The conservatives grab the best songs

By Lexington

THE conservative movement is on fighting form at this weekend's Values Voters' Summit in Washington. Two messages emerged from the first day's triumphalist speeches. Message one: you cannot separate social conservatism from fiscal conservatism, because to cut state spending you must stop people from having children out of wedlock, committing crime and so forth. In other words, you cannot cut public spending without remoralising America. Here's Jim DeMint, the senator from South Carolina who has done as much as anyone to engineer the penetration of the Republican Party by the tea-party tendency:

If you track the correlation between unwed births and things like juvenile delinquency, drug use, dropout, incarceration, unemployment, the correlation is huge, or sexually transmitted diseases or gambling. You look at these things that are value-related issues. The costs are in the trillions of dollars that the federal government spends. And in trying to address these things that the federal government has helped cause, we keep making it worse.

Fair enough: it's an interesting thesis. The other message was that the United States has an exceptional political system, an extraordinary history and a brilliant constitution that guarantees freedom like no other country's. Michele Bachmann, the representative from Minnesota, brought tears to her eyes with a peroration about the American struggle for liberty, from Valley Forge to Omaha Beach. After telling the story of a particular act of heroism in the second world war, she ended thus:

We not only stand on their shoulders, it is now ours to continue that ... link of liberty, forged chain by chain, from generation to generation. It has never been easy. It has never been free. And so now it's ours. Now it's ours. And so I ask you, are you up to the challenge? Are you willing to do your part? Are you willing to go forward? Are you willing to honor their memory? And are you willing to do this so that generations yet unborn will know the unparalleled liberty that has been given, that God has shed his grace on the United States of America? I ask you that today.

I'm not sure I get this. Yes, agreed, it's a great country, a great constitution, worthy of celebration, worthy of protection, amen. But Ms Bachmann wasn't just celebrating it, she was telling her audience that the conservative side of today's political argument stands for all of that, whereas Barack Obama and the Democrats are determined to dismantle it all. That's not just a stretch, it's a lie. But it has the virtue of being a Big Lie, which the Dems had better find an answer to if they are not to be eviscerated in November. Once your political enemies successfully appropriate God, the flag and the constitution, and you fail to win them back, you are dead meat.

Participants at the meeting were also shown a video made by the Heritage Foundation, singing the praises of American liberty. It's a high-class piece of work, genuinely moving and well worth watching. But, again, I submit that there's nothing to justify the Republicans laying a greater claim than the Democrats to the values the film extols. The point is that the Republicans are working hard to lay that claim, and the Democrats seem to be giving them a free pass. The Democrats need to get their messaging in order, and fast.

POSTSCRIPT: An arresting fact I learnt at the meeting was that Ms Bachmann has 23 foster children, as well as five of her own. That's pretty impressive.