During the Reagan era, social conservatives bet on the notion that they could team up with libertarian market advocates in order to prevent agents of the state from destroying the American way of life. But gradually, many social conservatives, like Vance, came to the conclusion that the opposite had occurred. Social liberals in charge of the state and economic liberals in charge of the economy had conspired unwittingly to raze the institutions and scrap the mores about which these social conservatives cared the most, in the name of maximizing individual autonomy in all areas of life. It’s unsurprising, then, that for social-conservative voters, many of whom believe their causes to have been battered and bruised by their dalliance with libertarian economics, the moral distinction between violent state power and persuasive economic power has been rendered meaningless. They did the right thing: They chose “persuasion,” and yet they feel as if the allegiance between liberalizing politics and liberalizing economics has left them utterly routed. The socially conservative corners of the Right believe that their enemies on the left are using every weapon they have at hand to win the culture wars. The Goldwater/Reagan movement convinced these social conservatives that if they put their shoulders to the wheel of limiting state power, the result would be socially conservative culture. The implicit assumption of the fusionist program they bought into was that state power was necessarily liberal in social terms while market power was necessarily conservative. Forty years on from the Reagan revolution, this assumption has been thoroughly debunked. American conservatives often claim that they care about procedural honesty and integrity whereas progressives go about executing their desired policies by hook or by crook. This isn’t quite true, however. The question isn’t whether one is going to have an outcome-oriented politics, but rather which outcome one values the most.