On the Incoherence of Ideological Bundling

The American left/right axis presumes a coherence that its component positions do not actually share. Support for a given policy is rarely derived from a first principle — it is inherited from coalition membership, then rationalized after the fact.

The bundle is the product being sold, not the ideas inside it.

This is not a new observation, but it is one worth re-deriving from load-bearing claims rather than repeating as received wisdom. Three cases make the incoherence visible: trade policy, federalism, and labor mobility.

Consider federalism. The same coalition that invokes local control in one domain will, in the next paragraph, invoke uniform national standards in another — not because the underlying principle changed, but because the desired outcome did.