After I finished the above post, I kept wondering why, if I was right in what I'd written about free market capitalism being a major cause of the breakdown of the old tribal/aristocratic model of government, the free market fanatics have largely been supporting the Republican party.

It occurred to me as a possible explanation that those people -- libertarians, mostly -- idealize the completely unregulated, Wild West image of the free market and are afraid of any new social model that would make the markets part of a re-integrated whole with the power to set standards and objectives.

This is why the libertarians have been willing to cast in their lot with the traditionalists -- the social conservatives and would-be aristocrats. Even though they don't have much in common with them overall, they've been united by their attachment to the current broke-down form of things-as-they-are in preference to any more effective replacement

There's been a tension there going back to at least 1969, when the libertarians walked out of the Young Americans for Freedom and joined up with the left-anarchists. (There's some interesting history on this that I hadn't previously known at http://www.spaz.org/~dan/individualist-ana... including a fascinating description of the young Dana Rohrabacher as "a charismatic campus activist" who traveled around the country singing folk songs and "converting YAF chapters into Libertarian Alliances." )

But like Rohrabacher, most of them turned into ordinary Republicans, and it's been only with this year's Ron Paul uprising (and the complete capitulation of the McCain campaign to the traditionalist right) that the split which began 40 years ago is looking like it could become permanent.

For an actual realignment, of course, the libertarians and the liberals would have to find common ground. That's where the current economic breakdown could be crucial, if it convinces the libertarians that some degree of regulation is necessary to keep the markets from diving into a ditch or being eaten alive by raw greed. Ron Paul himself isn't ever likely to get there -- but under the right circumstances, many of his followers might.

(The next step, of course, would be a conversation about how the profit motive isn't the best way to assure that attention is paid to urgent social needs -- and the possibility that if current business norms could be rejiggered so that drug companies, for example, put less money into curing erectile dysfunction and more into research on sickle-cell anemia, then government would be able to do a lot less tax-and-spending to take up the slack. But that's another topic for another day.)