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Social Conservatives are the Fiscal Conservatives

By: Thad Hunter (Diary)  |  February 24th, 2012 at 08:45 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Tim Kaine predictably lectured Virginia about those troublesome social issues this week.  Of course Gov. Kaine has never shied away from applying his rubric of social justice to government policy.  No doubt he is perturbed that his strategy is not working so well according to Rasmussen and Christopher Newport University polls this week.  Perhaps he could debate George Allen on matters such as adequate energy supply instead of wind turbines since Virginia remains the second largest importer of electricity.

However, let’s talk about those so called social issues.  It is strung up like yellow tape at crime scene to squelch debate by the same people who justify their particular social issues and favorite government intervention of the day.  We can agree that all of us make moral appeals, especially when we feel wronged.  All laws are linked to a moral standard and government exists to mitigate moral injustices.  America herself is a unique moral enterprise.  Yes, government cannot create morality, but it cannot exist without it.

The reality is that fiscal and social issues cannot be separated.  They exist together as a system of cause and effect.  Despite all the talk of fiscal responsibility, we have made no tangible progress because we are only focusing on effects.

We will not right the size our now officially bankrupt country with accounting, Ivy League expertise, or some magic calculus.  We have run clean out of other countries that will buy our debt.  Do we need different leaders?  Yes, but society must first change.  Self-ascribed fiscal conservatives properly sound the alarm over massive overspending.  We simply pose the question – why?  Can you explain why transferring intergeneration debt so large that devalues every hour of labor for generations to come is wrong without making a moral appeal?

Our fiscal disaster stems from uncontrolled entitlements.   Simple math tells us that.  But the root cause of exponential entitlements, for the most part, is a function of my generation’s great experiment in sexual amorality.   Now we have children having children, family disintegration, children without childhoods, more medical costs, women being abused and abandoned, dishonoring traditional marriage, all which and more, generate more entitlements.  Our free sex will cost our children trillions.

This is the linkage that “social conservatives” are making.  Not to micro-manage lives.  We leave that to the Republican and Democrat elites.  If there was a rational, coherent Mind Your Own Business political party, then conservatives would be the first to sign up.  However we will always believe that there are institutions and a handful of standards that must be honored and protected for liberty to survive.  Our pursuit of a consequence free utopia can only end in tyranny and we feel pressing in on us every day.

Like it or not, restoring a proper moral foundation is the fiscal solution.  If you are not inclined to accept that based on traditional values, then evaluate our 60’s moral standards using cold analytics and data.  Good morals can withstand critical analysis, and they provide their own proof.

Allow our Republican primary process to debate root causes for a change and not simply rail at the symptoms.  Our Constitution is calling us to secure the Blessings of Liberty for ourselves and our Posterity and time is running out.  The piper is on his way and he will be paid.

COMMENTS

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  • Tim Griffin@griffinelection

    Tim kaine is one to lecture on social issues after doing Obama bidding for the last year. Give me a break

    • mikeymike143

      i completely agree.

  • Finrod

    Just look at Santorum, who is as big of a SoCon as they come, yet he is still defending earmarks, which is as anti-FisCon as they come.

    And do I even need to mention the War On Some Drugs, which is a SoCon staple, yet a colossal waste of money and unconstitutional to boot?

    You can keep claiming that social conservatives are the fiscal conservatives all you want, but the reality is quite different.

    • http://www.gmsplace.com/ civil truth

      Are most fiscal conservatives also social conservatives?

      I can’t think of very many social liberals who are fiscal conservatives.

      Or is there not a significant correlation between the social and fiscal axes? Might be worth a detailed statistical study to examine this question, as it seems to keep coming up every election cycle.

      • retrocon87

        there are plenty of social liberals who are fiscal conservatives… they’re called “libertarians”…

        • http://www.gmsplace.com/ civil truth

          Or more generally, I am under the impression that the numbers of social liberals-fiscal conservatives is swamped by the numbers of social liberals-fiscal liberals – which I would also suspect is comparable to the relative frequency of these two pairings in the general population.

          In other words, the best friends of fiscal conservatives are far more likely to be social conservatives than social liberals.

          • aesthete

            or pro-gay marriage libertarians in Congress.

