In particular, liberals often have difficulty seeing moral capital, which I defined as the resources that sustain a moral community.” I suggested that liberals might have even more difficulty understanding conservatives than the other way around, because liberals often have difficulty understanding how the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations have anything to do with morality. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it’s difficult-perhaps impossible-to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside of their matrix. Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. People whose genes give them brains with the opposite settings are predisposed, for the same reasons, to resonate with the grand narratives of the right (such as the Reagan narrative). They tend to develop certain “characteristic adaptations” and “life narratives” that make them resonate-unconsciously and intuitively-with the grand narratives told by political movements on the left (such as the liberal progress narrative). People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals. “People don’t adopt their ideologies at random, or by soaking up whatever ideas are around them. The history of capitalism-of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights-bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.” They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin the freedom to assassinate unions the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations the freedom from competition the freedom not to pay taxes the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes the freedom to commodify everything and everyone the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer.
In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism.
They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” “I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.” Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners-God bless 'em-and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. “When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot.