(Hi! I'd sent the below comment to Whitney directly, and she asked me to put it here, hopefully to facilitate ongoing discussion.)
/////
It was good to read this. I appreciate you putting yourself out there in this way. That's a vulnerable thing to do.
I got thinking about this part:
"If I could shake my fiscally conservative snow globe and behold as the glittering white dust settled over my perfect fantasyland within it, I would see there a peaceful scene indeed: a gleaming place with people of all walks of life who were happy, accepted, and calm because they knew they could rely on their infrastructure being accessible to all, the presumption being that no one is inherently more deserving than another."
The thing about this is: fiscal conservatism *is the cause of* the inequality you allude to at the the end there. Fiscal conservatism is an ideology that holds that things work best for everyone when resources flow upward to the wealthy. This has been expressed over the last four decades most succinctly as supply-side economics (which, coincidentally, was just this week resoundingly debunked in a wide-ranging data-driven academic study, not that we needed it to be, because an 8th-grader could tell you that demand drives consumption, not supply, but anyway).
To give more money to the wealthy, of course, we have to take it from somewhere. And where we take it from is public spending – infrastructure, education, public wellness, social security in its many forms, etc. In other words, we're taking resources that would benefit ordinary people like you and me, and greatly benefit poor people, perhaps actually giving them the chance at the upward mobility that's promised in the American Dream – and we're giving these resources to already wealthy people who don't need it. For purely ideological reasons. (And also because the wealthy people, who happen also to believe that things would be better if they had Even More Money, control most of our politicians, which leads us directly to campaign finance reform, but that's a topic for a different day. It's all such an intertwined mess. 😭 )
If there were a clearer expression of bedrock fiscal conservatism in action than this last four years, I don't know what it would be. We started in 2017 with Obama's awesome economy being used as a pretext to give a $1.4 TRILLION tax giveaway to the wealthy ... and we ended in 2020 with the Republican Senate stonewalling on Covid relief for *seven months* while tens of thousands of businesses went under and tens of thousands of people lost their homes, even as corporations and the wealthy profited *massively* from Covid-relief giveaways. That's pure fiscal conservatism in action. Anything that happens, good or bad, is merely an excuse to give more money to rich people.
And further: conservative fiscal policy is wildly unpopular. Because of course it is ... people would rather have their own lives be easier than have their money given to wealthy people. To retain power, Republicans have to get us fighting with one another, so that we don't look at what they're doing with our money. So, they intentionally exacerbate and inflame differences between groups of people, and, specifically, they demonize the most vulnerable members of our society ... those black Latinx transgender lesbians you were talking about. There's a reason non-white/cis/hetero people have such a hard time of things in our country ... it's because Republican politicians are constantly telling us that they're a threat to the "American" way of life, as a means of distracting us from their fiscal policy. The two go hand in hand and can't be separated.
(This is also the reason that liberal protestors are demonized by these same politicians. And that, strangely, the protestors who are actually violent – to wit, the right-wing extremists – get a hall pass. You never hear it called "rioting" when a bunch of Proud Boys go on, for example, a stabbing spree, as happened in DC this last weekend. God forbid a CVS gets its windows broken though.)
Also, this isn't new. Conservatives *invented the idea of race*, for crying out loud, as a means of pitting Irish slaves against Black slaves, so that instead of finding common cause and rising up against conservative fiscal policy (expressed then as theft of labor as a means of upward wealth transfer), they would instead fight against one another. It worked great, and it's still their playbook 200 years later.
To put it more succinctly: fiscal conservatism is the *cause* of the social problems that socially liberal people want to see addressed. So I think it's kind of impossible, pragmatically speaking, to be a social liberal but a fiscal conservative? You're pulling in diametrically opposite directions at the same time.
I think about the below tweet a lot, and have for the last six years. It sums this all up so succinctly:
(Hi! I'd sent the below comment to Whitney directly, and she asked me to put it here, hopefully to facilitate ongoing discussion.)
/////
It was good to read this. I appreciate you putting yourself out there in this way. That's a vulnerable thing to do.
I got thinking about this part:
"If I could shake my fiscally conservative snow globe and behold as the glittering white dust settled over my perfect fantasyland within it, I would see there a peaceful scene indeed: a gleaming place with people of all walks of life who were happy, accepted, and calm because they knew they could rely on their infrastructure being accessible to all, the presumption being that no one is inherently more deserving than another."
The thing about this is: fiscal conservatism *is the cause of* the inequality you allude to at the the end there. Fiscal conservatism is an ideology that holds that things work best for everyone when resources flow upward to the wealthy. This has been expressed over the last four decades most succinctly as supply-side economics (which, coincidentally, was just this week resoundingly debunked in a wide-ranging data-driven academic study, not that we needed it to be, because an 8th-grader could tell you that demand drives consumption, not supply, but anyway).
To give more money to the wealthy, of course, we have to take it from somewhere. And where we take it from is public spending – infrastructure, education, public wellness, social security in its many forms, etc. In other words, we're taking resources that would benefit ordinary people like you and me, and greatly benefit poor people, perhaps actually giving them the chance at the upward mobility that's promised in the American Dream – and we're giving these resources to already wealthy people who don't need it. For purely ideological reasons. (And also because the wealthy people, who happen also to believe that things would be better if they had Even More Money, control most of our politicians, which leads us directly to campaign finance reform, but that's a topic for a different day. It's all such an intertwined mess. 😭 )
If there were a clearer expression of bedrock fiscal conservatism in action than this last four years, I don't know what it would be. We started in 2017 with Obama's awesome economy being used as a pretext to give a $1.4 TRILLION tax giveaway to the wealthy ... and we ended in 2020 with the Republican Senate stonewalling on Covid relief for *seven months* while tens of thousands of businesses went under and tens of thousands of people lost their homes, even as corporations and the wealthy profited *massively* from Covid-relief giveaways. That's pure fiscal conservatism in action. Anything that happens, good or bad, is merely an excuse to give more money to rich people.
And further: conservative fiscal policy is wildly unpopular. Because of course it is ... people would rather have their own lives be easier than have their money given to wealthy people. To retain power, Republicans have to get us fighting with one another, so that we don't look at what they're doing with our money. So, they intentionally exacerbate and inflame differences between groups of people, and, specifically, they demonize the most vulnerable members of our society ... those black Latinx transgender lesbians you were talking about. There's a reason non-white/cis/hetero people have such a hard time of things in our country ... it's because Republican politicians are constantly telling us that they're a threat to the "American" way of life, as a means of distracting us from their fiscal policy. The two go hand in hand and can't be separated.
(This is also the reason that liberal protestors are demonized by these same politicians. And that, strangely, the protestors who are actually violent – to wit, the right-wing extremists – get a hall pass. You never hear it called "rioting" when a bunch of Proud Boys go on, for example, a stabbing spree, as happened in DC this last weekend. God forbid a CVS gets its windows broken though.)
Also, this isn't new. Conservatives *invented the idea of race*, for crying out loud, as a means of pitting Irish slaves against Black slaves, so that instead of finding common cause and rising up against conservative fiscal policy (expressed then as theft of labor as a means of upward wealth transfer), they would instead fight against one another. It worked great, and it's still their playbook 200 years later.
To put it more succinctly: fiscal conservatism is the *cause* of the social problems that socially liberal people want to see addressed. So I think it's kind of impossible, pragmatically speaking, to be a social liberal but a fiscal conservative? You're pulling in diametrically opposite directions at the same time.
I think about the below tweet a lot, and have for the last six years. It sums this all up so succinctly:
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1241713-neoliberalism
Anyway, those are my thoughts, in novella form. Thanks for listening. ❤️