How the Democratic Party internalized libertarianism

The same dynamic capitalism that right-wingers often praise forced three generations of American mothers away from their children to perform full-time wage labor and made the modern LGBT rights movement possible, and it would have been substantially impeded without widespread use of contraception and legal abortion. Social and economic solidarity cannot exist independently. The traditional family life that conservatives insist they are defending is about as likely to survive neoliberal atomization as smallholding was to outlast the industrial revolution. This is why earnest social conservatives are fools for making common cause with free marketeers. Time and again big business will accept their presents by spitting in their faces. Film and television producers are happy to take advantage of tax breaks and lax or non-existent labor regulations in states like Georgia until the minute they congratulate themselves for not doing so.

Meanwhile the promises of the Democrats are less ostentatious — they won’t pass giant tax cuts, they’ll just vote not to reverse them — but they make up for it by not missing half the point. They have internalized neoliberalism — which is libertarianism played adagio — in a way that most Republicans never will.