THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM.  Nation columnist Corey Robin urges readers to reconsider the reasons for conservative electoral successes.

Confident that no one short of a millionaire could endorse the right’s economic ideology, everyone from Clintonite centrists to radical populists has treated conservatism as essentially a politics of distraction and delusion. Conservatives, it’s said, are just good salespeople, wrapping their ugly wares in the pretty paper of the culture wars. The way to combat them is not to challenge their ideas or defend ours but to use prettier wrapping paper.

That's the Thomas Frank What's the Matter with Kansas? argument, one that has failed for some time to convince me.  Mr Robin recognizes, however, that there is substance to those winning arguments.

After the midterm elections in November, it seemed the most natural thing in the world—to the right, the media, Obama and parts of the Democratic Party—to freeze the pay of federal workers and extend the Bush tax cuts for two years. Incoherent as policy—the first presumes that the deficit is the greatest threat to the economy; the second, the lack of consumer spending—it makes sense as ideology. The best (and only) thing the government can do for you and the economy is to get out of your way.

There is coherence to the policy.  Resources have opportunity costs, and it's naive to suppose that there is a constant multiplier effect of government spending irrespective of what those federal workers do.  Perhaps there are middle managers in the Transportation Security Agency who see value in disrupting train service in Savannah or delaying Empire Corridor service who would not be missed.  Perhaps there are assistants to the director of compliance who even as I type are identifying college athletic programs with disproportionately many wrestling scholarships with a negative contribution to national product.  That deputy inspector identifying deficiencies in the provision of handicapped parking spaces at starveling strip malls in remote parts of the country is a luxury in more prosperous times.

The subtleties of cost-benefit analysis, however, are not the ground on which Mr Robin chooses to take his stand.

If there is to be a true realignment—not just of parties but of principles, not just of policy preferences or cognitive frames but of deep beliefs and ideas—we must confront conservatism’s political philosophy. That philosophy reflects more than a bloodless economics or narrow self-interest; it draws from and drives forward a distinctly moral vision of freedom, with deep roots in American political thought.

Not simply Grover Norquist and leave us alone; not Ayn Rand and the virtues of selfishness. It's going to be difficult turf for his "we" -- the self-styled progressives -- to contest.

The secret of conservatism’s success—as any reading of Reagan’s speeches and writings will attest—has been to locate this notion of freedom in the market. Conservative political economy envisions freedom as something more than a simple “don’t tread on me”; it celebrates the everyman entrepreneur, making his own destiny, imagining a world and then creating it. Speaking before Congress in April 1981, Reagan sold his package of tax and spending cuts with a line from Carl Sandburg, that emblematic voice of the Popular Front: “Nothing happens unless first a dream.” The entrepreneur is the scion of freedom, the reincarnation of Ben Franklin and Abe Lincoln; the welfare state, its most potent enemy, the successor to King George and the slaveholder.

We must confront this ideology head-on: not by temporizing about the riskiness or instability of the free market or by demonstrating that it (or its Republican stewards) cannot deliver growth but by mobilizing the most potent resource of the American vernacular against it. We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job.

We must, in other words, change the argument from the abstractions of the free market to the very real power of the businessman. More than posing an impersonal threat to the deliberations of a democratic polity—as the progressive opposition to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision would have it, or as liberals like Paul Krugman and Hendrik Hertzberg have suggested about the unionbusting in Wisconsin—the businessman imposes concrete and personal constraints on the freedom of individual citizens. What conservatives fear above all else—more than higher taxes or lower profits—is any challenge to that power, any inversion of the obligations of deference and command, any extension of freedom that would curtail their own.

At best for Mr Robin's case, there is a split among what he thinks of as conservatives, with the country-club Republicans sympathetic to pro-business policies, and the more systematic thinkers among Tea Party Republicans sympathetic to pro-market policies, which are different.  (And those abstractions of the free market are often the worker's, or the consumer's, best protection against the desire of the capitalist to extract surplus value.)  The case he'd prefer to make, however, is one that might lead to new alliances between limited-government advocates in both major parties.

We must also change the argument about government. Government need not be a source of constraint, as conservatives claim. Nor is it designed to protect citizens from the vagaries of the market, as many liberals claim—a formulation that depicts citizens as needy and passive and opens liberals to the charge of paternalism and condescension. When government is aligned with democratic movements on the ground, as Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr. understood, it becomes the individual’s instrument for liberating herself from her rulers in the private sphere, a way to break the back of private autocracy.

In so, arguing, however, he's contesting ground the late Milton Friedman occupied many years ago.

So the problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. It seems to me that the great virtue of capitalism is that it’s that kind of system. Because under capitalism, the power of any one individual over his fellow man is relatively small. You take the richest capitalist in the world; his power over you and me is trivial compared with the power that a Brezhnev or a Kosygin has in Russia. Or even compared in the United States with the power that an official of the Internal Revenue Service has over you. An official of the IRS can put you in jail. I doubt that there is a person in the United States who couldn’t be convicted of technical violation of some aspect of the personal income tax.

One of the great dangers I see in the American situation is that there is a strong temptation in government to use the income tax for other purposes. It’s been done. When gangsters couldn’t be convicted under the laws they had really violated, they were gotten on income-tax evasion. When John F. Kennedy threatened steel executives in 1962 to get them to drive down their prices, there was the implicit threat that all their taxes would be looked at. Now, that is a much more serious threat—the power an official has in the pursuit of his self-interest—than anything Howard Hughes is capable of. We want the kind of world in which greedy people can do the least harm to their fellow men. That’s the kind of world in which power is widely dispersed and each of us has as many alternatives as possible.

That's from Professor Friedman's 1973 Playboy interview, and a lot of it is prescient. Here's his closing comment.

The spirit of the times has gone against freedom and continues to go against it. There are still intellectuals who believe that concentrated power is a force for good as long as it’s in the hands of men of good will. I’m waiting for the day when they reject socialism, communism and all other varieties of collectivism; when they realize that a security blanket isn’t worth the surrender of our individual freedom even if it can be provided by government. There are faint stirrings and hopeful signs. Even some of the intellectuals who were most strongly drawn to the New Deal in the Thirties are rethinking their positions, dabbling just a little with free-market principles. They’re moving slowly and taking each step as though they were exploring a virgin continent. But it’s not dangerous. Some of us have lived here quite comfortably all along.

And here's Mr. Robin's closing comment.

During the Great Recession, much has been written about reviving the policies of the New Deal. Though well-intentioned, this focus on policy suggests that thirty years of conservative control has left us ill-equipped to counter the power of the businessman with first principles. It’s long past time for us to start talking and arguing about those first principles, especially the principle of freedom.

Further comparison and contrast is left to the reader as an exercise.