You Can't Have One Without The Other

Ramesh Ponnuru has a piece in the latest issue of National Review on the crisis of conservatism:

Which brings us, finally, to the real crisis of conservatism, which is neither political nor philosophical but a mixture of both. That crisis can be boiled down to two propositions. The first is that, at least as the American electorate is presently constituted, there is no imaginable political coalition in America capable of sustaining a majority that takes a reduction of the scope of the federal government as one of its central tasks. The second is that modern American conservatism is incapable of organizing itself without taking that as a central mission.

The Republican party is a coalition that includes some libertarian-minded members, some social conservatives, and some voters who have a foot in both camps. It is easy to imagine (as Sager does) that it can choose which kind of majority party to be: one oriented toward the libertarians, or one oriented toward the social conservatives. If that were the case, a voter could root for one definition or the other, depending on his own priorities. But only one of those coalitions would actually form a majority. If over the last generation the Republicans had not absorbed the statist social conservatives at the price of losing some libertarians, it would have remained a minority party. If it had instead tried to pick up libertarian Democrats while alienating social conservatives, it would have become a much smaller minority than it already was.

You can try to separate the economic and social conservatives, but it's an illusion to think the groups can prosper independent of each other.