Riffing on the post below, “Postmodern Conservative” James Poulos writes:

In a world where libertarians are utterly doomed on the political front and turned loose with glee instead on the culture, the flattening out of local, particular political power — the inevitable result of sovereign individuality — drives prideful, envious democratic souls to the rational recognition that therapeutically throwing themselves, and one another, into the headlong pursuit of trivial novelties is the only way to enjoy life under the advanced logic of equality and social freedom (without opting for the unpopular hermit route).

Leaving aside the merits of the central claim here, I’m not sure why James thinks that we libertarians, so unsuccessful in politics, have this kind of outsized influence on the culture, the advent of Reason.tv notwithstanding. I think he means “cultural libertarians,” but these are not necessarily the same people who self-identify as “libertarians” simpliciter. If anything, doesn’t being a committed member of a political movement mean, more or less by definition, that you’re not simply seeking meaning and satisfaction through “trivial novelties”?

As for the substance of the claim, it strikes me as rather clearly false. Yes, an open and pluralistic culture means you can live as a frivolous novelty junkie, but I’m not seeing the case for why it means one must. One might expect, on the contrary, that a wider range of lifestyles and communities of interest would allow each of us to be more fully committed to his own. Similarly, the idea that cultural libertarianism “destroys” political libertarianism is far from obvious to me. Rather, it seems that being able to really feel the pull of diverse conceptions of the good—and perhaps having held a few different ones at different times—might dispose people to be more circumspect about throwing state support behind any one. Perhaps James means that the “habits of the heart” inculcated by cultural libertarianism leave us all so dissolute that we’ll end up needing the state to look after us. That’s a larger claim than I want to take up here, but I don’t think it checks out: As I argue here, for instance, the narrative that blames the collapse of inner-city family structures on the perverse values of latte-sipping elites doesn’t really capture what’s going on.