The Fiscal Conservative Social Liberal is a M̶y̶t̶h̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ Rare Creature.
When William Watson of the Financial Post wrote this description of the compound phrase “fiscal conservative, social liberal”, I found myself face to face with one of my conquered vices.
It’s social liberalism combined with fiscal conservatism: the idea that government should let people run their own personal lives but should also be modest about intervening in the economic aspects of their lives and so should not overly regulate, spend, tax or borrow. It used to be a common view.
Having spent most of my life as a conservative, deeply rooted in my working class Nova Scotian background, I wanted to accept that familiar message as simple, concise truth.
But what Mr. Watson actually provided is a pretty accurate description of the views of a “classical liberal” which we now know as a “conservative”. It’s the great conceit of conservatism, one that I used to share, to use the phrase “social liberal, fiscal conservative" as if it’s not a dichotomy, but a two sided Janus coin. It’s a seductive fallacy and the original sin of political virtue signaling.
Like all complex discussions, we can’t proceed without understanding the terms.
Fiscal conservatism is a real thing with a definition.
The phrase “fiscal conservatism" has been around since the 1930s when Roosevelt’s New Deal created a schism in the broad “liberal” camp.
The policies initiated by FDR’s social liberals were seen by the classical liberals to be the mechanism by which America became a “welfare state” with increased regulations, enforced worker protections, market controls, higher taxes, increased government debt and deficit spending. All this was anathema to the classical liberals who favoured the most minimal possible government intervention in the workings of both society and the economy.
In fact, it became such an issue for them that they created a new phrase to distinguish themselves. That phrase was “fiscal conservative”.
Those classical liberals began to call themselves fiscal conservatives so as not to be associated with FDR’s coalition of social liberals. And then finally just “conservatives”.
It started what became one of the greatest realignments in American political history. So, in a way, this compound phrase is the fulcrum of a decade long political struggle that shifted the world’s greatest democracy on its axis.
Deregulation, free trade, open markets, privatization and low personal and business taxes are the defining qualities of classical liberalism turned fiscal conservatism. To use “fiscally conservative” as an adjective to describe your beliefs, or to call yourself a “fiscal conservative” is to believe in these things.
As Mr. Watson said in his definition:
government should … be modest about intervening in the economic aspects of their lives and so should not overly regulate, spend, tax or borrow.
Social liberalism is also a real thing with a definition.
Mr Watson’s definition of being socially liberal is simple and straightforward and is the only manner in which the “fiscal conservative” component can be true.
Government should let people run their own personal lives.
And it’s also fully opposite to the actual definition. That is a conservative’s idea of what “social liberal” should mean, not a definition of what it does mean.
His wording is perfectly representative of the mental trick so-called principled conservatives play upon themselves. By taking the very passive position of non interference he is displaying no animosity or prejudice, no ill will or sense of superiority, no desire for people to suffer, merely a dispassionate notion of non interference. It is a fundamental belief of conservatism that we must not interfere in the natural course of a person’s life or do so as little as possible. For good or ill, that government should “let people run their own lives”.
To actually be a “social liberal” or a believer in social liberalism is to essentially be a FDR New Deal style liberal. The opposite of Mr. Watson’s definition. Social liberalism’s core principle is that it’s not enough to be passive, to just leave people to live their lives. It’s founded on the belief that not only should government concern itself with people’s lives, but that it has a duty to do so.
A social liberal, or someone who is “socially liberal” believes that government should directly and indirectly address economic and social issues such as equality, racism, workplace protections, poverty, health care, education and so on by way of regulations, laws, policies, increased taxes, and, as necessary, borrowing and deficit spending.
Social liberalism is the political recognition that left unchecked — when people are left to “live their own lives”— without sufficient controls on their worst impulses, society begins to erode. Socio-economic classes split and harden, wealth and income disparity explodes, poverty increases and with it violence, disease, and addiction. Serious crime, racial and religious intolerance, domestic violence and minor crimes specific to poverty overwhelm underfunded institutions.
Social liberalism formed organically in 1930’s America as a response to all those things which had already happened to their society leading up to and during the great depression. It wasn’t a bunch of lefty do-gooders doing good, it was the heroic effort to save a country from permanent damage, maybe even ruin, to change its direction and to allow it to flourish.
One cannot argue with the results. It ushered in an age of progress and prosperity the likes of which the world has rarely, if ever, seen.
And still, America’s conservatives have been engaged in a persistent and sometimes incomprehensibly craven attempt to undo the New Deal for almost a hundred years.
The rest of the necessary nomenclature
Let’s clarify the Canadian specific definitions used in this particular argument.
If your hard belief is “fiscal conservative” (low taxes/debt and minimal social intervention), you are right wing and a conservative. You usually vote for Conservative Party of Canada (CPC).
If your hard belief is “social liberal” (moderate social intervention, moderate taxes, and the cautious use of debt as a fiscal tool) you are left wing and a liberal. You usually vote for Liberal Party of Canada (LPC).
