If you're looking for a concise summation for a certain strain of conservatism, you could do worse than the opening bars of 2Chainz's "We Own It"*:
Money's the motivation, money's the conversation
You on vacation, We gettin paid so
We on paycation, I did it for the fam
It's whatever we had to do, it's just who I am
Yeah, it's the life I chose
It's all right there: An entrepreneurial mindset, an ethic of hard work, a focus on business success, emphasis on family values. Underpinning it all is a philosophy of personal responsibility. 2Chainz isn't asking anyone for a handout; he's not asking anyone to backstop him if he fails. The risks he takes are his alone.
"We Did It," as it happened, came up during Chainz's un-turn-away-able interview with Nancy Grace about marijuana legalization Tuesday night. Grace asked the rapper about the lyric "I never feared death or dying/I only fear never trying." It was one of many diversions from the topic ostensibly at hand: marijuana legalization, and videos of parents trying to get their children to smoke pot.
Booking 2Chainz for the segment turned out to be a stroke of genius. (With luck, Grace will follow through on her Twitter vow to have him back regularly.) Despite a slew of random digressions—on 2Chainz's aliases, on his videos, and so on—what comes across clearly is his libertarian-conservative ethos. In making a case for marijuana legalization, 2Chainz advocates for limited government and limited intrusion into citizens' lives; decries wasteful spending; and insists on personal responsibility while espousing an essentially Thatcherite conception of a polity as a collection of individuals who can't and should not be abstracted into "society" writ large.


