Socially Liberal, Fiscally Conservative

As I’ve been watching the debt ceiling “negotiations” and “compromise” at arm’s length (baby is here!), it’s felt a bit like one of those dramatic movie denouements:

They sit, mostly stone-faced, in a shadowy room. His briefcase, the handle yet warm, rests upon the adjacent seat. The decor is resolutely bureaucratic in a predictable, mind-dulling way. Nothing stirs, save the old analog clock.

Finally, the door opens, and the experts file in. Everyone is here: Biden, McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, Obama, and a few other boys from the club.

McConnell (or is it Obama?) clears his throat, the weariness evident in his voice as he speaks: “It is done. You will accept it. You will even like it.”

That’s right. Time to take our medicine. The Bush debt crisis has been momentarily allayed. Since our current deficit and debt problems are largely driven by enormous tax cuts and military misadventures, Congress has logically decided to address them by cutting the hell out of domestic discretionary funding. We’re cutting the social safety net, Veterans Affairs, and foreign aid because we’re unwilling to raise tax rates on the enormously wealthy and cut back on our military-industrial complex.

Polls show that this approach is unpopular. Americans hate the idea of cutting back on infrastructure investments, defense, entitlement programs, or—cutting to the chase—almost any government programs. Of course, Americans also hate tax increases (though solid majorities reliably back policies that would raise taxes on the super-wealthy and corporate interests). In short, we’re a country in search of coherence. “Don’t cut public institutions!” “Don’t tax us!”

Is it any surprise that we keep falling prey to the promise of supply-side magic? When President Bush promised that his tax cuts would pay for themselves AND the national debt (AND would solve the nation’s obesity problem AND would give everyone a pony for their birthdays, etc) within a decade or so, the country bought it hook, line, and sinker. See, if we cut taxes, we’ll grow the economy, which will increase tax revenue, which will pay for prescription drug benefits and our F-35s and all of the other big-spending conservative projects we love.

To paraphrase Adam Smith, this rhetoric requires empirical smoke and mirrors: Invisible Sleight of Hand. The Bush tax cuts (like Reagan’s, years earlier) proved to be a massive weight on the public ledger. No matter how nice it sounds, we can’t cut taxes and maintain (let alone raise) public spending without running deficits. The numbers just don’t add up. Ever.

All of that is pretty common Thought News turf, I know. I’m getting to something else.

I was catching up on my Freddie DeBoer reading today and saw this:

Bohemian, culturally liberal libertarian writers…have profound policy and political disagreements with American liberals and leftists, but on fundamental cultural and philosophical levels, they are far closer to the average American liberal than the average American conservative. The fundamental architecture of American cosmopolitanism– the assumption of equal dignity across difference, the celebration of individuality over social constructs of religion or rank, the preeminence of the right to be yourself, the things that many of us truly value in the commission of personal freedom– these have been built by the left. If you are more interested in specific legislative victories, I would remind you of who was the vanguard of civil rights for black Americans, women, and gay and lesbian men and women. But ultimately my concern here is social and  cultural, and I don’t know how anyone can fail to give pride of place to the left for advancing the right to be your own weird self. We’ve always been the home of freaks and weirdos and out theres, and I couldn’t be prouder.

Cosmopolitan libertarians live in liberal urban enclaves, surrounded by liberals, taking advantage of the kind of governmental cultural and transportation infrastructure that liberals created. They consume movies, novels, music, and theater crafted in overwhelming majorities by leftists. They operate in environments where the liberal spirit of tolerance and freedom from conformity underpins everything, yet they will identify again and again the liberal hand as the one of villainy.

While DeBoer’s specifically ticked off about Will Wilkinson and others of his ilk (hipster libertarians), I think he’s implicitly speaking about the same attitude that I described above. This is the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” crowd. I meet these folks all the time. They like to think of themselves as personally tolerant of other lifestyles—you wanna marry someone of the same sex? Get an abortion? Smoke weed? Participate in counter-cultural activities? GO FOR IT!—but they’d just as soon keep taxes down, thank you very much. These types figure that these are compatible positions because both involve being left alone. They won’t impose their social standards on you, and the government shouldn’t impose its taxes on them. Praise modernity and pass the Ayn Rand. Q.E.D.

I’m a Midwesterner, see, so I’m usually uncomfortable about making others uncomfortable, so I usually just shrug these people off in the interest of decorum.

But DeBoer’s right to call them on their BS. The “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” crowd would like to think that we can combat common prejudice by means of personal indifference. Personal tolerance is an immense historical achievement, something we should cherish and celebrate—but it isn’t the sort of thing that we can extend simply by staying home and not caring about the decisions of others.

Nope. That’s not how prejudice/bigotry/sadism works. The mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement wasn’t just about tolerating African-Americans—it was ALSO about ending the muscular racism built into public institutions. It meant housing programs to help establish the right to mobility for African-Americans. It meant desegregation programs that would extend public education’s promise to all Americans. In short, it costs money to be a meaningful social liberal.

As DeBoer points out in his post, the left has always led the fight to extend public tolerance to others. That’s why it’s so worrisome to see what there is of an American Left co-opting conservative austerity rhetoric. Remember: our current annual deficit is largely driven by low revenues and high war spending. The debt ceiling “compromise” aims cuts at domestic discretionary spending—the part of the federal government that helps to establish the decent, humane, tolerant society that social liberals hold so dearly. That’s why committed leftists are having such a hard time this week: this “deal” ignores the fundamental causes of our debt troubles and slashes spending on programs that underwrite a decent, culturally plural society. This isn’t fiscal sanity, nor is it recognizably leftist.

I’ve argued this before—and will harp on it again soon—but the key point here is that you can’t have the cultural pluralism or the public decency or the social stability that makes individual tolerance tenable if you aren’t willing to pay for public institutions to guarantee it.††

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†† This might all come back to Hobbes, you know. Whatever he’s got wrong, he’s certainly persuasive on human quarrelsomeness. Without a public power to “overawe them” (or at least to “incentivize tolerance”) , humans aren’t spontaneously going to behave compassionately. Without public revenues, that sort of public power is unsustainable. If fiscal conservatism means “keeping taxes at historically low rates,” it makes social liberalism impossible.