The American Spectator : The Spectacle Blog : Measuring "Liberaltarianism"

Tabin -- I wish I could agree and be done with this horrible apparition "Liberaltarianism" that stalks me without interruption through dreams and waking life. But Mike Gravel's unpopularity correlates less to his libertarian streak, I think, than to the tiny portion of public exposure he enjoys, and the large portion of that exposure that he dedicates to diatribes which can generally be described as unpolished.

The big picture I gleaned from Brink's magnum opus is that the failure of libertarianism as a political movement reveals precisely how staggering its successes have been as a cultural movement. Even gay pride parades are openly discussed among their former enthusiasts as passe, pointless, simply annoying. As I have been saying all along, liberaltarianism is mainly driven by a comprehensive agreement between liberals and libertarians on sexual mores, which are the virtually exclusive content of the code phrases "culture war" and "social issues."

Abortion has demonstrated what a waste of time it is to ram this huge (but still countermajoritarian) public consensus through the democratic process of representative government. The left has always been best at revolutions against politics in this country, and the most profitable lesson they have learned since 1968 is that overthrowing the power structure of the private sector is the best way to change the face of public policy from prohibition to permissiveness.

topics:
Abortion, Libertarianism

About the Author

James Poulos is a doctoral student at Georgetown and the former Political Editor of Culture11. His writing has been published by The American Conservative, The National Interest, The New Atlantis, Partnership for a Secure America, and The Weekly Standard. In addition to AmSpecBlog, he has blogged at The American Scene, Doublethink, and Postmodern Conservative, which he founded. With degrees in political science and law from Duke and USC, he is currently at work on a dissertation about life after Napoleon. In his spare time he anti-blogs at Pish Tosh.