With the approach of the crucial mid-term elections, and especially after the media obsession with the internet correspondence of Congressman Mark Foley, numerous liberal commentators eagerly anticipate a shattering crack-up of the conservative movement. While the outcome of the November balloting remains very much in doubt, these gleeful predictions of GOP disaster demonstrate an ignorant misunderstanding of the essential nature of the Republican coalition, and grossly exaggerate the gap between “religious” and “economic” conservatives.

Paul Krugman, for instance, New York Times columnist, bestselling author and Princeton professor, recently published a piece called “Things Fall Apart.” In it, he declared: “At its core, the political axis that currently controls Congress and the White House is an alliance between the preachers and the plutocrats- between the religious right, which hates gays, abortion and the theory of evolution, and the economic right, which hates Social Security, Medicare and taxes on rich people…Together, these groups formed a seemingly invincible political coalition, in which the religious right supplied the passion and the economic right supplied the money.”

Krugman insists that the movement will inevitably self destruct because its members don’t share a philosophy or even common aims. “The coalition, however, has always been more vulnerable than it seemed because it was an alliance based not on shared goals, but on each group’s belief that it could use the other to get what it wants,” he writes. In other words, he suggests cooperation within the conservative movement has always been self-serving, hypocritical, contradictory and cynical. He makes the fatal mistake of many ideologues: feeling so certain of his own enlightened righteousness that he can’t even acknowledge the sincerity of his opponents. “Surrounding this core is a large periphery of politicians and lobbyists who joined the movement not out of conviction but to share in the spoils,” he sniffs.

This attitude reflects the common assumption that the impassioned members of a Pentecostal church in Alabama can’t possibly endorse the same worldview as Ivy League-educated intellectuals at a conservative Washington think tank – an assumption that ignores the obvious fact that some ideological commitments cut across class, religious, educational, economic and even racial lines. The agreement on major issues that has fueled Republican successes since the Reagan Revolution is authentic and organic, not strategic or calculating.

For instance, religious conservatives support low taxes not as a sop to their economic conservative allies, but because they believe that families will make better decisions on spending their own money than bureaucrats. Inheritance taxes are at least as offensive to people of faith as they are to small government reformers since these “death taxes” assault one of the ultimate family values: the ability to pass on to the next generation the fruits of a lifetime of hard work. By the same token, economic Republicans who want to limit governmental bureaucracy and spending will support the home-schooling practiced by many of their Christian colleagues not as some concession to Fundamentalists, but because they share the core principle that individual Americans should depend less on government and more on themselves.

Even some issues that are supposed to drive a wedge between the “preachers” and “plutocrats” can, if properly understood, bring the two factions together. Consider the debate over federal funding for embryonic stem cell research: where even the most secular, libertarian-tinged, economic conservatives will rightly question the necessity of government financing for scientific work that remains profoundly controversial. Leaders of the religious right don’t seek a government ban on this area of scientific investigation so long as it’s privately funded—they only want to avoid tax-payer support and the societal endorsement that comes with it. By the same token, opposition to same sex marriage doesn’t involve any effort to block or penalize private gay relationships, but merely a desire to stop the governmental sanction and support involved in state backed matrimony. During all debates on the National Endowment of the Arts and the condemnations of their generous grants to sacrilegious expression, people of faith didn’t clamor for censorship--- they wanted only to avoid government sponsorship. If an artist chose to display a crucifix in urine in his own garage, not even the most outspoken religious conservative would have demanded that the police invade his premises to halt the blasphemy.

In all these areas, the libertarian and faith-based impulses can and do reach similar conclusions: hoping to keep government disentangled from ongoing efforts to challenge age-old religious values, and striving to use all available means to shore up societal support for the traditional family.

Yes, economic and religious conservatives may emphasize different priorities: Christian activists will care more passionately about abortion, while money-minded reformers might stress retooling social security or cleaning up our law-suit riddled judicial system. But the two wings of the GOP and the conservative movement nonetheless pursue goals that are not only complementary, but utterly dependent on one another. Continued...