# Social Conservatism The strand of conservatism organized around the defense of **traditional social institutions, hierarchies, and moral norms** — most prominently opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights, support for the traditional nuclear family and traditional gender roles, and the maintenance (often through law) of religiously grounded moral standards in public life. It is one of the standing factional poles of the American right, alongside fiscal conservatism, libertarianism, and nationalism. ## What It Is Where fiscal conservatism is concerned with taxes, spending, and markets, and libertarianism with maximizing individual freedom from the state, social conservatism is concerned with **preserving a particular moral and cultural order**. Its signature issues over the past half-century have included opposition to abortion, opposition to same-sex marriage and broader LGBTQ rights, support for school prayer and against secularization, opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and to feminist transformations of gender roles, and the promotion of "family values." Its intellectual and emotional center of gravity in the U.S. is heavily (though not exclusively) religious — overlapping strongly with the Christian Right's evangelical and conservative-Catholic constituencies (see [[Christian Right Timeline]]). ## The Fusionist Bargain and Its Tensions For decades, social conservatism coexisted with its factional rivals through **fusionism** — the Buckley/Reagan-era coalition that yoked social traditionalists, free-market advocates, and anti-communist/nationalist hawks into a single movement. That coalition was always somewhat uneasy: the libertarian commitment to individual freedom and the socially conservative commitment to enforced moral order point in opposite directions on issues from drug policy to sexuality. The [[Anti-Abortion Movement]] and figures like [[Phyllis Schlafly]] (who defeated the ERA) gave social conservatism its organizing victories; the [[Moral Majority]] institutionalized it as a political force. ## In the Current Era Social conservatism has been reshaped by the Trump era. Its voters largely fused with MAGA populism, trading some of the movement's older respectability for a harder-edged culture war, while its policy project achieved its largest victory in decades with the overturning of *[[Roe v. Wade]]* (2022). The donor side of this lane includes social-conservative megadonors such as the Uihleins, who fund anti-abortion and traditional-values causes (see [[Uihlein Family]]). The tension with libertarian and business conservatism persists — visible whenever "small government" rhetoric collides with social conservatives' willingness to use state power to enforce moral norms. ## Why It Matters Here Social conservatism is one of the **master factional categories** of the right that this KB uses to locate people, organizations, and donors. Identifying an actor as primarily social-conservative (versus libertarian, fiscal, or nationalist) clarifies their motivations and alliances — and the friction *between* these poles explains much of the internal conflict on the right. (Compare [[Makers and Takers]] and [[Libertarianism]] as the economic-individualist poles, and [[Christian Nationalism]] as the maximalist religious-political variant.) ## See Also - [[Anti-Abortion Movement]] — Social conservatism's signature cause - [[Moral Majority]] — Its institutional vehicle in the Religious Right era - [[Phyllis Schlafly]] — Movement icon (anti-ERA) - [[Christian Nationalism]] · [[Libertarianism]] — Adjacent / rival poles