Not the smoothest title I’ve penned, but hey.
Every now and then, this article finds its way on my news feed: 7 Things ‘Fiscally Conservative but Socially Liberal’ People Don’t Understand, by Greta Christina. I’m quite the fan of Everyday Feminism, but sometimes the things they share baffle me (this was posted, originally, on AlterNet). This is one of those times.
Disclaimer: I don’t know Greta Christina, and I certainly am not intimately familiar with her work. My title is structured to run parallel with hers, but she may very well understand every one of the issues I present here.
I hope she does, because this article is a conceptual cluster$%*@.
Without further ado, here are my own seven things. I hope my mad descent into listacles will be clarifying.
1.) “Liberalism” and “conservatism” are not monolithic.
I’m afraid this is one of those areas where partisanship has scrambled our concept-forming mechanisms. Because the Democrats identify primarily as liberal and Republicans identify primarily as conservative, we’ve somehow decided that Democratic policies are liberal and vice-versa.
As I discuss elsewhere (click the link for my discussion of liberalism vs. socialism), liberalism is an enlightenment-based philosophy that emphasizes the autonomy and dignity of the individual and their natural rights. When progressivism rebranded under the liberalism banner, it was more faithful in some areas than in others. “Socially liberal” fits well enough because it recognizes that all people, including members of marginalized groups, require freedom, dignity and equal protection under the law.
Conservatism is defined in part by the guiding question Barry Goldwater used to ask: “What is it we seek to conserve?” Part of that falls under the concept of “Western values,” an idea that has ended up as something of a mishmash of liberal values and Christian ones. Economist Arnold Kling believes the way they tend to view issues runs along a conceptual civilization-to-barbarism axis. That which tends to promote their idea of Western civilization is good, and that which seeks to undermine it is bad. Some of the liberal values they seek to conserve surround the idea of the free market which, yes, includes varying degrees of deregulation, lower tax rates, uncoerced business relations, and so on.
But as she tries to acknowledge (softly, I’m afraid), conservatism is not a homogenous ideology. Some fall along the liberal end (I’d call these libertarians, classical liberals, or minarchists), and some fall along the authoritarian end. While what she’s referring to seems to be the Republican agenda, generally, it is not enough to conflate that and conservatism per se.
2.) Virtue signalling is a great way to get clicks, but not to facilitate fruitful dialogue.
I firmly believe that to engage with folks who see the world differently, one must be as charitable to one’s opponent’s arguments as possible. This is also an excellent way to begin the process of changing minds.
I hope Ms. Christina’s goal was to engage with those who identify as “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” (for the record, I do not identify that way. More on that later). But if so, propping up strawmen to vanquish is not the best means of doing so. Specific policies were rarely introduced, studies were never cited, and no clarification was ever given regarding just what conservatism she’s talking about.
But of course, the story has plenty of “likes.” How many were by folks who read the article and said, “Wow. I was wrong on fiscal policy the whole time!” I’ll bet very few. I characterize this as virtue signalling because by all appearances, the goal was not to engage with conservatives. Rather, it was to enhance her status with her normal readership by writing something that would make them air-snap in agreement. I’m not sure how fruitful that is.
A person who identifies as “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” almost certainly does so because of some combination of principle and pragmatics. But the author engages her readers on neither grounds of principle or consequences; when they are referred to, they’re referred to in generalities. This won’t engage with those whose minds she might change in time.
3.) Free markets lifted most of the world out of poverty, and restricting access to markets damns millions of the world’s poorest to early deaths.
This is not nearly as partisan a point as some have made it. Setting aside the question of government interference in markets for a moment, even progressive organizations like the Brookings Institute and economists like Paul Krugman are on record in plenty of places attesting to the fact that access to markets and economic freedom are major factors in the global decline in poverty. In fact, leaving people with larger amounts of their wealth, letting them be creative and entrepreneurial, and letting them alone to trade is precisely the impetus for how rich the world has gotten.
Even just the microcosm of free market reforms in Chile vs. socialist reforms in Venezuela is startling.
This doesn’t mean that regulations aren’t helpful in some ways. It also doesn’t mean there aren’t times when features of the market like automation temporarily hurt the working class (it is worth noting that outsourcing is almost definitely not even a small component of lost manufacturing jobs.)
But even by the worst estimates, the working class comes out even when free trade is the law of the land (many estimates are more optimistic than that). And even in places where the wages of the working class stay stagnant, the increased availability and lower cost of life-changing technologies benefits American workers immeasurably. And even for low-wage employees and children from poor families, nonprofits nationwide are making advancement opportunities plenty and education available for free.