      • http://DefeatTimKaine.com Thad Hunter

        “Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron

        • http://www.gmsplace.com/ civil truth

          How well so many of them have stood the test of time.

          Lewis clearly saw both the danger of governmental power as well as perceiving the moral element behind the tyranny of the left, one which we lose sight of because of their misdirection.

          How much of what comes from Washington in the past few years are folks piously intoning how they’re doing it for our good (or the common good, or for the “earth”) as justification for their coercion.

          Britain was ahead of us in this department, so Lewis saw this motive in action before we did on our side of the Pond.

          On the fiction side, there was NICE of That Hideous Strength eerily preceding the real-life NICE that is on the loose in Britain today.

  • Viet71

    China continues, and will continue, to buy our debt (along with Japan), because they can’t do much else with all the dollars U.S. consumers have sent them.

    Our debt looks looks funky to us, as it should, but to another country it’s still the safest haven. Not for nothing the U.S. has such a mighty military.

  • paulrobert

    Thad,

    Your argument is essentially sleight of hand (or bait & switch, or a straw man, whatever term you prefer for pretending that the argument you are refuting is something other than what it really is).

    Re: Can you explain why transferring intergeneration debt so large that devalues every hour of labor for generations to come is wrong without making a moral appeal?

    No, I can

    • retrocon87

      The current answers of the Republican party and presidential candidates appear to be–

      On the debt:
      “The policies that are causing our current and projected debt levels are entirely related to out of control entitlement spending. The way to balance the budget is therefore to immediately cut taxes by 20%, enact a plan to reform entitlement spending that won’t go into effect for 10 years because doing anything sooner than that would be completely unfair to seniors, and this will ultimately lead to a budget surplus down the road because of our plan’s embedded assumption of 11% annual economic growth and 3% unemployment for the next two decades… And worst comes to worst if our economic projections don’t quite play out, liberal ‘tax and spend’ is still a hell of a lot worse than don’t tax, still spend, and pay for it by borrowing, so vote for us.”

      Social issues:
      “Children being born out of wedlock is destroying our society. Since the only way the government can really do anything is by spending, though, (which we’re against), we’ll just complain about liberals being immoral and then hope that people hearing washington politicians calling their morality into question will change their behaviors. **And yes, to answer your question, legalization of gay marriage could indeed result in a further explosion of out-of-wedlock births, because it would not technically be considered “wedlock” since even if they’re “married” we as conservatives still wouldn’t recognize it, and who knows– there is a strong possibility that two men or two women may even be able to reproduce if all of a sudden they think they’re “married”… a few pesky George Soros-funded scientists may disagree with us, but who the hell cares– if this results in every voter in the country under the age of 30 thinking we’re complete lunatics, then so be it. ADDITIONALLY– if the Catholic Church wants to deny morning-after pills to frazzled women in hospitals who were just raped, that’s all good too… all in the name of religious liberty.”

      Perhaps someone who is slightly less jaded and disillusioned than I appear to have become can provide some better answers here… he didn’t ask about energy and foreign policy which are essentially the only two issues left that I’m still in complete lockstep with the Republicans on, so I’m kind of running on fumes here…

  • dajeeps

    The linkage between the paternalism and lack of personal responsibility is clearly there, at least I can follow the golden thread of logic that far. But I have a problem trying to understand just what government is supposed to do about that, other than start to unwind all the programs so people have to start taking responsibility for themselves and their own choices. In the end, there really isn’t anything we can do about what people in a free society choose other than lead by example without doing our own version of trampling all over our founding document and end up with unintended consequences of a different spin.

    One diagnosis I have heard is that the immorality has something to do with the economic problems we have, but I am not sure I agree with that, except to the extent that the paternalism has gotten way out of hand, in the form of piling on program after program and government making promises it can’t keep. These problems come straight from government, and I believe they have more to do with self-serving politician/power brokers doling out favors for their friends by squashing the little guy with the regulatory agencies, and doing whatever they have to do to stay in power than anything else. I suppose to them it is better to be kings of chaos than never have power at all.

    Capitalism and free markets can take a certain amount of interference and still function, but there is a point beyond which it really isn’t capitalism anymore, and it becomes an unworkable mess of central planning. It doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to come to the conclusion that economic hardship is harder on a family than anything else, and if we can’t get our economic engine restarted and revved up again, things are only going to keep getting worse for the family unit before they get better. And it’s because of this that I put economic issues ahead of everything else, and I will be voting for Newt, even if I have to write him in.

