The Politics of Abundance

In his new book The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture Cato vice president for research Brink Lindsey argues that post-World War II affluence precipitated a renewed quest for meaning in Americ giving us both the counterculture to the Moral Majority, redefining the meaning of “left” and “right” in American politicans, and eventually settling into a broadly libertarian sociopolitical synthesis, despite the seeming intractability of “red state/blue state” partisanship.

In this month’s lead essay, “The Libertarian Center,” Lindsey elaborates his conception of the current soft libertarian consensus, and the constraints this places on Democrats and Republicans as they seek to cobble together working political majorities. Can any party keep power if they stray too far from the libertarian center? Is there a distinctive, yet-to-be-formulated libertarianish politics of abundance that could ever gather real political steam? Lindsey will be joined in addressing these questions by a polypartisan panel of blogging luminaries. On the left, we’ll have The Atlantic’s Matthew Yglesias. On the right, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. And in the … libertarian middle? … Reason contributing editor Julian Sanchez.

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