Fiscal Conservatism

I have grown so powerfully annoyed with every straight-faced, strong-jawed politically reasonable Democratic nominee vainly claiming the paradoxical title of "social liberal, fiscal conservative." I would venture that the two descriptions are mutually exclusive (based on my understanding of the phrase, fiscally conservative). That is, they favor (i) a nearly "flat-tax" (because it's "fair", at least, based upon the grade-school understanding of the notion), (ii) minimal spending on educational and social programs and (iii) corporate subsidies (read welfare for the rich - because baby-Jesus knows we have to protect our biggest businesses so that the benefits trickle-down to the underlings, notwithstanding the direct conflict with free-market capitalism). The problem with those policies, other than their apparent disconnect from good economic theory, is that they make social-liberalism necessarily impossible. The problem is that poverty, and its repercussions: crime, disease, starvation, etc., is already a tax on the entire society, but one, which, by definition, weighs heaviest on the poor. Thus, social taxation is already regressive, and fiscal-conservatism exists only to exacerbate it. This is anything but socially liberal; it’s atavistic and socially irresponsible. How can generally well-educated people ignore basic logic, or history for that matter, which has confirmed, if there was ever any doubt, that growing disparities in economic well-being simply cannot last and will have to be confronted one way or the other. In the prescient words of Rage Against the Machine: "hungry people won't stay hungry for long!"

Conservatives (fiscally or otherwise) have always been behind politically (its the natural outcome of conservatism), and they will continue to be. In fact, I think history can be simply defined as the proving of conservatives wrong, their ideology slowing giving way to the realities of progress. It’s just a matter of time and circumstance. Progressives, not ironically, come up with progressive ideas, conservatives bitch and moan about how things were different/better when they were young, how it's just not fair, charge us with utopist naivete, and then a century later fold and pretend they were on board the whole time. Just imagine if you could describe our current government to some fiscally conservative Republicans from the turn of the 20th century (i.e. McKinley), he would think we were all socialists. Describe our new national education program ("Leave no middle-class white kid behind"), nationalized prescription-drug bill ("Leave no voting senior citizen behind"), or our national faith-based programs ("Leave no potential convert to Christianity behind"), and George W. Bush would seem like Leon Trotsky.

Presidentially speaking, I think Kucinich is far and away the best candidate. However, he's shackled by his reasonableness, and will be relegated to the role of primer for future real-liberals (he's the Adlai Stevenson of the early 21st century). The rest of them (Sharpton and Brown excluded) are all just water-downed conservatives. Dean's a little better than the rest, but not much. The wrestling scream was the best thing I have seen out of him so far. That being said, any of them would be an indescribably vast improvement on the current administration, and will likely have my reluctant vote.