I ran across a Distributist website which asked if Free(d) market Distributism was liberal or conservative. I wish to provide an answer at least when it comes to Christian Distributism. The answer I wish to pronounce is not only is it right wing, but, a hard right conservativism that supports a completely socially conservative method of government.
I will do this by going down the list of what makes someone right vs left from this site.
"Believe parents who want to home-school their kids or send them to private school should be able to get vouchers (read tax funding) for opting out of the public school system. Generally not opposed to public education.
"Absolutely against abortion (faux) rights, support only adult stem cell research."
"Opposed to gay (FAUX) marriage; opposed to certain anti-discrimination laws because they believe such laws conflict with certain religious beliefs and restrict freedom of religion."
"Limited Government at National or Federal Level. Local Governments should have the most control over decisions affecting local population. Individual freedom and personal property rights."
"balanced budgets."
"Oppose the Affordable Care Act. (Obama-Cronyist Care). (Amen!! It is corporatism not Universal Health care.)"
"No "amnesty" for undocumented immigrants; stronger border patrol and fence to check illegal immigration. Belief that illegal immigration is lowering wages for citizens and documented immigrants." (Amen!!)"
"Strongly opposed to gun control laws; strong proponents of the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms), believing it's a deterrent against authoritarian rule." (AMEN!!)
"The political terms left wing and right wing originated in the 18th century during the French Revolution. The stronger your opposition to radical change and desire to preserve traditional society, the more you were to the right."
"Those on the right, largely due to religious beliefs, would like to see Roe v. Wade overturned to make abortions illegal. Some majority-right states have enacted legislation recently that would make it harder for women to attain abortions while not outlawing it entirely.
The right wing believes that a fetus is a living person and that abortion is, therefore, murder. Some people make an exception for cases involving rape and incest, but some do not." (Amen!)
Religious rights of pharmacists: The right wing believes that emergency contraceptive pills — commonly called "morning-after pills" — are similar to having an abortion. So pharmacists who oppose abortions on religious or moral grounds should be allowed to not dispense such pills. The left wing believes that pharmacists are healthcare workers who should be required by law to dispense any medication that a patient has a prescription for.Contraception mandate in health insurance: One of the provisions of Affordable Care Act (a.k.a Obamacare) was the mandate that all health insurance plans must cover contraception. With strong opposition from the right wing, especially the Catholic church, some exceptions for religious institutions were made. (Amen!)
.....the right generally believes that certain crimes deserve death as a punishment.....Proponents believe that:
The death penalty is an effective deterrent against crimes, especially crimes of a heinous nature.
The death penalty is an appropriate punishment for perpetrators of heinous crimes.
The alternative — life in prison — would only mean spending taxpayer dollars to keep them confined, fed and provide healthcare services to them.
Victims and their families deserve justice; often they can only get closure when the perpetrator is put to death. (Amen!)
The right believe marriage is strictly an institution based on the union of a man and a woman, and see gay unions as an aberration from the norm. People on the right also advocate for the right of employers (especially religious institutions, including Catholic hospitals) to choose not to employ gay individuals.
Another issue of divergence on gay rights is businesses choosing their customers. For example, a florist in Washington state refused to do the flower arrangement for a gay wedding. She was sued for discrimination. In a situation like this, people on the right generally support the business owner
The government should abide by the Bible when it comes to social issues like abortion and gay marriage. (Amen!!)
While some on the right are moving from strongly and wholly supporting the Second Amendment to accepting a ban on assault weapons, many still stand firmly in support of the right to bear arms. Their argument is that guns don't kill people; people kill people, and every citizen should retain the right to defend himself. The right to bear arms is enshrined in the U.S. constitution, and any attempt to regulate gun sales infringes on this right. (Amen!!!)
"Generally considering economic impact of environmental regulation." (Amen!!)
"For voter identification laws to combat voter fraud."
"Vote for Republicans (or People's Party of Canada, or Conservative Party of Canada, or Christian Heritage Party), many do so only because there are no other choices." Exactly!
