These sheep will follow as long as it does not appear too declasse to do so. Invitations to the best parties will keep these Republicans in the fold. The most ideologically committed of the Republican groups are the social conservatives. The social conservatives are concerned with enlisting the government in helping to maintain public virtue. For this group, abortion and to a lesser extent school prayer and school vouchers are the dominant issues.
Economic libertarians tend to ignore social issues.
They focus on limiting the government s role in the economy. Their antipathy toward government management makes them unsympathetic to and wary of the enlistment of the government in the serious service of social engineering. The alliance of these disparate agendas was based on a shared aversion to those Democrats in power. The social conservatives reacted against the libertine Democratic social agenda. The economic libertarians, though little concerned with the Democratic social agenda, feared the intrusive economic management and redistributionist tendencies of the Democrats.