Will Wilkinson rightly diagnoses the Republican Party’s brain drain: smart people don’t want to hang around with “flag-waving moral reactionaries” no matter how much they all might agree on the godlike efficiency of the market. But he still does believe in the market, so he can’t, or hasn’t, given himself up to the Democrats just yet:
“So I think my best bet is just to go ahead and try to come up with a more coherent and effective version of practical market-friendly liberalism.”
But Democrats want the market to succeed. They know that a successful market lifts all boats. They are not ideologically committed to anything other than “practical market-friendly liberalism.” Clintonism, I think, would still reign in the Democratic Party if the times could allow for it. But Democrats are capable of seeing when the market has failed.
The auto bailout is a good case in point. Will loathes it. He thinks that letting the automakers fail would be an act of “creative destruction” where some people (workers, those who depend on workers, those who provide goods that the workers buy) are “trapped in the wreckage.” This is an ideological commitment: he prefers the market at all costs. Democrats prefer the market at some costs. So when Will says “practical market friendly liberalism,” he seems to mean “libertarianism, minus the totally crazy shit, like the gold standard or whatever.” I would welcome Will and his fellow “liberaltarians” into the party, but Democrats shouldn’t bite on his gussied-up economic libertarianism, or rather, Will should acknowledge that that’s all that he is offering us.