Tim Lee, near the end of an interesting post inspired by Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance, writes:

Too many libertarians seem to define libertarianism as a very specific and restrictive political program: as a laundry list of government programs to be abolished, or equivalently as a very short list of government programs that won’t be abolished. By that measure, libertarianism is nowhere close to successful. But if we define libertarianism more broadly as a set of general ideas and attitudes—pro-market, pro-tolerance, skeptical of authority—the last few decades look a lot better from a libertarian perspective.

But of course one reason “libertarianism” tends to get defined as a very specific — and extreme — political program is that when you open it up the way Tim has it sounds a lot like “liberalism.” Which isn’t to say that Tim, who’d describe himself as a libertarian, and I, a liberal, agree about everything. But it’s to observe that the sorts of things that separate modern liberals from the economic right-wing are of a whole different kind than the sort of things that differentiated socialists from classical liberals. It was once the case that a substantial body of opinion in democratic societies thought that vast swathes of the economy should be either run directly by the government or else run as tightly regulated monopolies. In Europe, huge industries were nationalized and run by the state.

Nowadays, few if any people think that. Instead, you have left-right debates about things like how generously funded should public services be (and consequently how high should tax rates be) or should we make regulations to curb air pollution (of which carbon dioxide emissions now loom as an important variety) or in the name of public health paternalism (restrictions on where you can smoke, bans on trans fats). Say what you will about the “left” position on those topics, but none of these are calling into question the idea that the basic organization of the economy should be as a capitalist free market. At the same time, a lot of these issues weren’t really on the table in the first couple of post-war decades.

The result is just a political debate that looks very different and in which, in particular, different kinds of values seem salient. Most liberals probably wouldn’t describe themselves as “pro-market” unprompted, but nor are liberals are proposing to get rid of the market economy so being “pro-market” doesn’t distinguish anyone in contemporary politics from anyone else.

Fox News “has seen its once formidable advantage over CNN erode in this presidential election year, as both CNN and MSNBC have added viewers at far more dramatic rates.” The New York Times reports:

CNN has added 170,000 viewers a night, on average, when compared with the last presidential year, while Fox has shed about 90,000, according to Nielsen. (MSNBC, which added 181,000 viewers in that audience, much of it courtesy of gains by “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” still lagged in third place, with 303,000.)

A Fox News spokeswoman, Dana Klinghoffer, refused “several requests” for comment about the channel’s ratings and strategy.

On Fox News Sunday this morning, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol sarcastically decried “the horrible sexism and misogyny that the Democratic primary voters demonstrated” towards Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY). “It never would have happened in the Republican party,” claimed Kristol. “Republicans are much more open to strong women.” Watch it:

Kristol’s sarcastic claim is ironic given the sexism he himself directed at Clinton during the primary. Not only did he mock her tears in January, but in February, while discussing Clinton’s supporters, Kristol quipped, “White women are a problem, that’s, you know — we all live with that.”

The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh reports that late last year, “Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran.” The “Presidential Finding” was designed to destabilize religious leadership and gather “intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program“:

But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

“The Finding was focused on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.”

I agree with Noam Scheiber that the Republicans probably should evolve in a “Sam’s Club” direction and also that they probably can’t evolve in a “Sam’s Club” direction. But this seems way overstated:

Having said all that, these guys are right: The GOP is absolutely screwed. Even though the money comes from the same place it has for decades, the votes increasingly come from socially-conservative working-class people. At some point something’s got to give. I just think it’s going to be the GOP–which will basically cease to exist–rather than the moneymen and powerbrokers.

In the real world, it seems to me that in terms of the White House and governor’s mansions, there’s just a natural dynamic that leads the parties to more-or-less alternate in power since bad macroeconomic conditions are very bad for incumbents and yet not something that can be uniformly avoided. Beyond that, from 1933-1968 the GOP was almost uniformly shut out of power in congress, and rarely held the presidency, but even then it didn’t “basically cease to exist.” On top of all that, I don’t think this is going to happen but you can easily imagine a scenario in which Barack Obama takes power in 2009, the country faces some kind of foreign policy fiasco followed by a terrorist attack at home, and the GOP comes roaring back in 2010 and 2012 without changing its ideological stripes much at all.