RE: Conservative litmus test

Steve Brenneis responds to Behethland B. Clark:

I actually hate all this cubby-holing, but it seems to be such a natural human tendency. So I'll play a little longer.

The folks who identify as fiscal conservatives and social liberals, in my opinion, fall in a separate category altogether: confused. I know that is really generalizing, but there you have it.

Most social liberals approve of redistributionism and deep government regulation of one sort or another. You can't have it both ways. You can't enforce conservative fiscal policy when the government is spending on all sorts of things it shouldn't be. More on that later.

On the other hand, some people who identify as social liberals are really just modern libertarians. They name themselves fiscally conservative because they don't approve of the government spending our money on a lot of what it does, but they also don't approve of the government trying to regulate morality. They aren't actually fiscal conservatives because they don't really believe in what passes for conservative fiscal policy these days: monetarism, limiting government to non-individual excise taxes, limited regulation of financial markets, etc. Modern libertarians take laissez-faire to the brink of anarchy. While the Democrats have their share of socially liberal whack-jobs (fruits-and-nuts, koolaid-drinkers, pick your favorite epithet), the Libertarians are host to an entire wing of anarchists, nihilists, and left-over hippies.

On the third hand, your husband sounds to me like a poster child for the confused since environmentalism and fiscal conservatism equals oxymoron. There is simply no way to implement any government environmental policy without spending a lot of money. It is axiomatic that government never solves a problem, it simply stomps around the problem making a lot of noise. In the process, it usually makes the problem worse and ends up having to spend more money in order to continue making the problem worse. Nixon through Carter and Bush through Bush should be plenty of evidence for that argument. You didn't mention public education, but I suspect he is probably a strong supporter of that as well (or else Myra wouldn't let him in the house). Once again, public education, like environmentalism, is a money pit. The more you feed it, the hungrier it gets.

In the end, I suspect your husband's belief system is far more complex than all this. Taken issue by issue, it is my experience that large numbers of those who self identify as conservative, either socially, fiscally, or politically, but not all three, usually find out they are solidly moderate when they dive into the details. After all, seven out of ten people picked at random off the street are political and social moderates.