Skip to content 
A Durable Coalition: Social Conservatives and Antiwar Voters
The alliance is not only ideologically congenial, but electorally valuable.
The administration is not popular. After being elected on a platform of avoiding unnecessary wars, President Donald Trump and the GOP made the decision to risk a global recession and a potential Democratic sweep in the midterms by starting a war in the Middle East. Predictably, the Republicans are now the electoral underdogs and need to do some hard thinking about the future of the party and its policies.
One potential coalition, which would be healthy for both the party and the country, would be between social conservatives and antiwar voters. Both of these groups played a significant role in the coalitions that swept Republicans back to power in 2024, and were subsequently let down by the second Trump presidency. Trump won the presidency a second time by focusing on the extremism of the Biden administration on social issues, whilst also explicitly running as the “pro-peace ticket.”
In the time since the election, both of these groups have been repeatedly disappointed by the Trump administration, especially by the administration’s war with Iran and its approval, through the FDA, of a new form of mifepristone, a dangerous abortion pill. As a result, both groups have become increasingly critical of the Trump administration.
These two disappointed factions are naturally complementary coalition partners, particularly on the pro-life issue. There is a natural connection between the defense of innocent human life at home through pro-life policies and protecting it abroad by avoiding unjust wars. There’s also a historical through-line; America’s embrace of social liberalism followed our nation’s abandonment of our Founding principles of geopolitical neutrality and nonintervention, and the rise of an increasingly insatiable appetite for empire abroad and foreign wars on the part of our leadership class, during and in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The observation that disregard for human life in war leads to moral decay at home is not a new one. In 1974, Fulton Sheen, a prominent Catholic bishop and speaker, connected the moral issues with America at home in particular to the tolerance of the dropping of the atomic bombs:
See how much the world has changed? Now, what made it change? I think maybe we can pinpoint a date: 8:15 in the morning, the sixth of August, 1945. Can any of you recall what happened on that day? … It was the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima in Japan. When we flew an American plane over this Japanese city, and dropped the atomic bomb on it, we blotted out boundaries.
There was no longer a boundary between the civilian and the military, between the helper and the helped, between the wounded and the nurse and the doctor, between the living and the dead—for even the living who escaped the bomb were already half-dead.
Sohrab Ahmari, the U.S. editor of UnHerd, believes the connection between unjust wars abroad and tolerance for abortion at home is as evident as it was in Sheen’s time. “While plenty of ‘pro-life’ states and non-state actors have waged unjust war down the ages, there’s a particular moral indifference that links modern states that kill the unborn unjustly and wage war willy-nilly,” he told The American Conservative. “And there’s a link, too, with what our beloved Pope Francis called ‘an economy that kills.’”
“They don’t think about killing the unborn or risk to civilian lives in terms of whether it is intrinsically wrong, but about whether there are good consequences that would make the loss of those lives an acceptable trade-off,” Edward Feser, a prominent Catholic philosopher, told TAC. “I would guess that that is the sort of thinking that leads Trump to decide both to keep abortion pills accessible, and to threaten to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure.”
Per Feser, an alliance between the camps would create a more durable ideological configuration. “Each side should heavily emphasize the connection between the issues,” he said. “There is too much inconsistency or cognitive dissonance in both the pro-life and antiwar camps, and now is a good occasion to emphasize this and try to get more people to think more consistently.”
Such a coalition also is likely to be electorally viable and could benefit either party, although the Republicans are better positioned to take advantage of it. Currently, 37 percent of Americans identify as pro-life, including 69 percent of Republicans. This 37 percent can be considered to be the core of the Republican base. Massive majorities of voters likewise oppose the ongoing Iran war; the bulk of these voters tend to be Democrats and Independents. Many of these voters can be won by Republicans, should Republicans ditch the foreign wars and invest in becoming the pro-restraint and antiwar party, as they appeared to do in 2024. It is electorally wise for Republicans to ditch the foreign wars and adopt a pro-restraint stance on foreign policy, as to help grow its pro-life base and turn it into a governing antiwar and socially conservative party.
The post A Durable Coalition: Social Conservatives and Antiwar Voters appeared first on The American Conservative.
