study of the family conducted under Reagan, and the pro-marriage initiative undertaken by George W. Bush. Meanwhile, the need to return to traditional values has been a recurring theme of Republican rhetoric.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was famous for, among other wise statements, this one: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” It’s fair to say that what Reagan started was a political effort–liberal if you want to call it that–that continues still today to “change a culture and save it from itself.” Of course, Reagan himself would not have put the matter that way. He emphasized changing government. But changes in government can affect a culture. And so it is that George W. Bush sometimes seems to borrow from Moynihan. The week before Reagan died Bush told a group of journalists that “the culture needs to be changed,” and that it was to help change the culture that “I got into politics in the first place.”
The good news is that the culture does seem to be changing–for the better, Anthony Kennedy and the Supreme Court notwithstanding. In the spring issue of City Journal, Kay Hymowitz writes, “Americans have been self-correcting from a decades-long experiment with ‘alternative values.’ Slowly, almost imperceptibly during the 1990s, the culture began a lumbering, Titanic turn away from the iceberg.” She points out that “most of the miserable trends in crime, divorce, illegitimacy, drug use, and the like that we saw in the decades after 1965 either turned around or stalled” and that a more “vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry” is emerging.
Doubtless there are explanations for these developments in addition to politics, and I suspect that they include the influence of traditional religion as well as the sheer exhaustion of trying to live left, by the dim lamp of some alternative value. But I’d guess that Reagan, if he had been told of the positive developments, would have winked and told you that he had fully expected them, all along, and indeed, that even better days lie ahead.
Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.
