I BLAME THE POPE. Ramesh Ponnuru ponders the theory that the Republican Party has become less anti-statist because it's become more religious, and then wonders "let�s assume for the sake of argument that Republicans have simultaneously become more religious-conservative and less anti-statist. What�s the causal relationship here?" My hypothesis would be . . . Catholics.
As the Democratic Party came to embrace feminism in the 1970s, the GOP started successfully counter-mobilizing a fairly generic religiosity -- or at least a generic Christianity -- and began to secure the allegiance of the more devout sectors of America's Catholic population, formerly a core Democratic constituency. This constitutes a convergence with Continental political dynamics where practicing Catholics are typically on the right. At the same time, the conservative political parties in those countries are much more statist than the American right has traditionally been and, in part as a consequence, the Republicans have become more statist in their orientation, offering hints of the Christian Democratic tradition and fewer hints of the classical liberalism that's historically been dominant on the Anglophone right.
UPDATE: And so why, the commenters ask, are Catholics more statist than Protestants? Read your Weber, it makes for strong and healthy bones.
--Matthew Yglesias