I think most folks of all political stripes agree that sweat shops aren’t glamorous. Many may well be exploitative in some ways. Child labor is indeed a problem. But labor, too, is subject to the laws of supply and demand. For instance: it may be helpful to ask the question why a person in Vietnam or Bangladesh would take a job in a sweatshop. Certainly if you asked a person in Southern California to work the same job for the same wage, they’d laugh in your face. But they laugh because so much else – even low-wage work in fast food establishments – is better than that opportunity. Rather than blaming U.S. companies for operating sweatshops (though, please, do assign the appropriate amount of blame for any ethics violations), it might do well to examine why nothing better is available.
Go through your closet, compile a list of the countries from which your shirts and pants and scarves come. Then find where those countries rank on the Economic Freedom Index. I promise it will be instructive. Free trade might bring along with it sweatshops, but remember – those jobs are being taken because even worse opportunities have been made popular by despotic governments and bad fiscal policy.
Also, wages are a measure of productivity. Seriously.
4.) Voting rights issues, criminal justice reform, and drug and prison policy are not primarily fiscal topics (and to the degree they are, “fiscally conservative” folks are on the right side.)
If my elaboration on this point sounds confused, it’s because I am genuinely confused about why half the points were included as fiscally conservative views. The closest she gets is by arguing that voting functions and mechanisms to monitor police officers require funding, but conservative administrations usually attempt to increase defense and policing budgets rather than the inverse.
Granted, as she notes elsewhere, that is in part due to the militarization of police forces. But isn’t that budget mismanagement rather than an issue related to tax cuts?
Either way, police militarization by her own admission isn’t a “fiscally conservative” position. And while I agree wholeheartedly that too much of the conservative movement has draconian views of criminal justice reform, that doesn’t seem to be in the least bit fiscal. Most of the folks I know who would describe themselves as fiscally conservative but socially liberal emphatically consider the drug war, prison policy, and police brutality to be compelling social issues.
I’ll also plainly admit that some of them might understate the degree to which those are racially motivated/structurally racist. If/when they do, that’s wrong. But that’s well outside the scope of her argument against “fiscal conservatism.” If anything, fiscal conservatives have jumped onto the right side of the pro-reform coalition by acknowledging that our criminal justice laws are draconian and cost ineffective. I agree that emphasizing cost over the real impact on human lives is silly, and probably rooted in misplaced priorities, but in this case (again!) fiscal conservatism would seem to be on the right side when it comes to legalizing recreational drug use, reforming mandatory minimums and the bail system, and de-militarizing police forces.
To put it more plainly: the worst and most harmful laws in this arena aren’t just inhumane. They’re also wickedly expensive. Even by the worst model for fiscal conservatism (even this article’s!), the correct position would be… damn similar to the author’s position.
And while no article would be complete without a boogeyman Koch brothers reference (she had several), Charles Koch is leading the charge for criminal justice reform. Even the blue-blooded democrats in my office (a criminal justice reform organization that is starkly progressive) admire at least the work he does in this area. And, yes, he funds plenty of progressive efforts on this issue’s behalf.
Charles Koch has plenty of warts, believe me. But bizarrely, here he’s been charged with evils he hasn’t committed. In this area, he does a lot of good.
See? Nuance. It’s good!
I’ll admit that this issue is important for me as someone who isn’t “fiscally conservative” (I think it’s a misnomer, by the way), but has worked in a policy/legal field where folks who are have done amazing work. This is also an example of a spot where the Trump administration has really blurred categories: the Sessions-led DOJ is primed to send criminal justice reform efforts to the stone age, but plenty of conservatives (Justin Amash, Thomas Massey, Rand Paul among them) have been outspoken in opposing those efforts.
No, really. Nuance is good.
5.) Policies should be judged by their impact, not their intent.
It’s bizarre that the progressive movement has (rightly) made impact over intent such a commonplace expression, but all too often doesn’t apply that standard to its policies.
I don’t want to go too far down this road because contradictory studies can be found for most policies. But I want to emphasize that it is critically important that policies are judged by all their impacts, good and bad, and not just because the intent was to help marginalized communities.
Example: There are good and bad arguments for certain banking regulations, though the author is pretty clear that she thinks any attempt at deregulation is linked to a desire for all greedy financial institutions to run free. But the work of writers like John Allison makes a pretty compelling case that not only do some regulations lead to financial crises rather than present them, but that the 2008 financial crisis was caused primarily by regulation and the Federal Reserve. This has become much more mainstream, by the way.
