Greed

The groups that supported President Bush can be roughly described as:

1) Economic Conservatives: Lower taxes, regulation, reform of entitlements, tort reform.

2) Foreign policy conservatives: Strong military. Willingness to use military force. Skeptical of multinational institutions.

3) Social Conservatives. Anti-abortion, gay marriage, pornography. (See my post below).

It’s pretty fair to say that if a voter does not fall into at least one of these categories, he likely voted for Kerry. And some of us fall into all three categories. But a good number of Bush voters do not fall into all three. In particular, I suspect a good number of economic and foreign policy conservatives are not social conservatives and a good number of social conservatives are not economic or foreign policy conservatives. What’s interesting is that these groups together seem to have coalesced into governing majority.

But is this majority stable? The mainstream media would have us believe this depends on how greedy conservatives get. Their reasoning is that if Bush pushes a conservative agenda (under all three fronts outlined above) the country will balk and elect liberals in the future. I don’t agree. Why should this coalition fall apart if conservatives are collectively greedy (pushing a conservative agenda across all three fronts)? Doing so is pretty much what everyone expected when they voted, and that expectation was enough to deliver a majority. Instead, the coalition will fall apart if conservatives become separately greedy and attempt to enact only those parts of the list above that they individually favor. Put bluntly, if the economic and foreign policy conservatives get greedy and now attempt to shut out the social conservatives, the gains made in this election will be short lived, and whatever gains we’ve made on the economic and foreign policy fronts will be undone in the following years.