Appendix

I have made the claim, adapting Lilla, that there are essentially two types of American conservative, those whose interests are largely secular and economic, and those whose interests are redemptive and theocratic.  There is an uneasy alliance between the two in their distrust of government in its current historical manifestation.   The Jeffersonian sentiment -- that government is best which governs least -- might well be a watch word.  I should point out that I am thinking of the federal government.  Those same conservatives are often quite willing to allow local and state government to intrude into the lives of citizens in as much as those laws reflect the prevailing opinions and attitudes.  The arcane liquor laws in the state of Utah, a bastion of conservatism, are a case in point.

The New York Times (Jan 17, 2012) recently reported "Discord in G.O.P. as Conservative Air Differences," and there has been speculation that the party might unravel at the seams, though from my perspective, it seems more a struggle for ascendancy between those more moderate, more mainstream candidates represented by the likes of Romney, who have made their fortunes within the secular state, and the evangelicals who favor Santorum and, almost inexplicably, Gingrich.  I say, almost inexplicably, because there is much to dislike about Gingrich, from an evangelical point of view, not least his philandering, but he is, perhaps, more than any of the other candidates, an evangelical by temperament. Gingrich ultimately had the best argument, telling voters "if you vote for Senator Santorum in effect you're functionally voting for Governor Romney, because he's not going to beat him.  The only way to stop Governor Romney for all practical purposes is to vote for Newt Gingrich."  They did, and they put a crimp in the candidacy of Romney, effectively ignoring the advice of Huntsman, who endorsed Romney, suggesting that "the party needed to focus on defeating President Obama in November."

Whether the squabbling will ultimately be of benefit to Mr. Obama is an open question, but it is clear enough that there are competing interests within the Republican Party, and at the federal level, where it matters most, the secular wing has a clear interest in the creation and conservation of wealth.  One might argue that insofar as wealth is the principle instrumental means of wielding agency within our contemporary society, they also have an interest in conserving the power of the "monied" one percent, to include their political power wielded for the most part indirectly through the shadow governance of the so-called super PACs and influence peddling.  I wouldn't necessarily argue against this incipient paranoia, but I wouldn't argue for it either.  There is nothing nefarious about money in and of itself, and even if there were, I don't suppose a cabal of the monied one percent would be any more successful at subduing the rabble than Mubarek or any other tyrant.  While the super PACs have amplified political discourse, particularly on the right, they haven't changed the basic message that, as Hayek put it, "political freedom is meaningless without economic freedom," and economic freedom means a freedom from the restrictions placed on wealth creation that come of the regulatory state and the encroachments on wealth conservation that come of taxation. 

I don't think there is much illusion that the creation and conservation of wealth in the hands of small percentage of Americans does much in the way of job creation.  Although of late, with unemployment still at 8% or better, everyone has jumped on the jobs bandwagon, there is no compelling interest in jobs, per se, at least not on the secular side of the conservative party.  Within our economy, as the labor unions have always known, jobs and the labors costs associated with jobs are the principle means of redistributing wealth.  Jobs play against the creation and conservation of wealth.    At the risk of over-simplification, in business terms, jobs are an expense, often a necessary expense, but an expense nevertheless, and as everyone knows, expenses are to be minimized if profits are to be maximized.  It's a relatively simple calculation, and Romney's work at Bain Capital, as his apologists have pointed out time and again, was predicated on this simple calculation.  He may well have eliminated jobs, but he did so to enhance profitability and preserve those jobs that remained.  It's a tough job, but someone had to do it, and he did it well enough to amass a considerable fortune.  He also invested it wisely enough to avoid the earned income taxes that most American's pay, to end up with an effective tax rate hovering around 15%.  If the creation and conservation of wealth is the object of the game, then Mr. Romney has played it well, better than most of us can imagine.

The so-called social conservative wing of the party, the political theologians, has a deeper distrust of government, at least any government that is not predicated on the basic assumptions of Christian evangelicalism.  I should point out right away that the assumption of shared assumptions has a much broader reach than actual shared assumptions, and devolve quickly more to a set of common fears than anything resembling a coherent intellectual frame, or a theology proper.  It is tacitly, if not overtly racist, and xenophobic, and I would feel slightly embarrassed making these claims today if it weren't so apparent.  Despite the actual declines in Mexican immigration, despite the actual evidence to the contrary, the various "tough stands" on immigration, among other things, probably have more to do with incipient racial attitudes and a fear of the foreign than any actual threat to the job pool for locals.  Alabama has discovered this the hard way.  There is perhaps a slightly more subtle fear, one that wraps candidates like Romney in its maw for mastication.  The presumptive fear is not the loss of power, not even the loss of a privileged social position relative to blacks and Hispanics (though that might be more a factor than we are willing to admit), it is rather a loss of revelation to what Gingrich in the title of his most recent tome called the "secular-socialist machine," and the imperative to save America from it. 

To be Continued