You seem to me entirely right that inequalities of property ownership would be likely in a libertarian society. It isn’t clear to me, though, why that by itself poses a problem for liberty. You seem to take for granted that the larger property owners would form a common class that would then act coercively against the rest of us. One need not assume that the large owners would be unusually benevolent to doubt that this would occur. Why think that the larger owners would view themselves as a class at all?

Class terminology aside, the distinction I want to bring out is between “being subject to someone else’s rules” and “making the rules oneself.” I think in any social order there is going to be a division between those two concepts—although that’s a hunch rather than something I want to prove just now.

The ruled/ruler distinction applies not only to states—where there’s a difference between, say, king and subject—but also to property, where there’s a parallel difference between owner and nonowner. The owner makes the rules, and the nonowner agrees to them or leaves. There may be negotiation, and the nonowner may even have some leverage against the owner for other reasons, but I think the theoretical distinction remains clear.

Add to this the hypothesis that most people want to think of themselves as more ruling than ruled. Thus even when the ruled get a good deal—and even when the ruler gets a lousy one—there may still be a demand to change places. Expropriation and revolution, on this model, are both examples of violent changes in roles of ruler and ruled.

I suspect, then, that even a benevolent king may face resentment from his subjects sooner or later. Similarly, a benevolent proprietor may find his employees or tenants one day challenging his role. This is the conceptual class divide.

A system of all politics and no property necessarily sharpens the ruled/ruler conceptual divide. The ruler is absolute, and the ruled are absolutely subject.

A system of all property and no politics also seems to sharpen the divide, though in practice it would surely be milder than what we see in totalitarian states. But in theory, at any given moment some people are rule-making and others are rule-obeying, based on who owns the land one is standing upon.

To say that there may be some fluidity in who owns which patch of land is like saying there may be some fluidity in which party or family or other entity governs a state. In real life, the absolutes are rare. But keeping the model as simple as possible, let’s think of both ownership and political power as things that don’t change hands and don’t require compromise with the ruled.

What I tentatively propose is that distributing ownership and political power according to different principles helps mitigate, if not cancel out, the ruler/ruled distinction. Rothbardians agree that private property actually has impeded political absolutism in history. Might the converse be true, too: that politics has a place in impeding ownership absolutism? (Unfortunately, this proposition is harder to test against history.)

Schematically, a balanced picture might look like this: both political power and strong property rights exist in a given society. John Doe is a political ruler in that society (maybe he’s the king), but his power is limited on someone else’s property (he’s ruled). Jane Roe is a property owner, and in that sense she’s a ruler (maybe she owns Disneyland), but she’s also subject to political government, so in that sense she’s ruled. Even though Doe and Roe each has to accept some limitation on his or her own dominion (in politics or on private property), neither has to accept complete theoretical subjection, either.

Reality is much more complicated, of course. Political power and ownership do not perfectly balance, and sometimes the two can coincide in tyrannical ways even when the conceptual distinction remains clear. But it’s the division of power between different principles, not its practical division in a society, that I want to focus on here.

Libertarians understand very well that a state is a state, no matter what its form or how benevolent it may seem for a time. Shouldn’t the same conceptual uniformity be applied to ownership, no matter how much turnover there is in who particularly owns something, or how benevolent the owner mat be at a given time?

For the same reason, then, that libertarians don’t quite accept the idea that competition among multiple states is sufficient to qualify a world as justly ordered—even if those states aren’t all in collusion—does it not follow that competition among owners, even if they are not all colluding, might not be sufficient either?

And I do argue that narrowly: “might not be” rather than is/isn’t. One can devise best- or worst-case scenarios to answer definitively, but in the real world there is doubt about the question, and my argument would use that doubt to say: if we’re unsure about aligning all power (that is, all ruler/ruled relationships) according to one principle (politics or ownership), shouldn’t we maintain the division? In theory at least—rather than accepting an ideal the reduces the ruler/ruled distinction to a single dimension.

One Rothbardian response might be that no one is fully ruled or an absolute ruler in a system of property-without-politics, because self-ownership means that one always has a share in ruling no matter what external rules apply when standing on somebody else’s property. But that sounds like Hobbes saying that Leviathan cannot command a subject to die. A libertarian wouldn’t accept Hobbes as a great liberal because of that minimal exception to the power of the state, and I don’t think non-libertarians accept the minimal powers that come with self-ownership as any real remedy to the power imbalance that exists between owners of other stuff and owners-only-of-themselves.

