“Fact-free distraction”

Good description of some analysis still bubbling up around the lid that hasn’t yet closed on the November elections.

It’s how Ramesh Ponnuru characterizes the commentary on the Social Right.

In 2002 and 2004, Republicans ran hard on social issues and the courts — and scored victories at every level of politics. In 2006 and 2008, they left those issues off the table, and got walloped. It follows, naturally, that the social issues are to blame for the Republican defeats.

At least, that’s the conclusion that a chorus of commentators has reached. They are attempting to persuade Republicans to soften or downplay their party’s social conservatism and hide its social conservatives in order to resume winning elections. About this campaign to sideline the social Right, three things can be said with a fairly high degree of confidence: It is predictable; it will fail; and it is wrong.

Let’s see….To what else might wishful thinking apply?

How about the religious vote and abortion?

The president of Planned Parenthood claims the election results showing a majority of Catholics supported pro-abortion candidate Barack Obama means Catholics now support abortion.

She’d like to think.

Yet polling data specifically on Catholics and abortion finds otherwise.

A Marist College poll conducted in October found a majority of Catholics take a pro-life position and almost one-third of Catholic voters who say they are “pro-choice” on abortion actually oppose all or most abortions.

The Marist survey found 63 percent of Catholics say abortions should be permitted in none or almost no cases by opposing all abortions, all abortions except to save the mother’s life, or all abortions except to save the mother’s life or in cases of rape or incest.

That puts 63 percent of Catholics opposing about 98 percent of all abortions, according to Alan Guttmacher Institute information about when abortions are done.

And Guttmacher is the research wing of Planned Parenthood.

Rod Dreher’s calling some bluff, too. You can’t scapegoat religious conservatives for GOP failures.

White evangelicals (and, to a lesser extent, Mass-going Catholics) are the GOP’s backbone. Just more than a third of President Bush’s 2004 vote came from white evangelicals — and they turned out for McCain in comparable numbers. Cut social conservatives loose and you get a GOP that, as blogger Daniel Larison archly puts it, is “the party of all the remaining Episcopalians, Californians and New Yorkers who prefer lower taxes.”

In fact, far from being the demise of the GOP, the coming generation of evangelicals, Catholics and fellow travelers can be the seeds for the conservative movement’s intellectual rebirth.

This will involve a keener understanding of conservatism. Dreher did an exceptional job of defining this for a newer generation in his article and book on Crunchy Cons. It has come of age now.

All political problems, traditional conservatism teaches, are ultimately religious problems because they result from disordered souls. In the era now dawning, Americans will learn again to live within limits — and together. Religious conservatives are philosophically positioned to lead the way, but we can’t do it by pouring new wine into old skins.

We’re going to have to learn to think and talk in terms — and not overtly religious ones — of building up civil society and its mediating institutions.

Meanwhile, let the social liberals harbor their distractions. And social conservatives who want to build a future…

…should deepen contacts with faithful Roman Catholics, whose church’s social teaching offers a more comprehensive approach to politics from a religiously conservative standpoint. There’s also much to learn from British Catholics G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and their theory of subsidiarity — a decentralizing, “small is beautiful” approach to economics that appeals to some libertarians.

It’s what works. Something the Obama administration might well pay attention to, since they’re all about pragmatism.