I'd love to believe this, but I have my doubts:
Libertarianism has been touted as the wave of America's political future for many years, generally with more enthusiasm than evidence. But there are some tangible signs that Americans' attitudes are in fact moving in that direction.
[. . .]
But in CNN's latest version of the poll, conducted earlier this month, the libertarian response to both questions reached all-time highs. Some 63 percent of respondents said government was doing too much — up from 61 percent in 2010 and 52 percent in 2008 — while 50 percent said government should not favor any particular set of values, up from 44 percent in 2010 and 41 percent in 2008. (It was the first time that answer won a plurality in CNN's poll.)
The "public" (that mythical group of opinion poll fame) tends to reflect whatever's going on at the moment. The combination of the Tea Party movement, which rails against big government, and the Obama administration, which is big government manifest, has tugged at our "Oh, what now, please leave me alone" instincts. That doesn't necessarily mean a long-term change in the country's attitude about the relationship between the government and the governed. Put a real conservative in the White House, and the polls will surely show a growing perception of government as indifferent to the commonweal.
Dave Price seems to be on the same track.
Don't get me wrong — I'm all for an increasingly libertarian populace, but to a large extent this recent change appears to have come at the price of an unprecedentedly overreaching government.
(Via Glenn Reynolds, who says that "as the political class gets more obviously inept, people's faith in them is bound to gradually dry up." Good point, but as a libertarian, I take some solace in that ineptitude. Imagine how much government we'd have if they were actually competent.)
UPDATE: If you really want to torture yourself with politics today, here's a long anti-libertarian piece from someone who's obviously never had any sympathy for the movement, at slate.com, nataurally. It's called "The Liberty Scam," for goodness sake:
Every thinking person is to some degree a libertarian, and it is this part of all of us that is bullied or manipulated when liberty is invoked to silence our doubts about the free market. The ploy is to take libertarianism as Orwell meant it and confuse it with libertarianism as Hayek meant it; to take a faith in the individual as an irreducible unit of moral worth, and turn it into a weapon in favor of predation.
Another way to put it—and here lies the legacy of Keynes—is that a free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty that lies within it.
He is set straight by Jason Kuznicki, writing at cato-at-liberty.org, of course, and Matt Welch asks the provocative question (at reason's hit & run blog, where else?): "What do Ann Coulter and Slate agree on?"
That libertarians are monsters, of course.