If your hard belief is an extension of the left wing/liberal ideology (extensive social intervention, higher taxes and the more free use of debt as a fiscal tool) you are left wing and a social democrat. You usually vote for the New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP).
If you’re a moderate “conservative” who believes that a little debt and social spending is okay as long as it doesn’t overly threaten personal freedoms, restrict open markets or increase taxes, you’re centre-right . Your natural vote will be for either the CPC or the LPC, depending upon the economy, the party representatives and the party platform.
If you’re a moderate “liberal” who believes we should have robust social programs, but not so many that we become a “nanny state”, or unable to fund those programs without a debilitating level of taxation, or they interfere too much with the free market, you’re centre-left worldview. Your natural vote is for the LPC or the NDP, depending upon the economy, the party representatives and the party platform.
For the purpose of this article, let’s create a foundation thesis.
Canada is a socially liberal country and our two primary parties are engaged in an endless tug of war between moderate fiscal conservatism and moderate social liberalism.
Canada itself hasn’t been (if it ever was) properly fiscally conservative since universal healthcare was introduced in 1966, more than thirty years after FDR’s New Deal. That was the Rubicon which the “social liberals” pulled us across and from which the “fiscal conservatives” have been relentlessly and fruitlessly trying to “rescue” us ever since.
Being planted, firmly we think, on the left bank of the Rubicon creates the illusion that the stakes in the tug of war are nominal — a matter of how much we spend on social liberalism, not whether we have it.
Fair enough. On the basis of this belief, let’s say that while you cannot be both a “social liberal” and a “fiscal conservative” based on their clinical meanings, you can be either center-left or center-right and that these positions could be described accurately, if not clinically, as being “socially liberal and fiscally conservative” to one degree or another.
I’m writing this to clarify a public statement I made that one could not be both socially liberal and fiscally conservative. As I’ve just proved myself wrong, I owe a public apology.
[insert appropriate mea culpa here]
I concede my mistake. Now let’s talk about yours.
Yours has its roots in the nomenclature section, where I talk about which party/parties is/are your natural go to, depending upon your type of centrism.
By the definitions I just established, the people who use the “fiscal conservative, social liberal” phrase to describe themselves are moderates from both sides. Centrists. They lean left and right, but stay fairly close the center. They tend to believe that the way to bring Canada back to that desired “centrist” balance is to simply vote for the other side for a term. If you feel the side in power has veered too far into either “social liberalism” or “fiscal conservatism” you might believe that a vote for the opposition merely has a braking effect.
You might believe, for instance, that voting for a CPC government simply causes either less spending/debt or voting for an LPC government simply means a greater attention to social programs designed to equalize social and economic opportunity.
You might even plan to vote for the other side again the next time, and believe it’s like tapping “resume” on Canada’s political cruise control.
This is the mistake I want to convince you to concede.
The value of the great conceit so succinctly laid out by Mr. Watson is that it allows you to believe it’s just a matter of book keeping and reduction of some of social spending that you personally find offensive or excessive. It allows you to believe that all you’re doing when you vote the “other side” is hitting pause while we make some fiscal bank or regain some social ground.
But that’s not even a little true. It would only be true if the real, actual meaning of “socially liberal” is simply to be passive and “let people run their own personal lives”. Which it’s not.
Those of you who currently (while we have a liberal government in power) use the phrase this way “I’m a social liberal, fiscal conservative and I really care about people and want them to be good, but I’m getting mighty nervous about the amount of spending going on to enact that liberal program. I’m thinking of voting conservative next time, just to get things under control.”
Here’s what that vote you think is a harmless braking action is actually doing: it’s eroding the foundations of social liberalism itself. It’s making us a little less firmly planted on the left bank of the Rubicon. It’s making us easier to pull back across.
It’s reducing taxes, deregulating, taking away benefits and protections and trying to re-invigorate the “ruling class” (wealthy white people referred to as “job creators” by conservatives) by opening markets and privatizing services. It’s selling public land and rights to our resources. It’s dismantling the liberal democracy we just paid for — are still paying for. And when you elect the Liberals again next time, we’ll pay for it again … plus the cost of the rebuild.
Conservative governments tend to all cut costs in the same basic way: they cut revenue by cutting taxes and then to balance the books, they have to cut social programs. There is no other way. I refer you to Alberta which is governed by a right wing party which has a philosophy closest to genuine “fiscal conservatism”. Ontario is a less compelling but still valid example of the shifts between a liberal and a conservative government. It’s not just fiscal restraint, it is a philosophy of passive government whose “enemy” is active social liberalism. It is not social-liberalism lite, it is a whole other beast.
Honestly, it’s like buying something on credit and then setting it on fire before it’s paid for because you suddenly feel you overpaid.
If the intention was to gently brake while still in “Drive” , you should know that by voting for the “other side” you’ve actually thrown us into a hard, gear grinding “Reverse”.