  • Professor de la Paz

    You suggest that the lack of personal responsibility stems from a rejection of tradition and Christianity. You provide a largely historical argument that suggests that, since modern liberalism argues against tradition and religion, conservatism must necessarily embrace the opposite. You do not take into account any underlying motivations of either movement, you merely take what they say at face value. Your argument is largely historical in nature, and relies on the acceptance of the idea that the superficial characteristics of the conservative movement as the true heart of conservatism..

    However, your argument is dangerously flawed. To begin, your definition of conservatism puts the movement at odds, philosophically at least, with the Constitution and the ideas of the framers and founding fathers. America was born of the enlightenment. You do not need to partake in a particularly in-depth reading of Locke’s Second Treatise on Government to understand how it provided a basis for our constitutional system, and at the very least, a justification of our rebellion against a sovereign power. The foundation of the United States flew in the face of political tradition, not only in that it rejected a sovereign monarch twice (once in the rejection of George III and once in George Washington’s refusal of ascendancy to an American kingship). If tradition is a hallmark of conservatism, then I guess we here at Red State are all tories, are we not?

    Okay, I understand what I did there was a rhetorical trick, a slight-of-hand, but it illustrates an important point – conservatism cannot rely on historical arguments as a basis of its justification. What you’re doing is providing very specific historical contexts (the French Revolution, for example) and explaining the roots of political conservatism from that lens, but much in the same way that the rhetoric surrounding Obamacare cannot be taken out of its historical context, the particular superficials of conservatism cannot be taken out of their historical contexts.

    Next, you attempt to shift the topic, ever so slightly, from a discussion of a foundation of political beliefs to another historical argument, You say, specifically, that liberalism’s rejection of personal responsibility comes directly from a rejection of scripture and the incorporation of Darwinism. Your logic, basically, says that personal responsibility comes from Christianity, and without it, you just have bohemianism and decadence.. There are a few problems here:

    One, you do not need to be a Christian to believe in personal responsibility, nor is a belief in Darwinism really an indictment of the idea of personal responsibility. You’re conflating a rejection of scripture with a rejection of everything in scripture. If the Bible were to mention that the sky were blue, people who reject the bible as a basis of their moral compass are not rejecting that the sky, in fact, is blue. Rather, they reject a particular tradition of cultural heritage for whatever reason. That does not make them not conservative. If it did, I wouldn’t be here, as I don’t believe in god, I believe even less in your particular god, and I wholeheartedly believe in evolution. Yet I still believe that, fundamentally, the basis of human interaction is individual responsibility and choice, I believe that traditional family structures are far superior to many, if not all, of their alternatives, and I probably have a stronger moral compass than many who do believe (insofar as many believers simply use their religion as a shield to justify their poor behavior and bring meaning to a life that they cannot distill meaning from on their own).

    Two, Christianity itself does not teach personal responsibility. Look at the Catholic Church as an example of this.

    Religion itself is a good thing, because it does give people something to believe in, helps them find a purpose, and promotes social voluntary cooperation and creates a sense of community, but to claim that religion itself can cure all the ills in our country (since, according to you, the rejection of it seems to be the cause) either vastly overstates the impact of religion on the formation of political beliefs or vastly understates the gravity of our nation’s problems. I posit that there is something much deeper at play.

    The State, in practice, is an institution which monopolizes the use of violence and the exercise of power within a defined territorial jurisdiction. The liberal view is simple – the State exists primarily to obtain the fulfillment of the universal will viz. the state exists to move it’s citizens forward in history. This is fundamentally a progressive concept because it rejects the State as a vehicle to protect rights (in fact, it its most distilled form, Marxism, this Hegelian idea suggests that rights are granted by the State). Any institution that challenges the State’s hold on public morality is dangerous because such an institution can undermine the State’s “progress” towards its goal.