(That said, the Rothbardian and Hobbesian provisos here are worth something—the extent of the constraint Hobbes’s life proviso puts on Leviathan is something worth considering. If, as libertarians say, the state is everywhere and always predicated on lethal force, then Hobbes is a crypto-anarchist. But then Hobbes’s whole point, of course, is that the state isn’t ultimately predicated on force but on rational consent. Force is just icing on the theoretical cake.)

A great chess player may be a lousy basketball player, and vice versa. If all life were a single game, one of these players would always lose. If the many kinds of freedom we enjoy, or aspire to enjoy, were all to depend on the outcome of one game, I would have little confidence in their survival. Liberty is a game that has to be played on many fields.

That’s a big part of the story, but it’s not the full story. For one thing, there was nothing that said these regional blocs had to align the way they did. The marriage of the South to the pro-civil rights Democratic Party wasn’t necessarily any more awkward than the marriage of the South to the traditionally pro-civil rights Republican Party—the party of Lincoln, the party of Robert Taft (a staunch foe of the Klan) and Dwight Eisenhower (who used the National Guard to integrate Little Rock Central High), and the party that voted in higher proportions for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. So what made the GOP a more welcoming home for opponents of civil rights than the Democratic Party already was?

War and economics. The South was more “economically conservative” and anti-Communist than the rest of the country. Anti-Communism previously didn’t distinguish the parties from one another either—previous to the Johnson era, that is, when the Democrats ceased to be just another anti-Communist party and became the party of incompetent anti-Communism and pro-Communism alike. Lee Atwater, hardly one to overlook the racial component of Southern politics, describes the situation:

the South in 1964 was considered reactionary, Neanderthalic, and so forth because we weren’t mainstream on not only on the race thing but on economic issues and national defense and all, we were considered, you know, ultraconservative and everything.

What happens is a guy like Reagan who campaigns in 1980 on a 1964 Goldwater platform, minus the boo-boos and obviously the Voting Rights Act and TVA and all that bullshit, but if you look at the economics and the national defense, what happened is the South went from being behind the times to being mainstream.

The Reagans did not have to do a Southern strategy for two reasons, number one race was not a dominant issue, and number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been quote “southern issues” since way back in the ‘60s.

Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights act and his states’ rights philosophy certainly won him the Deep South in 1964. (He lost everything else but his home state.) But the South also favored Goldwater because he seemed to be a hawk committed to swift and sure action in foreign policy—he would he would win the Vietnam War and get out—much as later “to hell with ‘em hawks” on Iraq longed for a leader who would wrap up the War on Terror quickly by overwhelming force. Goldwater’s militaristic line played well in the South; it played badly elsewhere. The “Daisy” ad capitalized on the fears of the rest of the country. By 1968, the South still liked the idea of Republican hawkishnes compared to Democratic incompetence and dovishness, even as Nixon signaled to the country as a whole that he had a plan for peace in Vietnam. (“Peace with honor,” he would later say.) Tellingly enough, George Wallace’s running mate in 1968 was General Curtis LeMay, a military man who demanded the “to hell with ‘em hawk” solution to the Vietnam War: ending it by winning with overwhelming power.

Republicans other than Goldwater—including Nixon and Ford—weren’t particularly reliable for voters who opposed civil rights. (Nixon, for example, expanded affirmative action and federal anti-discrimination powers.) But they were reliable on anti-Communism, and with the Democratic Party’s rising support for civil rights, pressures coincided to accomplish realignment. Meanwhile, not only civil rights but the percolating “culture war”—a blend of sexual and moral tensions emotionally inseparable from Vietnam and civil rights, but arguably more radicalized by the former than the latter—pushed white evangelicals and the “silent majority” into the GOP.

War and race mix in American politics in ways that are quite complex. Joseph McCarthy’s activities somewhat anticipated the “ethnic” realignment in favor of the GOP, not on racial grounds but on anti-Communist and anti-elitist ones: indeed, one of the overlooked dimensions of the race-and-ethnicity battles of the past century has been the extent to which the divide is not only white-black but also ethnic-white/low-church white vs. elite WASP. That’s a class divide, certainly, but it’s also an ethnic division. Anti-Communism as an ideology was part of this WASP-ethnic split, hence McCarthyite attacks on the State Department, the WASP-iest institution of all. How this relates to later stages of the culture war should be obvious: Tea Partiers still hate the State Department, along with other formerly WASP bastions such as the New York Times, the Ivy League, and the Episcopal Church, which in the eyes of fundamentalist and ethnic whites isn’t a real church because it doesn’t go in for culture-war politics.

