HAHA…………. No

Joel Webbon recently argued that the right must embrace socialism to win. On his show he and his guests made the case that the left provides for its voters while the GOP never rewards the evangelical voters who carry it across the finish line, and that the right should adopt similar economic policies in response. I think that’s exactly backwards, and I want to explain why without just yelling about it.

Coalition building is one of the best things any movement can do, political or cultural. Think of it like a train. Everybody’s moving in the same direction on a core principle, and you can disagree about which stop you get off at. That’s fine. That’s not worth getting hung up on.

The problem is what the train has been running on.

Economic liberty, free markets and small government used to be the unifying principle of the right. That has quietly gone out the window. Republicans hold a majority and could use budget reconciliation to address spending, taxes and the debt, and they haven’t. Instead we now have wealth redistribution being floated from the right, including the promise of checks if you vote a certain way in the midterms.

Here’s what I think explains it. For more than a decade, the right has been running on negative solidarity. Unifying around being against the other guys instead of unifying around something you’re actually for. And negative solidarity builds an incredibly fragile coalition, because it pulls in people who fundamentally disagree with you on everything except who they dislike. That’s why you’re now seeing the fragmentation and the factions.

Positive solidarity is the alternative. If you advocate for capitalism, meaning private ownership of goods and services and the free, voluntary exchange of them, you’re against socialism by default. But you’re against it because of what you’re for, not simply because it’s over there.

To be clear on where I stand, I think socialism is evil. It has ruined countries and it’s behind some of the worst atrocities in modern history. But the answer to a coalition that lost its principle isn’t to adopt the other side’s economics. It’s to find the principle again.

The good news is that plenty of people on the right are pushing back on this. That tells me positive solidarity is still there, and it matters a lot as things move into whatever a post-Trump landscape looks like.

#Libertarian #Capitalism #Politics