    The question we must ask ourselves is whether or not we accept that definition of the State. If we do, then we simply wish for the universal will to be conservative political positions, but have no problem with Leviathan in principle. If we reject it, then we must present a counter-argument, but this isn’t too difficult since the counter-argument predates the origin of the liberal line of thought by quite some time. As conservatives, we fundamentally embrace the same view of the State as the founding fathers, a limited government meant not to progress us in history, but, in essence, to protect our individual rights from violation, to provide a peaceful and fair environment for social cooperation through certain laws and regulations that limit people’s absolute rights, but only enough to protect the rights of others, and a public sphere of free and open discourse without fear of retribution or indictment simply for political ideas that may be outside of the mainstream, or that differ from those of those in power.

    Many conservatives lament the growing divide between Christianity and public morality, and they are not wrong to do so. Even though I am not a Christian, religion has many good things and Christianity has many valuable things it can teach people. However, if the solution you embrace uses the government to strengthen Christian ideas through legislative or executive fiat, you embrace the same fundamental view of the State as liberals, and seek to use it to progress society to a point which you believe would be beneficial. This is not a conservative ideal, and it is the reason that I cannot call Rick Santorum a conservative. Rather, and I think we can all agree on this, we need to remove government supports that allow for non-traditional lifestyles to become viable when they otherwise would not be. Like I said in my above post, traditional values never would have become traditional if there was no benefit to them, and if incentives for abandoning them are removed, they will flourish. In the end, we all get what we want, without creating a dangerous precedent for the expansion of government power. That is unless such an expansion is your goal, but since you’re here at RedState, I have to assume that it is not.

    • kipling

      First, Conservatives became a political force in response to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment attack upon tradition and Christianity. The Conservative movement sought to conserve both – hence the conserve in conservative. To adopt your definition of conservatism is to deny the historical foundation of conservatism and and to invent a new definition in an a-historical context. You claim these are superficial characteristics but offer no proof and do not list the underlying motives that you mention. I suggest you read Burke’s Reflections On The Revolution in France.

      Second, while the American Revolution drew upon the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, it was not the only source – or even the dominant source. The religious revivals of the Great Awakening exerted just as much influence on the revolutionary generation as the Enlightenment. The Founding Fathers drew upon Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Rousseau. But they did not adopted those beliefs wholeheartedly. They believed in reason and the social contract (Enlightenment) but they distrusted man and therefore distrusted any government that he might create. They did not share the Enlightenment faith in the perfectibility of man and thought Rousseau naive for not guaranteeing individual liberty. Michael Novak’s On Two Wings discusses the dual influence of the Enlightenment and Christianity on the Founding Fathers.

      Your discussion of the American Revolution was not slight of hand but it was over-simplified and erroneous history. The Founding Fathers were very conservative in their outlook and only sought to reclaim the rights of Englishmen of which they felt Parliament and the King had deprived them.

      Third, the connection between Darwin, Freud, and modern psychology are well documented. Your beliefs are your own but on what do you base those beliefs? If you give your life meaning then your life has no meaning beyond you.

      Fourth, the modern nation-state is a relatively new invention. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) led to the concept of the modern nation state with its own raison d’etat (reason of state). Hegel and many of the Enlightenment and Romantics thinkers sought to find a driving force in history because they kept the Christian view of a linear history but sought to replace God as the driving force. The new states began to downplay religion as the source of a higher power and authority because it led to a questioning of the state.

      If we are to adopt the view of the Founding Fathers – as you suggest – then we must also adopt their view of limited government, submissive to a higher moral authority, whose purpose is to secure the rights of men bestowed upon them by God.

  • runner12

    was that “government cannot create morality, but it cannot exist without it.” This is the most accurate statement that I have heard regarding this subject in a long time.

    The problem is that too many fiscal conservatives and social conservatives enjoy poking the other one with a pointy stick any time they get a chance. Already one commentator on this diary has done so.

    Have some social conservatives been asleep at the wheel when it comes to fiscal conservatism and limited government in the past? Yes. But within the last decade or so they have all had a significant awakening. So give it a rest.

    Conversely, a society that does not embrace morals and virtues is destined to crumble. Fiscal conservatives cannot reduce the strength of a country to only dollars and cents.

    The finger pointing and nasty jabs must cease. We are all on the same team and we need to band together to educate a largely woefully ignorant public on the importance of limited government, fiscal conservatism, and social conservatism. When these three things are in place, America is at her best and her strongest.

  • Professor de la Paz

    Not because you don’t make a good point – in many ways, you do – but because it’s based around a conception of conservatism that simply cannot be construed as ideologically consistent.

