Socially Liberal, Fiscally Conservative
A Broken Pendulum and Political Serfdom
In the Summer of 1789, representatives of French political power gathered in Versailles as revolution consumed the country. The factions, messy and convoluted, were given names from physical positions within the assembly hall. This setup was convenient - you could tell where someone stood by virtue of where they sat. On the right side of the room sat the supporters of the Ancien Régime, on the left sat the proponents of the revolution.
It wasn’t long before those two blocs were talked about as Left and Right. Everyone who didn’t reliably belong to either camp was, then, defined by the leftover space between them. They sat in the center of the room. The “center” wasn’t a coherent political doctrine nor a midpoint between the two political ideologies beside them. Like the Left and the Right, it was simply a location.
Two assumptions were smuggled in beside this naming convention: politics must naturally be a single spectrum with endpoints, and that anyone in the center must be a midpoint. Those in the center must borrow halfway ideas from each side.
What if the National Assembly had a different floor plan? What if one wall held a mural of a dog and the other a mosaic of a cat? Maybe the factions would’ve become the Canines and the Felines. There’s nothing “between” a dog and a cat in the way there’s a “between” a left and a right. They could have been understood as their own species of thought, not a halfway point. The people who resisted both camps wouldn’t automatically sound like a compromise or a blend. But “Left versus Right” forces a center into existence, and “center” then must be derivative of the extremes.
In the early 2000s, ask someone their politics, and they’d likely repeat a familiar phrase: “Me? I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative.” At the time, this was seen as a cop-out; it was an excuse not to commit to a side. In retrospect, that phrase was an expression of a shared public sense of normalcy. It was a cop-out because, to the mainstream, it was an obvious position to take. There was a general sense that the left had nuanced, non-dogmatic opinions on social issues, while the right had nuanced, non-dogmatic opinions on fiscal issues.
Even then, politics wasn’t a spectrum. We just pretended it was, because the parties’ coalitions held together long enough for “Left” and “Right” to feel like real coordinates. They represented two distinct ways of seeing the country, composed of identifiable positions. We knew where they sat in the National Assembly.
What would it mean today to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative? Would it mean, like it used to, that you support limited intervention in the economy but broader latitude on freedom of expression? Wait a second - didn’t the Trump administration just buy massive stakes in American companies? Didn’t the Biden administration pressure social-media platforms to curb content it viewed as misinformation?
Left and Right, Liberal and Conservative, Republican and Democrat; these labels have lost significant meaning as each party reorients their prime objective as total domination over the other. Our politics have become polarized in a literal sense. Standing at a geographic pole, there is no left and right. Only down. The political pendulum has been severed from its tether, now used as a blunt force object to beat the party not in power into submission.
The strongest argument against rejecting a “left” versus “right” framework is moral: when one side feels uniquely dangerous, refusing allegiance looks like evasion. But that logic itself is the psychological engine of binary politics: emergency turns loyalty into virtue and skepticism into betrayal. Once the fight is framed as existential, every escalation becomes “defense,” institutions become weapons, and ideology becomes secondary to victory. A third identity that refuses to acknowledge the two poles as the political centers of gravity gets mocked as “centrism.” It threatens the premise that there are only two legitimate camps.
Even if you find Trump irredeemably vile, and that’s a valid perspective to take, such a position does not change the fact that the Democratic Party, in their opposition to Trump, has transformed from a coherent set of political beliefs to a disjointed reactionary platform. It is defined by the sole goal of clawing back into office. What happened to defund the police? What happened to lax border regulation? All thrown to the wind. Maybe abundance will work!
This is not an argument that political parties should have static positions until the end of time. Political platforms should and do change. It is an argument that your positions should not be defined by their relation to the major political parties. Your positions should exist because you believe in them. They should not shift just because your party does. You can be a single-issue voter. You can care about your stance on abortion, gun rights, or immigration over all else. But to translate that passion into fealty to a single political party is to become a political serf, tilling a chunk of political earth forever shifting beneath you.
The greatest trick ever pulled by politicians was convincing the public that taking a position outside established parties is a copout. Surely it must be - it takes the easy positions from either side. How convenient! What is the issue with taking easy positions from either side, when they are obvious positions to you? A new bundle of ideas is not “RINOism” or “Champagne Socialism” or whatever the establishment sneers. It is not “Fiscally Conservative but Socially Liberal”. It is not an amalgamation of left and right - if left and right have lost definitional power, then centrism is itself a coalition of organic, independent positions. It is not an easy stance between two extremes when the concept of “betweenness” has become arbitrary. It is an entirely new platform. It is revolutionary.