The myth of social liberal, fiscal conservative

One of the worst problems afflicting America is centrism.

Normally when people talk about the problem of centrism, they mean the way centrism mistakes apathy for superiority.

This results in a situation where not know enough to form an opinion one way or another, is taken as being better than actually informing yourself.

This in turn leads to a growing “meh” response to issues like climate change.

This response roughly equates to figuring the people trying to get to the life boats in the Titanic are the real problem, not the sodding iceberg.

But the kind of centrism I want to criticise now is of a different stripe, it is the conscientious, considered, nuanced centrism that is every bit as bad and stupid.

This is the centrism of the fiscal conservative, social liberal.

This particular type of centrist is all for all sorts of wonderful liberal things – right up until it comes time to pay for it.

They will say they are all for racial equality – and then defund civil services.

What is the link? Consider the Ferguson report - in that they found that the city needed the cops to collect a certain amount of revenue to sustain itself.

This means that the cops would go out and arrest people for minor to non-existent crimes that they normally wouldn’t police, essentially acting like a shake-down racket for the city.

And who gets hit by this hardest? To put it bluntly, black people.

Black people are always at a disadvantage in the American legal system – lawyers tend to give them worse advice, courts tend to give them stiffer sentences, and cops tend to get more leeway when profiling and abusing them.

So because people are fiscal conservatives, racial incidents targeting black people are still pretty much the norm in the American police force, which is under pressure to shake people down to keep city hall running.

A lot of people have said shut down the Ferguson cops after revelations about just how lousy and corrupt their system is, and some will say the same of the NYPD and LAPD with their racist incidents.

But you still have to fund City Hall – all you’re going to achieve is putting the pressure on a new group to shake down the same people who are being abused right now.

You aren’t going to do away with the abuses without doing away with fiscal conservatism, because stuff needs paying for.

Another example of this problem in action is abortion.

Alveda King is well known for being anti-abortion despite the fact that she's had two, and apparently tried for a third but couldn't afford it. Now one could focus on her hypocrisy here, but she is a conservative and thus that is to be expected, what is of interest is this: she couldn't afford it.

The fundamental issue with abortion is not some nebulous question about the right to life, but whether a woman can be compelled to sustain a life with her own body if she doesn’t want to.

For example if person A would die unless they were tethered to your body for the next nine months, causing you visible pain and discomfort, should their need trump your right to say “no” to such an arrangement?

In regards to this particular question a social liberal, fiscal conservative is all for a woman’s right to choose – right up until she doesn’t have the resources to afford the abortion clinic.

If you are pro-choice you are obliged to be pro-public healthcare because that choice is founded upon a basic human right, the right to bodily autonomy.

And being a fiscal conservative means you are not willing to pay for it, it is no longer a right to choose, it is a privilege to be paid for.

If you are socially liberal, you want schooling to be secular. You figure that religion is something people can make their own minds up about, and it isn’t for some authority figure to come and say “You should believe this.”

Well, here is the thing – fiscal conservatives want to de-fund schools, they want tighter and tighter budgets for education.

Which means that a lot of schools end up closing down, or offering sub-par educations because as heroic as the teachers may be, there aren’t enough of them and they’re getting paid next to nothing.

Worse, there isn't the money for a strong school inspectorate to make sure basic standards are being applied. This isn't fair to the teachers, because they end up having to pay for class materials out of their own pockets, they end up having to deal with hostile work environments, they have to deal with staffing shortages etc...

This in turn means more and more kids get yanked out of the secular education system, and into church schools or home schooling.

Secular education, right up until you have to pay for it.

The nature of the social liberal, fiscal conservative is basically “I want it, and I want it for free” – but things very rarely work out that way.

If you want good infrastructure, you need to be willing to pay for it. You can’t just say “no more taxes” and expect those bridges to magically repair themselves.

And if you want good values in your society - well reform costs money too. You can't maintain a situation where racism is profitable, where healthcare is for the rich, where education is a luxury.

You need to be willing to put your money where your mouth is.

The big problem America has that is illustrative for we in South Africa is this – they don’t see their country as genuinely being theirs. The roads, the parks, the schools, the various services aren’t theirs – so why should they pay for them?

Except these things are theirs and if they don’t start paying they will fall apart.

We in South Africa need to learn from that and reject the ideology of the “fiscal conservative, social liberal” for the bullshit that it has always been.

One good thing that did come out of our last budget, as hard as it is to swallow it, is that our government took the hard decision to raise taxes.

If that money goes into maintaining and improving the country – that tax hike isn’t such a bad thing. It is still our money, and it is maintaining our stuff.

At least up until it gets stolen, which I think is the really big issue we have with the ANC. I think a big source of bitterness about government from we in South Africa is not that we’re paying too much, it is that we’re not seeing enough being done with it.

And upgrading the president's house doesn't count.

We need to see what we pay as being a deal, and in order to achieve that, we need to see a whole lot less corruption and incompetence.

What we don’t need, is the impossible demands of fiscal conservative social liberals.