But again, I don’t think Frum and Brooks and co. want to eliminate the base, they just think it won’t be enough in the future. ~Alex Massie

I’m not sure what Brooks thinks, and these two don’t speak for all of the reformers, but in Frum’s case this is not quite correct. Frum’s post on the significance of Bristol Palin’s marital woes concludes this way:

The socially conservative downscale voter is increasingly becoming a mirage – and a Republican politics based on that mirage will only lead us deeper into the desert.

To be precise, Frum is not exactly arguing for eliminating the base, but is saying that the base as it has been known in the past is evaporating and becoming something else. What he is recommending, as usual, is that the GOP abandon social conservatism before the socially conservative downscale voter abandons them by ceasing to exist. There may be something to this to the extent that rising generations are less likely to marry, or are more likely to marry late or marry and then divorce fairly quickly, and so one might think that they would be less likely to align themselves politically with a party that champions marriage and family (at least rhetorically). The trends he identifies are real, but his conclusions do not necessarily follow. One of the demographic reasons for declining GOP support among 18-29 year olds over the last several cycles is that Millennials are less likely to be white, married and Christian, which are the characteristics that have by and large defined the GOP voting coalition for several decades. Frum places the emphasis on marriage as the most relevant factor, which may or may not be true.

If it is true, it is very far from clear that Frum’s recommendation of dropping social conservative positions is the right one to follow. Ross and Reihan see the same problem, but have proposed an entirely different solution, which is that the GOP should adopt policies to promote and support stable marriages and childbearing. That is, they think the GOP should bother to implement policies that follow through on the rhetoric they have been using for decades. (They would probably not put it quite that way, but I think this is fair.) Their rationale for this is more than electoral strategy, though it is related to that as well, as they see the connections between family instability, lack of education and lower income and recognize the danger to the health of our political system if increasing family instability creates a highly stratified society. They argue for preventing the kind of social and economic stratification that will invariably result if these trends are not checked, whereas Frum essentially accepts that these trends are unfolding and the GOP must find some way to adapt to them. To put it another way, Ross and Reihan are interested in channeling these changes in a constructive fashion, while Frum argues for getting out of the way and going along with them.

One place where Frum’s analysis breaks down entirely is in the assumption that family instability and having children out of wedlock make people less likely to vote for a social conservative platform, when there is good reason to believe that it is precisely the instability and insecurity in private life that attract many voters to a social conservative message. Seeing the effects of chaos around them, these voters crave some semblance of order and an affirmation of norms. This is the perverse and perhaps unsustainable relationship between social disintegration and the politics of social conservatism, and I think it is a lesson to conservatives that the real work of cultural renewal is not primarily to be found in political activism but it is in combating that disintegration directly through local institutions, education and social work.

Social conservative voters have been used to win elections, but their agenda has never taken anything close to priority with the party. Part of this may be because the party’s ability to mobilize social conservative voters depends heavily on the ongoing failure to combat many of the social ills that generate social conservatives’ discontent with the current state of affairs. It may be worth pondering why it is that the period of the last decade where we have seen income stagnation and growing income inequality is also the period during which we have seen the intensification of social conservative rhetoric (if not of actual policies) and the increasing profile of socially conservative candidates inside the GOP who have, a la Huckabee, also started to offer some minimal lip service to downscale voters’ economic concerns.

Somewhere in all of this there may be some way to explain the manic reaction to Sarah Palin among rank-and-file conservatives, as her family possessed both elements of stability and instability that allowed her family life to be presented as both an ideal and as a recognizable, messy reality. Perhaps the conservative excuse-making for her daughter’s behavior was not just politically-motivated opportunism, but prompted recognition of the kind of family disruption that was only too familiar to them from their own families. Palin defenders fixated on class and education differences to explain the typically upscale conservative criticisms directed at her, but perhaps (and this is just speculation) it was actually in the differing experiences of family stability that determined whether someone was favorably inclined or critical. The identity politics that drove people to say, “She’s one of us” allowed her supporters to see her as someone very much like them and perhaps also someone who enjoyed a degree of family stability that they did not. That is, she was someone with whom they could identify, but also someone whom they aspired to imitate. Then again, this may not apply to the Palin phenomenon at all and the reasons for it may be entirely different. On that inconclusive note, I will stop.

Massie has an earlier post on this question here.