Ethnicity and ideology are a tangle. Something that radicalizes one side of the equation—such as a botched war and countercultural antiwar movement—can give the whole tangle a new center of gravity. Peter Viereck, in particular, noted in a prescient look at the developing culture war in 1954 how ideological hatreds can substitute for racial ones. “Transtolerance,” as he called the phenomenon, “is ready to give all minorities their glorious democratic freedom—provided they accept McCarthyism or some other mob conformism of the Right or Left.” It was “a sublimated Jim Crow: against ‘wrong’ thinkers, not ‘wrong’ races.”

In the decade after Viereck wrote, Vietnam would alienate many Americans who previously supported civil rights. Consider the testimony Michael Harrington provides, in his “social autobiography” Fragments of a Century, on how the war affected two central figures of the era:

A White House aide told a few of us that President Johnson was worried because several of us—King, Rustin, Farmer, and myself—were also sponsors of a SANE march against the war in Vietnam. Johnson was concerned, we were told, that we might utilize the conference as a platform to denounce his policies in Indochina… We had no intention of disrupting the event, yet the change in mood evidenced by Johnson’s fear was of enormous significance. The civil rights coalition that had grown through the firstt five years of the the decade was being torn apart by Vietnam.

… King was sorely tried at the time of his death. He felt, I think, that he was at a kind of impasse: he had to respond to the militants and break with some of the white liberals on the issue of the war, but both those steps would take him away from the nonviolent and integrationist values that were at the very center of his existence.

… There was a mood of good feeling in the early sixties that genuinely moved the conscience of white America. Had the Administration continued to put its energies into the struggle that attitude made possible, it might have been able to begin the end of the Civil War. It chose Vietnam instead. At the same time, anyone who took nonviolence seriously, as King did, could not help but be profoundly outraged by the carnage in Indochina. So a good number of the black activists, and most of their radical and liberal allies in the white middle class, went into increasingly bitter opposition to the government.

The two finest traditions of the American liberation movement had come into conflict with each other. The exigencies of building and interracial movement of the black and white workers on the basis of economic demands … suggested that one try to ignore the war, or at least not put it in the forefront of the struggle. Peace activism would alienate a major section of the organized white labor movement, which was so crucial to that tactic. But the imperatives of even a strategic commitment to nonviolence—King’s great contribution—required that anyone who spoke, or thought, in the name of Gandhi denounce the unconscionable war in Vietnam in no uncertain terms. The ideological synthesis and the political alliance that provided the basis for the great victories of the early sixties was shattered.

Race, culture, religion, war, party, and sex—they’re a matrix in which passions of one kind have a tendency to transpose themselves into other contexts. These concepts don’t reduce to one another or a single dimension; to understand American society one has to have a sense of what’s going on in each and how changes in one may affect the others.

She denies leaking the supposedly sealed court docs about the case. Mark Sanford’s side of the story is that he didn’t want their 14-year-old son to watch the Super Bowl alone: “I did indeed watch the second half of the Super Bowl at the beach house with our 14-year-old son because as a father I didn’t think he should watch it alone. Given she was out of town I tried to reach her beforehand to tell her of the situation that had arisen, and met her at the back steps under the light of my cellphone when she returned and told her what had happened.”

Perhaps that’s adequate as political excuses go. He had to say something. But I find the phrasing a bit strange: “as a father I didn’t think he should watch it alone.” Does that just mean he thought his son would have more fun watching the game with company, or is that “as a father” line meant to be vaguely moralizing—as if the Super Bowl and its ads might be too racy for the teenage son of a guy who hiked the Appalachian Trail all the way to Argentina with his mistress? Probably “as a father” is just a politician’s stock empathetic cliche, cropping up by force of habit in any reference to his family life. But Mark Sanford, of all people, should be careful about relating to the public “as a father.”

Update: Politico reports that the National Republican Congressional Committee is pulling out of Sanford’s race. They think he’s toast. Or as David Freddoso says on Twitter:

NRCC “won’t be engaged,” won’t be married, and won’t be in Argentina w Mark Sanford’s campaign

— David Freddoso (@freddoso) April 17, 2013

(Speaking of Manchester and free trade: one of my favorite scenes from the film “24 Hour Party People,” about Curtis’s band and their Factory Records labelmates, is an outtake where Factory impresario Tony Wilson tries to convince a superannuated patron to let him present the Sex Pistols on Granada television. “They have songs about the queen?” the old man asks. “Yes,” says Wilson, “the queen…and anarchy.” “Nothing wrong with a bit of anarchy,” says the old Manchester liberal.)