Another example: There are valiant reasons for a minimum wage, and I won’t argue against there being some minimum wage here (though as Murray Rothbard notes, “the minimum wage can only kill jobs,” and definitionally can’t add them). But the minimum wage also has a well-documented negative impact on the employment of minority youth.
This is important because the author believes that policies that hurt marginalized groups are intrinsically racist/sexist/etc. But she’s assumed that policies meant to do certain things will in fact do them. That is hardly ever the case.
I don’t wish to go back-and-forth on which policies are good or bad. But I think the larger point is this: the author is totally right that policies which deliberately hurt minority groups are bad. But just as she wants it to be clear that progressive policies aren’t intentionally but at worst inadvertently wasteful or ineffective, so the benefit of doubt should be given to – yes, even – conservatives that what they want is a society that is better for everyone.
In other words, you might think that conservatives know how awful free markets are for poor people and black folks and so on and only wants to promote them because their rich overlords want them to, but I guarantee that for most, the disagreement is based in a legitimate difference of principle and understanding of what the measurable effects of certain policies are.
There’s room for nuance in the evaluation of policy. The sheer volume of economists, political scientists, social scientists, philosophers and lawyers on all sides of every issue is a sure sign that evaluating the effects of policy is difficult. And the author of this article and I are far from the most qualified folks to do so, anyway (and accordingly, the onus even more on us to be constructive and deferential when we discuss policy).
Ultimately, this is a powerful point: always assume your opponent has the best of intentions, and then argue principle and pragmatics from there. Our author never quite gets there.
6.) If human rights abuses are characteristic of a free market then boy, I wonder what is characteristic of central planning.
That’s all I have to say about that one, really.
Reductionism is fun though, right?
7.) Ultimately, those of us you might be referring to have legitimate reasons for viewing the issues the way we do, and they’re not usually reducible to blatant racism, classism, etc.
This brings us to the elephant in the room. Why respond to this article, at all? After all, I don’t identify as fiscally conservative. This isn’t about me, at all.
But it is, I think. It is because, while I think fiscal conservatism is a misnomer for a host of real economic policy positions (many of which are categorically contradictory with each other and belong to different schools of thought), somehow the greater classical liberal tradition is roped into this “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” hoopla. It doesn’t help that this is how Gary Johnson characterized himself, and how many new libertarians tend to self-identify. It also doesn’t help that the GOP has often co-opted the jargon of free markets without earning it. Indeed, the GOP is sliding away from any claim to that language by the day (thanks in large part to the Trump administration). At times, especially since the Reagan Administration, what has passed for free market economics has actually been a distorted cronyist set of policies (the Left largely owned this in the decades before then). That distinction matters.
But ultimately, most people don’t pay attention to that particular set of nuances. It is easier to blame liberalism in principle for the things it has never been responsible for. Libertarians are guilty of this too – the C4SS calls this “vulgar libertarianism.”
This forces me to exert some energy to defend something I’m not, in part because the conceptual chaos which is part and parcel of the whole thing has somehow bundled a lot of the rest of us in.
Ultimately, I love the idea of interacting with things we don’t agree with. I’ve read more socialist books than most fervent socialists, I follow plenty of democrats and republicans on Facebook and Twitter, and I read the whole gambit of potential news sources (shout-out to Jacobin Magazine for being wildly entertaining and fairly enlightening).
This is only to our benefit. It may not shift our position too much, but it certainly widens our understanding of not only what is happening in the world, but of how our brothers and sisters view it. That’s important.
There are probably ways I’ve been more uncharitable than intended toward the author of this piece, and so I do have to say that I appreciate its perspective. That policies are inadvertently racist and sexist and so on in ways we don’t intend is valuable and certainly true, even if I disagree somewhat on which sets of policies are most guilty of that.
I also may be wrong. Good God, it wouldn’t be the first time. Despite all my reading, I don’t have the elite policy chops of an academic. I have to defer quite often to experts. Despite my best efforts to read experts on “all sides,” I do this sometimes unevenly.
But that’s the point, right? I believe most folks genuinely want the best for the world, by whichever metrics they’ve acquired or inherited, and we can forge a more peaceful and humane discourse for figuring out what is in fact best.
And no doubt some folks are greedy, or want the worst for others. I won’t deny that this is true, though I hope it’s as false as can be given the particular set of facticities we’ve been dealt. There is also no doubt that institutionalized xenophobiae are ever present. We have to work through them, and reform them, wherever we can.
But the first step is to be more charitable, more humble, more active as a researcher, and more open to experts. We also have to be quick and careful to differentiate between deliberate malice and legitimate, well-founded places of philosophical or empirical disagreement.
I hope we can get there.
Chris & the Cross-Examined Life 
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