"Well, I'm conservative -- but I'm not one of those racist, homophobic, dripping-with-hate Tea Party bigots! I'm pro-choice! I'm pro-same-sex-marriage! I'm not a racist! I just want lower taxes, and smaller government, and less government regulation of business. I'm fiscally conservative, and socially liberal."

How many liberals and progressives have heard this? It's ridiculously common. Hell, even David Koch of the Koch Brothers has said, "I’m a conservative on economic matters and I’m a social liberal."

And it's wrong. W-R-O-N-G Wrong.

You can't separate fiscal issues from social issues. They're deeply intertwined. They affect each other. Economic issues often are social issues. And conservative fiscal policies do enormous social harm. That's true even for the mildest, most generous version of "fiscal conservatism" -- low taxes, small government, reduced regulation, a free market. These policies perpetuate human rights abuses. They make life harder for people who already have hard lives. Even if the people supporting these policies don't intend this, the policies are racist, sexist, classist (obviously), ableist, homophobic, transphobic, and otherwise socially retrograde. In many ways, they do more harm than so-called "social policies" that are supposedly separate from economic ones. Here are seven reasons that "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" is nonsense.

1: Poverty, and the cycle of poverty.This is the big one. Poverty is a social issue. The cycle of poverty -- the ways that poverty itself makes it harder to get out of poverty, the ways that poverty can be a permanent trap lasting for generations -- is a social issue, and a human rights issue.

Roy Moore was an extreme danger to religious freedom and the rule of law for everyone living in the United States, but he posed a particular threat to the liberty of queer people, Black people, Chicanos, Muslims, non-Christians (including his own lawyer who, his wife noted with great enunciation, was “a Jew”), women, immigrants, and the poor.

But let’s give credit where credit is due and admit that the real reason Democrat Doug Jones will be heading to Washington to represent the people of Alabama is identity politics. If white people in Alabama had their way, Moore would be heading to the Senate, where he’d be free to legislate what kinds of sex you and I would legally be able to have, free to impose theocracy upon us, and free to keep treating young women as he allegedly has in the past. An overwhelming number of white people, who make up the majority of the state’s eligible voters, cast their votes for Moore, just as they voted for Trump last year. At the same time, 98 percent of Black women and 92 percent of Black men voted for Doug Jones. And, despite the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and voter suppression efforts, they came out to vote in droves.

Identity politics saved the day.

But wasn’t it a different kind of identity politics that gave us Trump in the first place? Wasn’t it “white identity politics” behind Moore’s strong showing with white voters? Not exactly.

Conservatives of all stripes, as well as liberals like Jonathan Chait and Mark Lilla, like to write off “identity politics” as divisive claptrap, but I don’t believe they understand the concept for what it is. Identity politics is not simply referring to the politics of any identity—its roots lie in grounding anti-racist, anti-misogynist and liberation politics specifically in the experiences of Black women.