The high status thing to say is always that politicians focus too much on the short term and we ought to be worried about the long-term fundamentals. And back in 2009 and 2010 you certainly heard a lot of this kind of rhetoric that was aimed at establishing the seriousness of the speaker by disparaging the idea of juicing the economy in favor of the need to work on the long term economic fundamentals. But six months is a relatively short span of time in the course of human history. And it turns out that a six month spell of unemployment leads to a significant decrease in a potential worker’s attractiveness to employers. That means a six month spell is relatively likely to turn into a year-long spell or a two-year one. And that kind of prolonged absence from the labor force doesn’t just represent lost income and economic output for two months or 24 months. It represents lost opportunities to learn on-the-job skills and build organizational capital. It represents a worker who’ll probably drop out of the workforce altogether if he can get himself eligible for disability benefits or plausibly recast herself in a socially validated housewife role.

Perhaps outside the framework of a welfare state and the bureaucracy that attaches to hiring (and firing), the long-term unemployed would quickly be picked up by someone at some wage level. But we actually do have a welfare state, and the effect Yglesias describes makes matters worse for everyone: the unemployed remain out of work, the taxpayer has to foot the bill, and the private sector loses the value that would come from maintaining the skills of these workers. One would have to dig deeper into historical data to see what can counteract these effects: Yglesias argues that World War II put the Great Depression’s unemployed back to work, but that era is incomparable to any other in more than one way. What happened to the long-term unemployed of, say, the early 1980s?

Whatever the case, unemployment ought to concern conservatives at least as much as federal spending does. Especially if the two threaten to become a vicious circle in circumstances like those facing the country today.

The question that immediately arises, though, is just what are “people’s rights” other than property rights? Libertarians who follow Rothbard subscribe to a doctrine of “self-ownership,” which they mean quite literally: you own yourself in much the same way as you own other property, except that you cannot alienate your own will. (This is why most Rothbardians don’t believe you can sell yourself into slavery: you can’t give up your volition and become in effect a robot subject entirely to someone else.)

Self-ownership means you have a property right that must be respected even when you’re standing on someone else’s land. Indeed, even a trespasser, in Rothbard’s ideal, cannot be assaulted, robbed, or killed—and he can only be removed from one’s property with the minimum necessary force. So that’s one thing David probably means by “people’s rights” on “your property.”

The trouble is, that might be the only thing a follower of Rothbard means. Rothbard was an anarcho-capitalist, and in general his disciples envision a world in which all land is privately owned: Disneyland or a shopping mall is sometimes invoked as a practical illustration of what a fully privatized, property-based community might look like. Gated communities are another example.

In each case, the sharply constrained character of “liberty” should be obvious. There’s no free speech in a shopping mall—vendors are not obliged to let you loudly criticize their wares on the premises—and employees in Disneyland must adopt the “Disney Look.” Gated communities impose all kinds of restrictions on their members. The regulations one encounters in all these places may be good or bad, but they don’t match up with what most of us conventionally think of as freedom. And the rules are set by one class of people, the property owners.

There are, to be sure, at least two ways in which persons without property in anything other than themselves—proletarians, as they were once called—can still exert power even in this model. First, their natural talents will make them valuable potential employees, and that gives them some negotiating leverage with owners. And second, in aggregate the preferences of the proletarians make up the demand side of the market, or most of it, and “consumer sovereignty” can be quite real, leading land lords and the owners of capital to serve rather than rule. You wind up with as much freedom as you can earn and as much as the consumers’ side of the market demands.

But that still may not be very much. What tends to happen in these arrangements is that the proletarians begin to demand a share in management. This is the paradigm from which both democracy and socialism arise. The one comes from the demands of the governed for a role in government, the other from the demand of labor for a role in management, and the two are quite closely related: “management” and “government” feel like much the same thing to those who are subject to rules they don’t make themselves. (Government can mean ecclesiastical government as well: Protestantism is in essence precisely the demand by the governed laity for the right to govern the church themselves, without an institutionally fixed hierarchy.)

Property-rights libertarianism frames itself as an answer to political coercion. The state kills and taxes and commands, activities that would be criminal if carried out by any other institution. Abolishing the state doesn’t mean the end of those behaviors, but it does mean that no institution would have moral license to engage in them. The same standards would apply to everyone—in theory, that is. In practice, people with hard property would in fact have the power to command and to collect rent and, at the extreme, to kill in defense of their property, much as the state claims to kill only for defensive purposes.

