The Nature of Conservatism

Joe Carter recently had something very insightful to say about the traditional 3-legged stool model of Conservatism (social, fiscal, defense):

Rural/suburban Republican-voting conservatives--for the sake of identification let's call them "Reagan conservatives"-- don’t make sharp distinctions between the three branches. You won't find, for instance, many "fiscal conservatives" in rural Oklahoma that are squishy on the life issues or think that we should shrink the Armed Forces. In fact, when you hear someone referring to themselves as a "economic conservative" or a "defense conservative" you can almost be assured that they are (a) a libertarian and (b) live or work in an urban area.

Almost completely correct. (b) would be better expressed as "lives in a blue county". Truth be told most people in America don't live in cities proper, but in "urban areas" that encompass both cities and their surrounding suburbs.

Joe brings up a good point though. I have to wonder how Conservatism on the blogosphere is distorted because most "conservative" bloggers aren't. Most of the big blogging names (like Glenn Reynolds, everyone at the Volokh Conspiracy, everyone at QandO, etc.) are really small-L libertarians. You have to wonder what effect this is having on the right side of the blogosphere as a whole.

As an aside, I'm probably going to de-list Evangelical Outpost soon. When I followed Instapundit's link there, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I had actually visited the site. That's always a bad sign.