As my colleague and
co-author Matt Welch
has noted, The New York Times Magazine has had the
temerity to ask, “Has the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived?”
(the first time it waded into such territory was in 1971, when Stan
Lehr and Louis Rossetto (the latter of whom would go on to co-found
Wired magazine in the early ’90s) touted libertarianism as
the next big youth movement).
Robert Draper’s article is a rollicking, essential read—and not
simply because he quotes Matt, his Fox
Business Independents‘ co-host Kennedy, Reason’s
polling director Emily Ekins, and yours truly at length (“If we can
have 20 different types of Pop-Tarts, maybe we can have more than
two types of political identification”). It’s because something new
and different is in the air. You can see it in the
bizarre, black-swan cashiering of politicians as varied as former
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and the sitting
Democratic governor of Hawaii (who just lost his primary). You can
see it in historically low ratings not just for Congress as an
institution but in the way people feel about their
own representatives. Mostly, though, you can see it in
the way people are living their lives beyond the puny, zero-sum
scrum of politics, where people as different as Glenn Beck and
Glenn Greenwald are building new forms of media and storytelling
and community. Whatever else you can say about politics as
bloodsport, Obama sucking even worse than Bush, etc., this much is
true: People are also getting on with their lives and building new
businessess, communities, and worlds in ways that are pretty damn
amazing.
Which doesn’t mean anything to folks deeply invested in
maintaining the conventional left-right, liberal-conservative
status quo. The Times‘ Paul Krugman, who doesn’t even
pretend to read people with whom he disagrees, writes off the
idea that interest in “free minds and free markets” is growing as
just more “libertarian fantasies.” Because he can only conceive of
things in the narrowest, dumbest ways,
he writes that “libertarianism is a crusade against problems we
don’t have,” as if the drug war, a continually failing foreign
policy, legal discrimination against gays, immigration policy that
punishes people yearning to be free, dead-broke entitlement
programs, and so much more aren’t really problems. Now that he has
a no-show job at CUNY, does he even get out of his house anymore?
There’s nothing short of a revolution in how people conceive of
work as a form of self-expression going on all around him. Over at
places such as National Review, even conservatives who are
themselves essentially libertarian pooh-pooh the idea that anything
much can or will be done to reduce the size, scope, and spending of
government. “Rand
Paul can’t win” is the essence of this formulation by Kevin
Williamson and others there, again reducing complex shifts in
cultural, social, economic, and political dynamics to electoral
outcomes that threaten a dying post-war coalition of special
interests. Gallup finds something like just 25 percent of Americans
copping to being Republicans. That number will only decline if the
GOP insists on doing the same thing it’s been doing since the
Gingrich Revolution. Which is to say: Spend, regulate, carp, and
grow the size of the state even as it claims to be anti-government
and pro-freedom.
I have no idea who will be the next president of the United
States, but I’m certain that the outcome of that contest will
matter far less than the broad currents in American society that
are clearly moving in
the direction of greater social tolerance and fiscal
responsibility. That’s one of the main trends that Reason
picked up in
its poll of Millennials—not some self-congratulatory discovery
that the kids today are junior-varsity libertarians—and folks who
don’t want to grapple with that and all its implications will have
less and less relevant to say about politics, culture, and ideas.
That won’t make a difference to the Krugmans of the world and the
pols who are in truly safe districts, but it will to the rest of us
who are keenly interested not just in seeing what the future holds
but also in helping to create it in the first place.
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