The social pattern that libertarians see as the abolition of licensed coercion looks very different from another angle—it looks as if all political rights of citizens against the claims of property owners (including the claims of property owners to, say, tell their employees what to wear) have been abolished, and all management power, presently divided between the state and private property, now attaches to private property and its owners’ wishes.

Employees in Disneyland may not be allowed to congregate to petition for a redress of their grievances against management, but within a state those employees are also citizens, and citizens can assemble on public property to criticize private or state institutions. No business is required to let you exercise “free speech” on its premises, but citizens have won the right to speak freely on public property. Arguably, free speech is a concept that only makes sense outside of a purely property-based system—free speech has to be speech somewhere, someplace under an authority that chooses to grant freedom of expression. Discussion is integral to the idea of a republic in a way that it is not integral to the idea of Disneyland or a shopping mall. In practice, of course, a state may or may allow free speech, just as a private property owner might or might not. But in theory, public space seems more conduce than private space to what we think of as free speech.

In a purely propertarian system, the limits of what is permissible, in speech or anything else, are set according to the principle of ownership and the will of the owners. In a totalitarian state system, or even a strongly authoritarian one, the limits of what is permissible are set solely by the government. Neither of these situations, however—that of pure property power or pure state power—is normal in the modern Western experience, however. Instead, a system that includes both private property and public institutions is the context in which our ideas of liberty have formed. This kind of liberty is polycentric rather than monopolistic. The private realm has some privileges against the state, but the power to manage or govern isn’t distributed entirely based on property. That power to manage the managers is partly invested in the state, and management of the state itself may be invested in the people at large (democracy) or some limited noncommercial class (aristocracy) or even, in part, in religious authorities (in the case of established churches, for example).

This polycentric liberty seems to me more capacious than either a liberty based entirely on the private-property principle or one based entirely on government fiat—the latter, of course, is the “freedom” of the Soviet Union.

I’m skeptical that anything good would come of investing all managing power (or governing power) in property holders, who already by definition have some advantage over other people—namely, the advantage of property or, at a more conceptual level, accumulated capital. Worse outcomes would arise from investing all power in the state. But by keeping powers divided among different principles of authority, one preserves several possible ways of life and several avenues of protest and redress should injustice be perpetrated by either the public or private sector. Property limits the power of the state, and the state limits the power of property. Mixture and balance is what preserves liberty as we know it.

There is, it must be said, another kind of danger besides an institutional monopoly on power. “Public opinion,” expressed through the market by way of consumer sovereignty and through politics by way of elections and polling, can also constrain the ways one can live or even think. The political and market dimensions of public opinion, what’s more, can reinforce one another. One advantage to having an established church, even for those who are not members, is that it preserves a public voice other than that of the masses, whether expressed on the market or politics or both. The mixture and balance that a well-ordered polity needs has many layers beyond the private-public or property-politics distinction. The masses-individual distinction is also important, if harder to express.

All of this is a hunch as to why a private-property-based Rothbardian system would not very closely resemble the freedom we’ve known. It might be strictly libertarian, but it could, like Disneyland, be very illiberal at the same time. None of this is to deny the bloodiness that tends to characterize actual states, but in terms of models, property without politics leaves something to be desired.

One of the virtues of our system, at least as it was originally “sold,” is that there are safeguards against precipitous, oppressive actions. If we are to take Madison at his word, the main safeguards are not institutional in nature. Rather, as we can see from Federalist essays nos. 10 and 51, the major barrier is the multiplicity and diversity of interests found in the extended republic. It was anticipated that the process of majority formation among these diverse and multiple interests would be difficult and time consuming, particularly with respect to progress toward convergence on any unjust or oppressive measure.

Unfortunately, writes Carey, “as Madison acknowledges in Federalist no. 63, if an unjust or ill-conceived measure does somehow make it through the hurdles of the extended republic, it will also take some time to correct the situation.” And while the scale of the republic may be an advantage up to a point, “the increasing incapacity of our national government to govern is probably due to the republic being far too extensive with too many divergent interests.” The people are divided, while the governing elite is united in its will to act—indeed, sometimes the will of one man, the president, is almost sufficient.

All of that is true, but what I suspect has been doubly fatal to the old-style federal republic is that it faces not only a popular will that is too divided to be effective but also, from the opposite direction, national-scale forces that are too few to supply the competitive checks on interests that Madison envisioned.