I provide further evidence below from https://practicaldistributism.blogspot.com/2013/12/utopia.html?m=1 ;
"Distributism actually looks at society, and the people in it in a very realistic way. We look at human nature, and realize that it contains many unpredictable variables that are very real factors in society and economics. Human nature is a real economic force to be reckoned. There will always be those who fail to live up to the standard, those who fail to grasp the full consequences of their actions, and those who will deliberately choose to advance their own interests even when it is harmful to others. Society needs to be structured to mitigate their influence. It is precisely because of this that we promote subsidiarity, solidarity, and emphasize the local economy with the guild system. Distributism is not a perfect socio-economic system; it is merely one that takes account of the imperfections of people. It assumes that these imperfections will always be at play, so the socio-economic system must account for that fact.
These human imperfections can arise from different directions, from the lower orders of society and from the higher orders. When from the lower orders, businesses can seek to act in unjust ways, to charge unjust prices, to pay unjust wages, to use unjust methods to undermine competition. When from the higher orders, the government can enact unjust laws and usurp roles that are naturally the function of the lower orders, even roles that naturally belong to the family itself, like directing the education of children. The further removed the usurper is from the natural level, the less the natural level is able to effectively fight to correct the problem. If the highest level of government interferes with rights of families to direct the education of their children, those families are powerless to do anything about it unless they are part of a very vocal majority – and they might not be able to do anything about it even in that case.
Capitalism is a product of the philosophy of individualistic liberalism. Some might consider it odd that a society founded on this idea would result in the consolidation of economic and political power away from the mass of its individual citizens. To read the Founders of the United States, they considered it the most natural thing that individuals would jealously guard against it, that businesses would guard against it, that local and state governments would guard against it, and, therefore, the system would work as long as no one failed. Since, in their view, the power of any level of government is granted to it from the people, the people would always have the power to revoke any power unjustly usurped from them. The United States, from its very foundation, depended on the smaller, weaker levels of society always banding together in a perpetual defensive position against a larger aggressor. In other words, the people are to consider themselves as constantly besieged. Ironically, the U.S. Constitution, which limits the authority of the federal government, was itself an expansion of that government’s power from the U.S. Articles of Confederation. The reason is that coordination requires subordination, but applying that philosophical reality in combination with individualistic liberalism will not result in a just society.
This is very different from the view of Christendom, which believed that the power of government was determined by the need it existed to fulfill, not coming from the people, but from the nature of that level of government itself. Therefore, there is a need to acknowledge powers above and beyond ourselves, which define us and set limitations on us for the common good. These powers are God and the nature he created, including human nature. Christendom depended on a constant defending of the natural orders of society and a constant growth in understanding of human nature and its failings, but that defense came from all sides, the Church, the people, and the state.
In Christendom, the argument was that, if you failed to act justly, you would not go to heaven. This applied equally to king and peasant, pope and layman. In the eras that followed it, the argument became that, if you are not vigilant, you will be subject to tyranny. The individualistic liberals of the late 18th Century still viewed God as an important factor in guiding their daily lives, including in government, but the application of that factor was left to the individual. Those who negotiated the US Constitution knew their experiment might fail, but their expectation was that, through diligence and a natural jealous guarding of self-interest, it would succeed.
In the first century since the United States was founded, some of the principles of the US Constitution were already being abandoned with the loss of sovereignty of the individual states in the US Civil War. In the century since then, the federal government has not ceased in its continual power-grab, not merely from its subordinate states, but from every local community and family. One might consider it odd that this would happen, but the very individualism the Founders believed would protect their system is the cause of it being dismantled. The fact is that, throughout history, many of those individuals in power believe that their genius in being able to get into positions of power proves they should be allowed to exercise it as they see fit, even if it means preventing others from exercising powers that once belonged to them. Notice that this is the very same argument made to justify the never-ending consolidation of wealth among the very rich. Surely if they could get into the position of running these banks and international businesses, they are obviously smarter about business than others, and are therefore the best ones to know how business should be run and what the national economic policy should be, even if doing so puts others out of business.