    There is a very real rift on social issues between liberals and conservatives, but it isn’t as it is normally portrayed. It isn’t a fight between tradition and modernity, but rather a battle between those who feel that individuals should be responsible for their own actions, and those who reject that notion. The root of social conservatism isn’t tradition, although tradition does play a key role (I’ll get to that in a moment), it’s self-responsibility. The antithesis of the “modernity” presented by the liberals isn’t tradition, it’s self-responsibility.

    The root of conservatism is that individuals are responsible for their own actions, and the consequences entailed thereof, and that government does not and should not exist to mitigate this responsibility. The liberal world view is the opposite – that individuals are not responsible for their own actions precisely because government exists to mitigate this responsibility. Although many conservatives, having not taken the time to break down their beliefs further than “liberal bad, conservative good!” will argue with this premise, I would challenge them to present a coherent and consistent political doctrine that is also conservative. Without ultimately relying on self-responsibility, the only fall-back is tradition, and I doubt any thinking person will argue that something should remain the way it has only because it has always been that way. Such an argument is intellectually bankrupt. But where does that leave tradition?

    I said before tradition is important before I rejected it as the basis of a political doctrine, but I did mean that it was important. The traditional lifestyle became tradition because it worked well, and it provided a blueprint for future success. In recent years, conservatives have claimed that tradition is under a fundamental attack, and they are not wrong to do so; however, the enemy of social conservatism isn’t an anarchistic social construct as promoted by the liberals, but it is the very ordered nature of the liberal social construct. To phrase it differently – liberals aren’t permissive socially, they merely reject tradition as it allows for bastion of autonomy from the regulatory power of the State. For the left, everything begins and ends with the power of the State.

    A conservative rejects that notion of the State. Therefore, it is counter-intuitive for a conservative to embrace the State as an agent to promote a particular lifestyle or tradition. Rather, a conservative embraces the traditional lifestyle personally, promotes it personally, but seeks to remove the facets of state power that allow non-traditional lifestyles that fail to flourish through public support. A conservative would have a State where an individual chooses his or her lifestyle, and accepts the consequences thereof. Under such a system, traditional values persist because they work – if they don’t persist, it’s because they don’t work.

    So, with all due respect Mr. Hunter, I’d posit that you have your argument reversed. The proper “fiscal” solutions – less government spending, a smaller state, et cetera, are the solutions to our social ills. It is also why, on a truly ideological level, I see no substantial difference between conservatism and libertarianism, (with perhaps an exception made for foreign policy) since both are based, fundamentally, around the idea of individual responsibility. It is also why I reject “big-government Conservatives” like Rick Santorum, as the idea is fundamentally an oxymoron and we already have a moron in the White House.

  • Finrod

    Very well-said.

  • kipling

    You stated: “The root of conservatism is that individuals are responsible for their own actions, and the consequences entailed thereof, and that government does not and should not exist to mitigate this responsibility.”

    While conservatism does preach individual responsibility, the basic tenets of conservatism embrace a lot more. Please see Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, et al.

    Modern conservatism became a political force in reaction to the French Revolution and the excesses of the Enlightenment, which stressed human reason over tradition and Christianity. Burke particularly argued for the necessity of tradition in keeping ordered liberty.

    The definition you offer of conservatism is ahistorical. While it is the definition that many libertarians would like to hoist upon conservatism, it deliberately rejects the rich mosaic of the conservative tradition.

    Now, as to your claim about individual responsibility and the state. The idea that man is not responsible for his actions is a socially liberal construct that comes from the liberal rejection of Scripture and its teaching upon man and the nature of man. Liberalism, through Darwin and others, rejects the ideas that man is created in the image of God, has a divine purpose, and is morally accountable for his actions. The new philosophy that began so promisingly in the Enlightenment ended in the depression of Nietzsche’s conclusion that we can know nothing and that most men are sheep to be herded by the powerful few. Modern psychology has followed a similar path with Sigmund Freud. Freud’s psychoanalysis, and other theories that followed, argued that man is not really conscious of why he does things. Therefore he cannot really be responsible for his actions.

    You bemoan the lack of personal responsibility but that problem stems from the intellectual and philosophical rejection of tradition and Christianity.