Thread by @ChrisPolPsych

I don't agree with all of the arguments here, but it is an interesting read that points to the complexity of public opinion and the extent to which actual behavioral trends may operate separately from political discourse. Some random thoughts: (1/n) noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-social-c…

Social conservatism as a political tendency is first and foremost a kind of identity politics -- it's about who gets recognition, who is in and who is out, and who should be dominant. (2/n)

In the US among White people, it's also bound up with a lot of identity competition that has little to do with religion or sex in philosophical terms, i.e., racial attitudes and racial backlash. (3/n)

Even under the best of circumstances, the ability of a government controlled by social cons is going to have limited ability to steer mass behavioral patterns. (4/n)

Even countries where social cons have had power -- e.g., Ireland up to the 1990s or so and Poland now -- have not been able to stop the march of secularization and behavioral liberalization (and their rule generated backlash over time). (5/n)

While variance in stuff like sexual activity among teens, divorce, etc. is clearly governed by religious commitment, societal-level variation in these things is *also* going to be shaped by any number of other things -- things probably far removed from govt policy. (6/n)

I suspect that's a good part of what is going on here, as opposed to moral suasion by social cons. After all, a parallel, simultaneous trend is folks dropping out of religion b/c of backlash against the alliance b/w religion & right-wing politics. (7/n)

Abortion is also an interesting case. A question there is whether the social cons have been persuasive -- or whether abortion is simply 'different' from other social issues (like LGBTQ rights) and was never ripe for as much liberalization. (8/n)

The key points here are well-known to public opinion folks, but unfamiliar in the broader discourse, i.e., abortion atts haven't liberalized like LGBTQ issues or legal weed, most people are conflicted, the gender gap is small, opinion differs a lot across states. (9/n)

Finally, one of my oddball takes is that it is theoretically possible for functionally 'restrictive' norms to come back without the broader apparatus of reactionary religion or politics coming back. (10/n)

Part of this relates to a point above: being socially conservative vs socially liberal is an identity and the factors governing actual behavior may to some extent be different. (11/n)

But another point has to do with the fact that many parts of life may abhor a normative vacuum. Traditional religion may fade, but interpersonal relationships (including intimate ones) need to be stabilized and protected against exploitative behavior. (12/n)

Social theorists pondered related possibilities. Durkheim didn't think the sacred would die with mass religiosity; instead, it would attach itself to the dignity of the human person. (13/n)

Habermas, drawing on Kohlberg, observed that late-capitalist societies might get stuck at a "stage 4.5" moral order -- traditional communal moralities might get relativized without anything more universalistic filling the void. (14/n)

Perhaps some of what we see is this kind of re-moralization -- a re-emergence of normative restraints in the relational/intimate sphere rooted in 'univeralistic' concerns about human dignity as opposed to reactionary religion or patriarchy. (15/n)

#MeToo strikes me as an example of this kind of re-moralization. The new part is that the moralization of sex rests more on universalistic, gender-egalitarian concerns than on trad nostalgia. But it is still involves normative regulation (and this is a good thing). (16/n)

The point is that social conservatism vs social liberalism is in many ways abstract identity competition that floats above the "real" effective normative matrix that guides a lot of behavior. They're not irrelevant to the latter, but they are not the whole of the law. (17/17)