THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Despite Hayek's insistence that he wasn't a conservative, there was a temperamental conservatism to his free market principles. Despite his reputation as a defender of hierarchies, Burke supported markets and free trade and believed in social and economic change, so long as it came slowly through evolved and bottom-up processes, rather than rapidly through top-down imposition. 

Indeed, there is no contradiction between Burke's traditionalism and his support for markets, or between Hayek's libertarianism and his love of accumulated wisdom which evolves over time. Both a commitment to tradition, and a commitment to liberty, spring from a constrained worldview.

Whenever conservatives attempt to do away with commitment to free enterprise, they run into a problem. The left has its economic philosophy. If the right jettisons capitalism, it does not. We can't go back to mercantilism, and mercantilism never really made sense as an economic philosophy anyway--something which has been understood by economists going back to Smith and Ricardo.

Without a competing economic philosophy, right-wingers begin implicitly or explicitly embracing socialism or progressivism, echoing communism or radicalism, or rehashing leftist critiques of the free market, whether or not they understand themselves to be doing so or not. 

And much as some on the right try to explain that you can have a right-wing socialism, you can't. What happens instead is that those who used to call themselves conservatives move gradually further and further to the left until they have jettisoned their conservatism and embraced progressivism. They set out to move socialism to the right, thinking that they could change socialism. Instead, socialism changes them. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd