WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND. To build a stable electoral majority, create a "Just Leave Us Alone" coalition? Now that the denial and anger are wearing off, the Angry Leftists are contemplating bargaining. Matthew Yglesias has unwittingly identified the source of the Left's problem.

My insight du jour on this topic, however, is to remember that it was we seculars who started the "culture war" (albeit before I was born) and that this has certain implications. 40 years ago, in the wake of the liberal landslide of 1964, the state of American social policy was far more objectionable than anything one could conceive of being implemented today. Jesusland with its exceptionless abortion bans, anti-sodomy laws (to say nothing of civil unions or gay marriage), and school prayer stretched from sea to shining sea. And Jesusland -- which is to say the entire United States of America -- was also Whiteytown with its Jim Crow in the South and less formal, but almost equally pernicious, mechanisms of social exclusion operating in the North and the West. And liberals struck, with a wave of court decisions, legislation, and work to change social attitudes that continued moving forward from the Civil Rights Act to the Voting Rights Act to Roe v. Wade to civil unions in Vermont to Will and Grace to the Massachusetts Supreme Court to Gavin Newsome's quasi-legal San Francisco marriage ceremonies. Without approving of the backlash, one can see why it happened, why it shouldn't surprise anyone, and take comfort in the knowledge that the clock will not be rolled back on these issues to where it was in 1964 or even, on most fronts, to where it was in 1994.

Take away the preening, and you have grasped that the use of the power of the national government to impose changes on reluctant others provides a machinery that can be used by those others in their turn. Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek spells out what happens next.

If any faction grows sufficiently powerful it will aim, self-righteously, to use state power to persecute error, wrong thinking, and wrong-doing – even if the alleged wrong-thinkers and wrong-doers never interfere with the persons and property of others. If this same faction loses power, it will demand, self-righteously, to be tolerated by those who disagree.

Are you listening, Matt Yglesias?

For many reasons it is unwise to use the state in social-engineering projects such as overseeing the ethnic make-up of private-firms’ employees. But one reason surely is that, once uncorked, this same power will eventually be seized by others and used, say, to punish homosexuality, to prohibit abortion, and to outlaw valuable forms of bio-medical research. Power to do good is power to do ill. Best for blue-staters and red-staters each to take back power from Uncle Sam and then live together in peace. Happily, the actual text of the U.S. Constitution provides a good framework for peaceful co-existence.

Swarthmore's Timothy Burke has been thinking along similar lines. It's a long read but will reward careful study.

My narrative is not the New Jerusalem. It is “don’t tread on me”. It is America as the experiment in the universal promise of freedom, as unified by its constitutional guarantees. From many, one. The other road gives up on the red-staters, or at least on the people trapped in old, dying rural communities. Instead, it turns to the business elite and to suburbanites and says, “You guys are playing with fire, and you’re going to get burned if you keep it up. Leave while you still can.”

It is a soft libertarian road, characterized by an intense commitment to the universal enforcement of constitutional rights, by an uncompromising protection of free speech, free assembly, to the restraint of the power and capacity of the federal government, any government, to intrude on the rights of its citizens. But this road also has to abandon the strong version of the welfare state, to throw overboard strong regimes of governmental regulation of business, to subject government intervention in economic and social issues to very strong needs-tests and very intensive assessment of effectiveness. The rhetoric of this road would have to strongly favor meritocratic visions and conceptions of social mobility and economic policy.

Essentially this embraces the common interests of suburbanites, business elites and cosmopolitan liberals, and I strongly suspect, many of the so-called “Reagan babies” and “South Park Republicans”, who vote Republican when they do much more for these logics than because of red-state “moral values” rhetoric.(*) It throws overboard the old union constituencies and their political allies, and to a lesser extent, throws over more conventional forms of patronage politics aimed at ethnic groups.

The first road embraces the communitarian heritage of the left; this road draws much more on 19th Century liberalism, and tries to pull out those aspects of the left-liberal tradition that owe heavier debts to that lineage. Again, it’s a case where the left would enter very much as the junior partner into this coalition, not as a vanguard or leadership.

Of the two roads, in purely pragmatic terms, this strikes me as being much easier to carry out, and potentially much more capable of delivering short-term political gains. There are already signs of serious tension within the present Republican coalition on these issues. In purely practical terms, the danger of this road is that it not only does not check the growth of red-state resentments, but actually accelerates them. The main hope here might be that this coalition could effectively block the moral-values constituency from access to national power once again.

I personally find this strategy more appealing. The communalist vision is one that I ultimately find intensely repellent in personal, visceral terms. I’m prepared to neutrally enforce the rights of people to choose to live however they want to choose, but I’m not prepared to sign on with a coalition that actively, drippingly embraces a project to reinvent gemeinschaft for the 21st Century. I am a child of modernity, and I embrace it. I recognize the power of the historical wellsprings of red-state resentments, and I know the importance of responding to them with something other than blind hatred or temper tantrums. But I’d rather try to expand the definition and resonance of cosmopolitan values, and embrace an equally American vision of rights and freedoms: Pennsylvania, not Plymouth.

Professor Burke correctly notes the potential for such a vision to exploit the fractures in the Republican coalition, as detailed in the books noted here, as well as to prompt more serious thinking about rolling back the Nanny State and retiring the Welfare Economics Paradigm (TM). There are possibilities and dangers, as Catallarchy's Jonathan Wilde notes.

A large swath of Americans are broadly politically libertarian - defined as socially liberal and fiscally conservative - but still big government reigns. As should be obvious, the two parties are virtually identical. Both candidates voted for the Patriot Act, supported the prescription drug bill, hold the same views on entitlement spending, and voted for the Iraq War. Kerry was not going to repeal Bush’s tax cuts nor change the policy in Iraq. Any actual differences between the parties split libertarians in half, with the socially libertarian platform on the Democrats’ side and the fiscally libertarian platform on the Republicans’ side. Despite the media’s infatuation with the red/blue split, the two parties are only different cosmetically. The election was about identity, not policy.

Even with a large libertarian population, the odds of libertarians being a strong political party in government are essentially nil, as getting rid of tariffs, ending union privilege, deregulating, and allowing people to choose their own paths in life have small dispersed benefits to everyone and large focal costs to privileged special interests - exactly the opposite of what yields a good return on investment via government. They will find few investors because party politics is about focal power aggrandizement. Liberty is a difficult to supply public good.

Should be a good time for work in public choice.

(*)For good reason.