Today, the widening ideological rift between liberals and conservatives is clear, but the more subtle differences between different schools of thought within political parties can be harder to interpret.
The Republican National Convention emphasizes that Republicans are largely united behind a party platform that combines a range of conservative ideas, but their motivations and priorities are different and may overlap.
One such school of thought is social conservatism.
What is social conservatism?
According to the European Centre for the Study of Populism, “social conservatism is the belief that society is built on a network of fragile relationships that need to be maintained through obligations, traditional values, and established institutions.”
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“Social conservatives are generally skeptical of social change and believe in maintaining the status quo on such social issues as family life, sexual relations, and patriotism.”
Social conservatism, more simply put, is conservatism on social issues. In the United States, that might mean opposition to gay and transgender rights, abortion, immigration, civil rights, and other issues that affect social groups and relationships.
Social conservatives often support gun rights and a strong and central role for religion, especially Christianity, in society and government.
Social conservatives tend to oppose measures to eliminate historical inequalities linked to individual and societal differences, such as race, class, sex, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and nationality.
Historically, social conservatives have opposed social reforms such as racial integration, civil rights reform, women's suffrage, and the legalization of homosexuality.
They tend to oppose pluralism, where groups of different cultural identities coexist side by side as equals in society, and embrace hierarchical structures instead.
“Our research shows that conservatives tend to believe more strongly than liberals in a hierarchical world – essentially the idea that the universe is a place where the boundaries of categories and concepts matter,” writes Jeremy Clifton of the University of Pennsylvania.
A good example of this is conservatives' emphasis on the deep, “natural,” essential differences between men and women and the importance of each fulfilling traditional gender roles.
Through most of the 20sNumber In the 19th century, social conservatism was primarily concerned with maintaining racial, religious, and gender distinctions in society and the law.
They may prefer a “law and order” kind of order as a good in itself to a society that is messier, less disciplined, and in which certain individual freedoms are permitted.
They may demand new implementation of values āāthey call “outdated” and want to return to a real or imagined past.
Thomas DeMichele of the fact-checking organization Fact/Myth explains a key difference between current mainstream conservatism and varieties of conservatism of the past:
āGenerally speaking, classical conservatism seeks to preserve tradition, while social conservatism seeks progressive change to what are perceived to be traditional values.ā In other words, they seek progress by returning to an idealized past from social changes that have already occurred.
Social conservatism or fiscal conservatism?
Fiscal conservatism is another major trend in American conservatism.
Some of its most important and central beliefs are that taxes should be kept low and that government should have a small, intervening role in social and economic affairs and little power.
There are some contradictions with social conservatism, particularly in the tendency for social conservatives to want the government to have more power to enforce certain moral and social rules, but within the modern Republican Party the two coexist without much conflict.
Fiscal conservatives believe that society and the economy can and should regulate themselves without oversight, and that the primary role of government is to protect private property, not to protect and promote the people's lives and their ability to exercise their rights more directly and actively.