The paper attempts to do justice to the complexities involved in the relations between a market economy, democratic polity, and free society on the one hand, and social conservatism on the other. This attempt is undertaken given various simplifications and conflations committed by the conventional wisdom especially in the U.S. One of these is the untenable equation of economic conservatism or the laissez-faire economy with a free society. Another is the broader but equally dubious equivalence of the mixture of economic conservatism and political liberalism, i.e., a laissez-faire economy and political democracy, with a free social system. The purpose of this article is to put these conceptions in a proper perspective. Special emphasis is placed on a peculiar social system named authoritarian conservatism in light of its increasing salience in the U.S. in recent years. The conclusion is that modern America (especially the South) displays tendencies to conservative authoritarianism rather than to the renaissance of democracy.
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