Who are the Socially Conservative and Fiscally Progressive?

Across the globe, there are a series of political movements and factions pushing an agenda that has not appeared on the scene for many years. Sometimes corresponding to various forms of populism, this agenda doesn’t quite fit anywhere on the existing Left-Right political spectrum, as it is found in most Western countries. Appealing to traditional axes for the identification of political ideologies, this agenda might be very broadly described as socially conservative on the one hand, making traditional liberals uncomfortable, and fiscally liberal on the other hand, making normal conservatives just as uncomfortable.

In America, for decades, a neat division between those who are socially and fiscally conservative and those who are socially and fiscally progressive has prevailed — the Right and the Left respectively, embodied in the Republican and Democratic parties. The minority of those who have transgressed this conventional division and appeared in both Republican and Democratic contexts has consisted mainly of Libertarians: functionally, they are socially progressive and fiscally conservative. But so far, very little attention has been paid to those who identify by the fourth combination: socially conservative and fiscally progressive.

These terms are all sufficiently broad as to each include a wide variety of…