This is because, even though they have diverged in regard to how to build the ideal society, they both spring from the same faulty philosophy of individualistic liberalism. They are both like the pigs in Orwell’s, Animal Farm, believing that they are the ones who are more equal than everyone else. That same individualism left the common man defenseless when economists decided that ethics does not apply to economics, and defenseless when political theorists decided that government was the solution to just about every problem. Each of these camps believes they have the real answer to creating a truly free and prosperous society, if only all of those pesky other people would behave the way they should. You see, when their systems fail, it is either the fault of the other camp, or of the consumers themselves. It is never really the fault of their ideas; it is the fault of people who pick and choose what to believe, and then choose to act differently than the economists predicted. Distributists, on the other hand, expect failures to occur. There will be those who attempt to corrupt the system. This is why the system must be set up to mitigate the damage these people will do, and make it easier to correct the problems they create.
This is why we advocate the guild system to fight corruption in the lower orders. When a single business engages in unjust practices, the guild can remove its license to do business in the local area. This is really no different than a business losing its license for failing to abide by the laws of the city or county. However, because businesses in the guild only operate in the local community, and the guild itself only has authority in that community, even if the entire guild were to become corrupt, its sphere of influence is limited by design. Therefore the local community has a greater ability to bring it back in line than they do with the intercity, interstate, and international companies with which we have to deal in our present system. Additionally, the problem of a local company will be a local problem. It will have little impact on the overall economy of the state, the federal nation, or the world, as has been the case with the current financial crisis triggered by the failure of a small percentage of sub-prime mortgages in the USA.
Distributists advocate subsidiarity to deal with corruption in the higher orders. The principle of subsidiarity only grants authority to the different orders of society according to the need they exist to fulfill. While this can be abused, Distributism grants more power to the local level than it has under our current system, even more than it had when the USA was founded. This will make the local level more effective at correcting corruption at higher levels. Currently, the higher level is allowed to override local laws, even in things that are local issues. Distributism corrects this. For example, by including in its founding principles the idea that state assistance does not give the state the right to usurp local authority, the state may still contribute to education in a poor area, but its contribution gives it no authority to dictate what must be taught. The state may contribute to social assistance programs when the level of need warrants it, but its contribution does not give it authority to direct those programs at the local level. Admittedly, these concepts are foreign to us. Those who promote assistance by the state insist that the assistance grants the state more authority in regard to that assistance. Thus, the state can, and even must increase its power over the masses whenever its assistance is needed. Those who promote the continued authority of the local level sometimes insist that this means the state cannot even assist. This was actually the view of the American Founders in regard to the federal government they created in both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. These two extremes are natural evolutions from the philosophy of individualistic liberalism.
Distributists advocate solidarity, which is when the society, both as a whole and at each level, accepts that everyone is responsible for everyone. It is not just the responsibility of individuals who work or contribute to help those in need, and it is not just the responsibility of the government who must step in pre-emptively just in case individuals would not. It is a social responsibility shared by the society as a whole and by each member. This also has a subsidiary nature which means that it primarily falls to the local levels of society, families, churches, guilds, and other local associations, but it also means that the higher levels of society must step in, when warranted, to assist but not take over. If the higher level is needed to coordinate efforts because the need is wide-spread, it may do so until the situation will allow the more local levels to effectively resume their natural role. Yes, there will be those who will not help, but there will be a tremendous social pressure to do so, and a tremendous social stigma for refusing to do so.
These ideas, subsidiarity, solidarity, ethical economics, preference for the local economy, guilds, the common good, and the other various aspects of what a Distributist society would be like, are why those of us who advocate Distributism cannot discuss it merely on the economic or the political level. It cannot even be discussed merely on both of them combined. When Distributists discuss these ideas, we are actually discussing a different philosophical view, a view that rejects the false philosophy of individualistic liberalism that is the core of the political and financial world in which we live.
Take not of the decentralized and local nature of Disributist economics. As well as the use of a higher order financed sphere Sovereignty type system with the use of Subsidiarity principles. Note also that it is a form of market economy and thus not leftist even in economic terms. Even more take note that it stands against individualistic liberalism being something that seeped into traditional institutions even during the past in the US. Which if anything makes it even more truly conservative than the modern right movement.
Which is why I think there is no doubt that classical/Traditional Christian Distributism is hard right. It is an Christian Anti-Capitalist Hard Right free(d) market movement which aims to correct the errors of the Globaalist Neo-Liberal Capitalist (FAUX) market they see as being a marage of an actual free market economy.
Whether I agree with everything within the system or not it does not fall anywhere other than as Very conservative and Hard Right.