The correct thing to say if you are a social liberal and want Canada to stay a socially liberal country, but you are concerned about our economy or fiscal state, is “I’m a social liberal and I want the social liberal government to stop spending so much money or explain it to me so I can stop worrying.”
Social liberalism — like anything else — can’t exist in stasis. If society/government does not move along and become progressively more adept at being “socially liberal” (not necessarily more socially liberal, just better at it), it will begin to disintegrate under its own weight.
If portions of it are undone every four years, it will always be a crumbling building that requires constant repair. And real fiscal conservatives undo the pillars, you must understand, not the roofs. They aren’t going to try and cut off a toe, they’re going to try to stab it in the heart.
So, if you’re a person who wants the government to actively participate in engineering a more equal society — to do more than be passive road builders — placing that conservative vote is a funny way of showing it.
Here’s a truth: because we ARE a socially liberal democracy, when the conservatives come to power it can seem an awful lot like they’re supportive of all those social programs and of social liberalism itself. It’s not like they come in on the first day and send a guy around to start kicking seniors out of public housing and herding them down to the local church basement.
They are insulated against a public outcry about their intentions because we’re sure the things we’re warned about could never actually happen. Canada won’t, you tell yourself, ever get rid of public healthcare or downgrade its public education or have a state media. Canada will never deregulate the markets or remove workplace protections or let people go without necessities.
In a province things can happen much more quickly and the results are much more visible and obvious, so if you’re sure we won’t actually go backwards and your conservative vote will simply be a check, I invite you to go talk to some social liberals in Alberta or Ontario.
There’s another side, of course.
If your concern is that the fiscal state is a result of veering too far left ideologically, that we’ve started building a government so large that it has become vulnerable to unchecked excess, that we’ve become hostage to special interest group grievances and “feelings” , that by trying to be all things, it has become a jack of all trades and a master of none, then that’s a different thing.
Perhaps you’re concerned that we’re slicing off the sharp edge of personal responsibility and shaving too close to the bone of personal freedom and in the grand scheme to equalize things, your own chances at success are slowly disappearing. Or that we’re sidling too close to the moral hazard of a government trying to remake human nature itself or subsidizing its weaknesses to an enabling degree. Perhaps you’re not sure that it’s the government’s job, and thus not yours, to feed the poor or house the vulnerable or contain the markets or make people stop saying mean things.
Perhaps you feel that the Necromonger was right and that a person should get to “keep what they kill”. Or at least more of it.
If any of these things are true — or all of them — to this or that degree your choice is different. You can believe all (or any) of these things, they’re perfectly valid views that have a place in the discussion, but it’s best if you understand them in their entirety. If any of these things resonate, your vote for a conservative government as a check is a perfectly reasonable one to make.
But just be clear why you’re choosing to do that and what the consequences will be. You’re checking ideological drift, not fiscal excess. They’re different but equally valid things.
This whole exercise started as an explanatory/mea culpa Twitter thread that became a victim of my “writing how to books” brain. Which is to say that twitter threads that contain nomenclature tables are bad Twitter threads.
Because I will be amazed if anyone makes it this far, I might as well add this personal and extraneous post script:
The original Twitter thread combined with a bunch of real life and online conversations with conservative and liberal friends, has sent me into a terrible political identity tailspin.
I think I’m likely a “Mulroney conservative” which is nothing at all like a “Harper conservative” and even less like an “O’Toole conservative”. My closest political home is the Liberal Party and their drive to maintain ascendancy requires a movement leftwards that I find increasingly uncomfortable in some very complicated “big government” ways which are not at all fiscal.
My personal stopping point is that I honestly believe that wealth/income inequity is our single largest global problem, bigger even than climate concerns— which I think are the second most pressing issue we face as a race of people.
I do not like this new variety of Canadian conservative — not one little bit. I dislike the Harper-ness of their ideas, their willingness to accept and even embrace what we tend to call “Right Wing Nut Jobs”, religious social conservatives and, frankly, low rent candidates with neither the intellectual capacity nor the character to run a country like Canada.
Mr. O’Toole has come right out and told us he would implement a “Canada First” set of economic policies that are, in his own words, “exactly the same” as Trump’s “America First” economic policies. I’m not sure why anyone with a functional brain would vote for that or advocate that any other Canadian do so, frankly. To be clear, that is a set of policies aimed at getting to real “fiscal conservatism” very quickly and, as already discussed, actual fiscal conservatism is the political opposite of “social liberalism” and shouldn’t be a place anyone wants to go after 2020.
In the late 1970s, Prime Minister P.E. Trudeau claimed that his Liberal Party of Canada adhered to the “radical center”. I think, all things considered, in a country like Canada, we should stick as close to that center and that philosophy as possible and only one party has stated policies that are even within reaching distance of that center.
I’m going to remain a “Mulroney conservative” and vote for the closest thing we have to that, which is the Liberal Party.
