A week ago — which is 5 dog years in blog time — Helen Rittelmeyer chastised Conor Friedersdorf for proclaiming his conservatism but disclaiming any obligations to support the Republican team. Helen wrote:

I could probably state my entire objection in a single sentence—”Conor, you’re my editor and I love you, but don’t take sides with anyone against the Family, ever[.]”

If party loyalties are indeed like familial loyalties — and what the social science shows on this question (see particularly Philip Converse’s work and the subsequent follow-up studies) is that the citizens of a mass democracy are overwhelmingly likely to simply inherit their parents’ party tags blindly and automatically — then I’ll see Helen’s Coppola and raise her a Shakespeare. “A little more than kin, and less than kind,” Hamlet replied when Claudius claimed him as both a cousin and a son.

Helen’s statement that

The Democrats are on the left, and we’re on the right. At any given movement, the GOP might be more or less in line with conservative principles, but it is, and will continue in the near future to be, the conservative party in our two-party system.

may be pervasive conventional wisdom, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny (nor, if it were true, would it generate the obligations Helen requires for her argument to go through). In case anyone had forgotten, a unified Republican government presided over the greatest expansion in federal spending since the Johnson administration. Perhaps a tad bit more unnervingly, Bush and his enablers in the congressional GOP have waged a seven-year war on Magna Carta and other institutions traditionalists — with their strange antiquarian eccentricities and all that — might have placed some value on. They wasted some uncountable quantity of blood and treasure, both American and non-American, on a lunatic project to turn the middle-East into Switzerland, and were so wedded to the infallibility of scientific socialism Lysenkoism the exportation of pseudo-democracy that they didn’t perform minimal due diligence prior to launching the Mesopotamian catastrophe. And oh yes, a Republican president, treasury secretary, Federal Reserve Chairman, presidential candidate, and vice-presidential candidate (the last to the extent that she has any grasp of the relevant concepts) have engineered the conversion of the entire finance industry of the homeland of Weberian Protestant work ethics into a Scandinavian-style social democracy, except with far more ample welfare for the incompetent ultra-rich.

Did Democrats participate to varying degrees in all the foregoing? Sure: what that demonstrates is that, on the major questions of the Bush era, many Democrats were no more conservative than the Republicans; it doesn’t demonstrate that they were less conservative.

On the other hand, the Democrats have become a considerably more fiscally austere party than the Republicans (which is not to say that the Democrats are fiscal conservatives simpliciter): the budget would-be President McCain proposes adds 5.7 trillion dollars to the national debt, whereas a President Obama would add only (!!!) something less than a third of that figure.  Fanatical Lafferism is no more conservative than the Wolfowitzian approach to international relations. By the same token, to the admittedly paltry extent that Democrats represent a break from the foreign policy of the last eight years and the outrages against what Milton called “antient liberty,” they are the marginally more conservative choice.

Now it’s true that Republicans favor overturning the Roe v. Wade decision, imposing legal restrictions on abortion, and amending the Constitution to put a halt on the expansion of gay marriage rights. A voter for whom those and related concerns trump all others no doubt belongs in the GOP. But since there is no such thing as the pro-freedom wing of the judicial branch, the sorts of federal court appointments that would be required to end national legalization of abortion will come packaged with all sort of restrictions on civil liberties, and it is very far from clear why conservatives should have a strong preference for one or the other party’s greatly dispiriting roster of judicial appointments. And as for gay marriage — first of all, it is a conservative development, and secondly and more importantly, trying to stop it is a less productive use of one’s time than trying to put all the free-standing toothpaste in America back into the tube whence it came.

In short, the Republicans are a conservative party if and only if the Democrats are. One might appear marginally more conservative than the other depending on one’s emphases and interests, but as far as institutions for promoting the conservative agenda go, they stand or fall together: beyond a great effluvium of windbaggery on TV and radio, there is just not much for staunch conservatives to choose between them. (And here I confess somewhat preferring the Democrats this time around in virtue of their disinclination, relative to their opponents, to engage in insane demagogy or make the first person in the line of a succession an individual less fit for that responsibility than almost everyone with whom I have ever had a minimally interesting conversation.) The fact that, once upon a time, the Democrats promoted the Great Society while the Republicans ran Barry Goldwater, changes this not at all.

But even if the GOP were a clearly more conservative option, that would not necessarily obligate a sincere self-identified conservative to support the Republicans, all else being equal. It depends on what sort of conservative one is. Here on the other side of the Atlantic, the Tory party is not substantially closer in substantive terms to either American party; if anything, the Tories are are on balance just slightly to the left, and thus a fortiori to the left, of the Democrats — Boris Johnson didn’t endorse Obama because he is the Weather Underground’s Manchurian Mayor of London. Likewise with the CDU/CSU (Merkel’s party) and FDP (the free-marketeers) in Germany, the UMP (Sarkozy’s party) in France, and the other parties of the European center-right. Or in other words, by the dominant worldwide standards, the Democrats of the United States are a center-right party, which is simply to say that the political median of the United States is further right than in other countries.

It is on this point that Helen’s argument for loyalty to the GOP washes ashore even granting for the sake of argument her assessment of the Republicans as the conservative choice and her claim that conservatives have some duty to support conservative parties. What Helen does not, and could not plausibly claim, is that all conservatives have a duty to support the most conservative party in all circumstances. Otherwise, she’d be committed to the proposition that if she were transplanted to the UK, she’d be bound to vote Tory, but if the Tories were transplanted to the USA, supporting them would be impermissible. For those who are closer to the center than to the right of the center-right, it’s the more leftward of two center-right parties that, ceteris paribus, deserves support.

So if the Republicans really are the more conservative party — if, in other words, for reasons I’ll leave fans of this claim to enunciate and defend, mostly ineffectual gestures towards banning abortion automatically trump mostly ineffectual defenses of civil liberties, and if “fiscal conservatism” actually means always and only cutting taxes, rather than fiscal conservatism — and the GOP really passes the threshhold for acceptability to conservatives, then people on the center-right have two acceptable parties to choose from, and should choose based on their proximity either to the center or the right. If, as I contend, anyone who can say with confidence which party is more conservative ought to consider a career as a psychic detective, then people on the center-right have two parties that are equally and indiscernably acceptable or unacceptable, depending on how charitably (or gullibly) one is willing to interpret either party’s gestures towards conservative principles.

Most conservatives affiliate with the GOP for reasons of heredity and the mistaken but widespread conception of the Republican party as the more conservative branch of the two-party system — as, mutatis mutandis, most liberals affiliate with the Democrats. Consequently, most conservatives will be bound, by and large, to participate in or at least engage to some degree with questions over the platform, methods, and long-term goals of the Republican party. That’s all well and good, and would be unavoidable even if it weren’t. (As I’ve explained elsewhere, I was a partisan Democrat until sometime in high school, and even though I’m no longer on Team Blue’s roster or really any sort of liberal except in the classical sense, I remain more interested in the Democratic party’s internal debates and expectations for its future than in similar questions about the GOP.) Our parents’ political affiliation is an indelible part of our background, like the creed or lack thereof in which we were brought up, our ethnic heritage, and so on. But the way to affirm our own identities and birthrights is not to suspend our critical faculties or unthinkingly “pull for our team” when our considered conviction is that “our team’s” victory would vitiate the principles we uphold not because we passively inherited them, but because we derived them from our rational engagement with politics and philosophy — quite the contrary.

(N.B.: This post was edited a couple of times to correct typos and clarify a confusing construction in one sentence.)