Sunday, December 2, 2012

The Deepest Source of our Troubles - Ricochet.com

The Deepest Source of our Troubles - Ricochet.com

What I would say to libertarians is this. Liberty requires a responsible citizenry, and the sexual revolution (very much like the drug culture, which was and is its Doppelgänger) promotes irresponsibility of every kind. It promotes dependence, and it fosters an ethos in which those who exercise the virtues fostered by the market are punished for doing so and in which those who live for present pleasure are rewarded.

There are many reasons why Mitt Romney lost in 2012. Some, as I suggested in an earlier post, were his fault. Some of them were not. One of the latter is that the demographic deck was stacked against him in a fashion that it was not stacked against Ronald Reagan in 2008. If we do not find a way to reverse the sexual revolution, we are doomed. The future of liberty is contingent on the success of the social conservatives. The libertinism that some libertarians ostentatiously embrace provides the growth in the administrative entitlements state with its impetus. If to be a libertarian is to favor political liberty, then libertarians must embrace social conservatism. If to be a libertarian is to embrace sex, drugs, and rock and roll, then libertarians are the proponents -- whether witting or not -- of the soft despotism that threatens to engulf us.

As I said in my blogpost on Saturday, the last thing that we need to do is to take the advice proffered to us by Mike Murphy that, to succeed, the Republican Party must surrender to the Zeitgeist. If the Republican Party does that, it should be abandoned.