A sketch of what happened might go as follows. The Constitution and many statewide reforms brought about after the Revolution laid the foundation for a commercial republic, in place of colonies whose trade and potential for growth were circumscribed by the metropole. But even as the legal groundwork for extraordinary economic expansion was being set down, the political experience that informed the Framers was that of a land where local political forces were more powerful than national economic interests—the latter of which were hardly yet in existence.

During the 19th century, however, enterprises and fortunes whose scale exceeded the regulatory scope of the states arose. By the end of that century and the beginning of the 20th, various national-scale ideological movements, such as populism and later progressivism, had sprung up to demand national-scale regulatory powers to check such national-scale interests. Outright socialism was another such movement. The fortunes of these ideologies rose and fell, but they had an influence on the expansion of government, particularly (albeit in ad hoc fashion) in response to the Great Depression. To counterbalance both the left-wing ideological push for greater national-scale regulation and the fact of the New Deal itself, there emerged another national-scale ideology, which ultimately came to be called conservatism.

World War II and America’s leading place on the world stage immediately thereafter further called for more-than-federal ideas and ideologies. As Irving Kristol wrote in 2003:

 A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns.

None of these vast ideologies and interests that arose over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries could be compatible with the practices of late 18th-century self-government. Even to whatever extent these ideologies pleaded their concern for localism, federalism, or “states’ rights,” they ultimately had their eyes set on wider horizons. To be sure, there had been some sweeping ideological visions even before the late 19th century—Whiggism helped foster the national-scale interests against which populism and progressivism were responses, and even earlier there had been universalizing ideological tendencies within Jeffersonianism. But what accumulated between the Civil War and the Cold War were not just large-scale ideologies but large-scale institutional realities—vast economic interests and international military commitments—that encouraged the institutionalization of progressivism/liberalism and conservatism.

Madison, of course, did not imagine a world in which communications between distant states would be even as speedy as they were in 1913, let alone in 2013. Local interests, quirks, and values still exist, but their relative weight in our system—in our culture as well as politics—has diminished dramatically in contrast to large-scale interests and ideology. (Calling these large-scale phenomena “national” can be somewhat misleading: they’re national in aspiration but factional in reality; that is, not only are they subscribed to only by a fraction of the populace, but more importantly they have a narrow view of what constitutes the national interest, which they don’t much try to distinguish from their partisan interest.)

My suspicion is that attempts to rewind history and return to federalism as it was envisioned before late 19th century are worse than quixotic—they’re delusional to a degree that only exacerbates the worst tendencies in our large-scale ideologies. A more effective effort at reviving federalism will have to look at our national and international circumstances, as well as local ones, as they really are, and must provide substantive ideas at the largest level as well as the smallest, for a vacuum at the top will be filled by the existing, disastrously failed, ideologies. In short, localists need a philosophy of empire or nation, even as they strive for decentralism.

Getting this right depends on being self-aware and treating different levels as, well, different, in contrast to the tendency of movement conservatism and progressivism to treat local and national (and international) matters as all equally permeated by the same ideological imperatives. There’s no reason to think that the same formulas, or formulas sharing a single source, are best at all times and every scale. A prudent conservatism must respond to this variety—it must be supple.

The problem for Republicans is simple: They built relatively durable, ideological coalitions immediately before a new generation of socially moderate and diverse voters completely upended the electoral calculus. In 2012, voters over age 30 went for Romney by 1.5 points—a result that shouldn’t surprise observers of the Bush elections. But the persistent and narrow GOP lean of the 2000 and 2004 electorates was overwhelmed by Obama’s 24-point victory among 18-to-29-year-olds. Democratic success with young voters is a product of demographics, not just Obama’s fleeting appeal or Bush’s legacy. Just 58 percent of 18-to-29-year-old voters were white in 2012 and 19 percent said they have no religious affiliation; in comparison, 76 percent of voters over 30 were white and only 10 percent were non-religious.

The ascent of millennial voters has turned the Bush coalition into a coffin—and the coffin could be sealed in 2016. It was frequently observed that a Romney victory would have required a historic performance among white voters, provided that Obama could match his ’08 performance among non-white voters. Bush’s 2004 performance among white voters wouldn’t get it done anymore. In 2016, the math gets even more challenging. If the white share of the electorate declines further, Republicans won’t just need to match their best performance of the last 24 years among white voters, they’ll also need to match their best performance of the last 24 years among non-white voters. If they can’t make the requisite 16-point gain among non-white voters—a tall order, to say the least—then the next Republican candidate will enter truly uncharted territory, potentially needing to win up to 64 percent of the white vote just to break 50 percent of the popular vote.

