Matthew Yglesias: On Social Conservatism
EXCERPT:
Bush's problem, in other words, isn't that he moved to the right of where Reagan was and thereby lost California (and New Jersey and Connecticut, etc., etc., etc.). Bush's problem is that the bulk of the country is drifting further and further away from the demands of conservative evangelicals. Nowadays, a position that's substantively more moderate comes across as more conservative. The gap between bourgeois (or, perhaps, bobo) morality and evangelical morality is simply growing too large to bridge.
