Below The Beltway

The central premise of Brink Lindsay’s The Age Of Abundance is that the unparalleled prosperity that became a central part of American life in the years after World War II has fundamentally transformed American culture and politics and moved us in what he contends is a more libertarian direction.

While the book serves well as a history of the culture, economics, and politics of post-war America, Lindsay’s most interesting arguments come when he discusses what he describes as the new middle-class consensus that has developed over the past twenty years in the United States, and the political movement that could transcend the left-right debate that has gripped American politics since the 1970s:

“For such a movement to offer a viable alternative to the prevailing ideologies, it would need to start with forthright affirmation of the libertarian cultural synthesis — and equally forthright rejection of the left and right’s illberal baggage. A movement so grounded would probably not yield an explicitly libertarian politics, since it would need to include constituencies that incline toward more activist government. More likely, it would articulate an intellectual common ground shared by small-government conservatives, libertarians, and pro-market liberals. It is at least possible that such common ground could be discovered if policy issues were at least delinked from the long-running cultural conflict.”

In other words, the political debate needs to be taken out of the hands of the ideologues on the left and the right who have turned politics in the United States into a zero-sum game under the mistaken belief that their vision of utopia is going to be achieved in a democratic republic. It would also require those of a libertarian mindset to realize that the libertarian utopia is likely not to come in their lifetime — that Social Security is going to be around for awhile, that taxation is not going to be eliminated, and that the Federal Reserve is here to stay. In the end, though, a political movement like the one Lindsay describes will make Americans more free and that’s better than nothing.

There’s more to the book than that, of course, and it’s well worth a read if you want to understand what’s really going on in American politics today.