When I say Conservative, I mean…

In my article in the Traveler last week, I wrote of growing hypocrisy in the conservative coalition that, until recently, was responsible for the governance of our country. I received various responses, from those claiming that I don’t understand republicanism to others saying that only moral conservatives want to ban gay marriage; fiscal ones don’t usually care.
What is funny, however, is that the supposedly negative feedback that I received actually just enhanced my point of view, that is, that conservatism is not Republicanism (but rather a faction of it), and that there is no one conservative mindset. There are, more or less, two main factions of conservatism: social conservatism and fiscal conservatism.
Social conservatives are those who seek to quell various moral transgressions. They’re the ones who supported the Stupak amendment to the House’s healthcare bill because, at least, they’re not supporting abortion. Fiscal conservatives are the more libertarian-leaning ones; they’re the ones who repealed the banking restrictions put in place after the Great Depression (and arguably caused our current situation), who support deregulation, who feel the federal government exercises too much power and is too large.
Neither one of these factions is overwhelmingly large, and neither are they restrained to Republicanism (the aforementioned Stupak amendment is, in fact, named for a Democratic senator and was voted for by 63 other Democrats). The two are not mutually exclusive, in that a person can believe quite strongly in both moral and fiscal conservatism, but they do make uneasy bedfellows in larger scale applications.
As I expressed last week, the union of social and fiscal conservatism often results in hypocrisy, usually due to the actions of the social side. Social conservatives will endorse some government regulation (say, against abortions) that, from a fiscal point of view might seem like unnecessary use of governmental force. The situation, as it currently exists, is almost like in a parliamentary system: in order to keep one party out of power, two smaller parties form a coalition government and share the gains.
Coalition governments, however, usually do not last forever, and there is evidence to suggest that the current conservative coalition is, in fact, beginning to disintegrate. Remember the primary season for the 2008 election? There was no candidate that appealed en masse to republicans. Evangelicals had Huckabee, but the rest was rather awash and we somehow ended up with John McCain.
And even in the most recent elections, look at New York’s 23rd congressional district. There were three candidates: Democrat Owens, Conservative (of the Conservative Party of New York) Hoffman, and Republican Scozzafava. Republican celebrities such as Sarah Palin and Fred Thompson endorsed Hoffman over the Republican candidate, to the extent that the Republican candidate withdrew from the race and endorsed the Democratic candidate, who proceeded to win. It was the first time a Republican had lost the district in over 100 years.
Neither form of conservatism holds enough sway to control the direction of our country. They are both, however, opposed to various liberal gains, and, when working together, have much greater influence (albeit at the expense of hypocrisy). They seem, at the moment, to be at odds.