The most popular punching bag of the last thirty years is the hyper-divisive beast known as “The Social Conservative.” This is the guy or gal who has inserted themselves as the “nay” vote in all of today’s most heated cultural wedge issues, and has fought against everything from gay Civil Rights to allowing women easier access to contraception. Oh, people love to laugh at the Michelle Bachmanns or the Rick Santorums, and it never hurts that there’s always a steady stream of shit-kickers willing to take their place (the Santorums and Bachmanns are clearly derived from the Palins and Bushs, who are clearly devolved from the Reagans, both Ronald and Nancy).
But while men wearing sweater vests that finger wag at pornography are the juicier targets for Saturday Night Live parodies, the real radical shift has been in the fiscal conservative (i.e. economy Republicans, or “debt hawks,” or “Money Republicans”) wing of the party. Whether you love evangelicals or hate them, there’s no denying that they’ve stayed largely the same over the last half-century. They’ve become a group uncomfortable with the Civil Rights movement to a group uncomfortable with the Feminist movement to a group uncomfortable with the abortion rights movement to a group downright hostile to the Gay rights movement, as predictable as phases of the moon.
What’s really changed in the last decade, is the growing radicalization of “Fiscal conservatives,” who have now been overrun by people calling themselves “Libertarians,” which in its current, Tea Party-incarnation seems to just mean “people who hate government and taxes for any reason,” which is about the same definition you could use for The Confederate Party or, before that, anarchists.
Today’s Fiscal conservatives aren’t merely content to stop universal health care, they want to eliminate Medicare and Medicaid, so that nobody has affordable health care…even declaring war on “Obamacare” or as it’s actually known “The Affordable Health Care Act,” and showing disgust at Mitt Romney for championing his state into the best healthcare in the country. They don’t just want to keep the impractical Bush tax cuts, they want to pay no income taxes, advocating instead for a very regressive “Fair” tax system of zero percent income tax on anyone but a hefty sales tax of 25 percent on everything whether you’re a homeless guy or a billionaire alike, which any sane economist says will destroy our consumer based economy. And don’t even get them started on unions (ban them!), public education (defund it and bring in charter schools!), or any government job/spending whatsoever (horrible!) unless you want to see people foaming at the mouth.
All of this isn’t just wanting a return to 2000, it’s wanting a return to 1900. [Whenever Grover Norquist talks about wanting to go back to the turn of the century, he really means the turn of two centuries ago.] In some ways, what fiscal conservatives are now asking for is arguably more regressive than the changes social conservatives want, and inarguably more radical. When Ron Paul talks about abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to the Gold Standard or about privatizing the entire public school system, it’s the equivalent of Santorum declaring a “War on Pornography.” The only difference is that the majority of people don’t know enough to know it’s a bad idea, and therefore you won’t see an SNL sketch about it.