But there’s an ever better reason for Republicans, and conservatives, to change: GOP policies of the past decade proved utterly bankrupt. An activist foreign policy, tax cuts and financialization, and more heat than light on social issues produced a nation at the end of the Bush years deep in recession, mired in two occupations (one of which continues to this day), and trending away from traditional values. It’s hard to imagine a rout more comprehensive, and it occurred after “conservative” Republicans had held Congress for most of two full presidential terms.

Why would a party even want to go back to that? Why would any but the most hell-bent ideologue want to stick with what hasn’t worked? The GOP might make some terrible missteps in trying to reform, but no one should want it to return to the Bush era and the high-water mark of post-1960s conservatism, even if the party could still win elections playing its old hand. Luckily, philosophical conservatism is deeper and more capacious than the Bush coalition and its failed ideology. A new audience for timeless sources, newly applied, is what the thinking conservative ought to aspire to.

Former Congressman Ron Paul will hold a press conference this Wednesday to launch his next big project: the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. After decades in and out of the US House of Representatives leading the call for a non-interventionist foreign policy and the protection of civil liberties, Dr. Paul is launching a revolutionary new vehicle to expand his efforts. The Institute will serve as the focal point of a new coalition that crosses political, ideological, and party lines.

The Ron Paul Institute will focus on the two issues most important to Dr. Paul, education and coming generations. It will fill the growing demand for information on foreign affairs from a non-interventionist perspective through a lively and diverse website, and will provide unique educational opportunities to university students and others.

The neo-conservative era is dead. The ill-advised policies pushed by the neo-cons have everywhere led to chaos and destruction, and to a hatred of the United States and its people. Multi-trillion dollar wars have not made the world a safer place; they have only bankrupted our economic future. The Ron Paul Institute will provide the tools and the education to chart a new course with the understanding that only through a peaceful foreign policy can we hope for a prosperous tomorrow.

Founder and Chairman Dr. Paul has invited the Institute’s board of advisors to speak at the conference, including Rep. Walter Jones, Jr. (NC), Rep. John Duncan, Jr. (TN), Judge Andrew Napolitano, Ambassador Faith Whittlesey, and Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.

I don’t find comparisons of the Gosnell story to that of Sandra Fluke very persuasive. The better comparison is to last year’s Trayvon Martin story. My take is the opposite of Kirsten Powers’s: of course the Gosnell story is about abortion, not just “human rights,” and the ideological charge that abortion carries is what’s making this a national story. That’s entirely proper.

If you’re an opponent of abortion, it’s obvious that Gosnell should be an A1 national story because it’s the best prima facie argument for greater regulation or outright bans on abortion to come along in a while. Abortion is a national issue, and this story powerfully illustrates the contentions of one side of the abortion debate, so it should get maximum attention.

That the impetus to cover this story nationally arises most readily from ideological advocacy, rather than a disinterested sense of what’s news (to the extent that such a thing is even possible—there are certainly degrees), doesn’t make the story illegitimate. After all, it was advocacy that lay behind the push to make Trayvon Martin a national story. His killing looked like a local story to me: terrible, tragic, but something for the local authorities to sort out, which I trusted them to do, absent any ideological reason for thinking justice would not be done. People who had a stronger ideological predisposition, however, and saw the killing as emblematic of a racism and law enforcement’s indifference to the violent deaths of young black men dug deeper, and the story broke nationally—as Gosnell is now doing.

The immediate implications of the Gosnell case, like those of Trayvon Martin’s, are localized, whereas Sandra Fluke’s testimony before Congress involved what was already a national HHS decision. To point this out isn’t to minimize the gravity of the Gosnell or Martin cases; it’s simply to make a distinction about what puts one story on a fast track to national coverage (excessive coverage, in the case of Fluke, if not the HHS ruling itself) as opposed to being at first blush a strictly local story.

Ideologically charged advocacy journalism has a place in highlighting some stories seemingly of only local significance as chapters of much larger narratives. Those larger narratives may or may not be valid in themselves—and they may well be invisible to people who aren’t ideologically attuned—but it’s quite right that they give a spotlight to powerful local stories that would otherwise be overlooked.

It’s worth considering what other stories might be of underlying national significance yet get no attention because ideological interests haven’t accentuated them. America’s existing ideological framework, hackneyed and bare bones as it is, certainly doesn’t capture all truth. What’s needed is some perceptive filter other than political ideology that could attune reporters’ sense of newsworthiness to deeper ideas beyond conventional bureau divisions.

there was more to Major’s victory than the benefit of the doubt and a dream opponent. In the two years before the election, the Tory campaign built consistently on the theme of “opportunity for all”, both in tone and content. The rhetoric was matched by a coherent plan, which included the expansion of higher education, and the commitment to choice and accountability in public services. Tory motives were trusted to the extent that Labour failed to make a number of campaign lies stick (while five years later, their baseless claim that the Conservatives would privatise the state pension system quickly gained currency). Though mocked in some quarters, the talk of a classless society signalled a commitment to social mobility, the idea that we wanted to include rather than exclude, that we were for everyone.

… Ultimately, the lesson of 1992 is that a party of competence and decency, that can show it wants to improve opportunity for everyone, is a powerful force.

As it happens, “competence” and “decency” are words that I often find myself using for the qualities our own Republicans lack. “These things were more important than the negative campaign against Labour which, admittedly, was relentless,” Ashcroft says about the Tories’ 1992 victory.

“Opportunity for all” is a pretty good slogan, if you can say it with any conviction—and it’s not quite the same thing as David Cameron’s “modernisation” project or the kind of GOP rebranding that’s fashionable at the moment. Cameron’s push for same-sex marriage has been a disaster because it alienates his party’s core voters without overcoming the reservations that other voters have about what they see as exclusively the party of the rich. Marco Rubio’s entreaties to Hispanics may fail for the same reason. But likewise a right-wing strategy of appealing only to the party’s base while demonizing the rest of the country—the majority, in fact—as dependents on government, possible criminals, and moral reprobates is suicidal. Parties like the GOP and the Tories only have a prayer if they can sell themselves as vehicles of integration for everyone, through prosperity and law—parties for the 99 percent, plausibly offering opportunity for all.

Congressman Nixon initially aligned himself with the internationalist wing of the Republican Party… . But within this framework, Nixon pitched to the right. During the Korean War, Senator Nixon favored General Douglas MacArthur’s disastrous plan to advance to the Yalu River. In 1954, , Vice President Nixon advocated sending troops to Vietnam to rescue the French and, if necessary, even using nuclear weapons. In 1957, he urged the Eisenhower administration to back the French in Algeria. During the Vietnam War, campaigner Nixon criticized President Lyndon Johnson for not sending enough troops or dropping enough bombs. He unequivocally called for the United States to maintain its nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union.

Yet sometime in the mid-1960s, while he was practicing law in New York and campaigning for Republican candidates, Nixon began to look more dispassionately on international relations—what he called ‘taking the long view.” It was possible for him to do so because of his distance from political decision making, which allowed him to view the world outside the immediate framework of domestic anti-Communism and missionary moralism. In his method of observing international relations, Nixon was influenced by his favorite among world leaders, French President Charles de Gaulle… . Nixon, who later described de Gaulle in Leaders as “a man of enormous ego and yet at the same time enormous selflessness,” was struck by his ability to look at the world without immediate preconceptions. De Gaulle had granted independence to Algeria, distanced France from the United States, and taken the first steps toward what he called “détente” with the Soviet Union. As France prospered, Nixon saw in the French statesman the rewards of “selflessness” and unconventionality in international relations.

“Taking the long view” and looking dispassionately at domestic policy, as well as foreign affairs, would be a good beginning for aspiring Republican leaders today.

It was never hard to see the influence of Methodism, born as a reaction to the complacency and privilege of 18th-century Anglicanism, on Mrs Thatcher. She believed in thrift and hard work, and liked the advice of John Wesley, Methodism’s founder, to earn, save and only then give as much as possible. The acts of generosity listed in the New Testament, from the Good Samaritan’s to that of the woman who anointed Christ’s feet, were possible only because the donors had money, she noted.

But in other ways, Mrs Thatcher moved away from Methodism, and it moved away from her. As she ascended firmly to the upper middle class, she began attending Anglican church. Conspicuous consumption and debt-fuelled growth, often seen as legacies of the Thatcher era, could hardly be further from Methodist values. And in her native east Midlands, Methodist communities and ministers were active in defending coalminers during the strike which she defeated. Methodism has influenced Britain’s centre-left far more than its political right.

She was, as the magazine notes, “the last British prime minister openly and emphatically to acknowledge the influence of Christianity on her thinking, in particular terms not fuzzy ones.” (While Tony Blair was “passionately religious,” he was “famously discouraged by his advisers from “doing God” in public because of the fear that he might sound nutty.”)