So dramatic was the ensuing revolution that it is easy today to forget that communism ever existed — or at least what it really meant. Decades of totalitarianism impoverished people spiritually as well as economically. Those decades of oppression were swept away in an instant. What may be the most important liberating moment in human history should give us hope even as we despair about the future of our own nation and of Western civilization.

Communism's body count dwarfs that of fascism and Nazism. The latter was uniquely monstrous in its attempt to eradicate an entire people. But communism was unmatched in its endless slaughter. The Black Book of Communism, written by several European intellectuals — attacked for their effrontery in criticizing Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and other well-meaning mass murderers — estimated the death toll at more than 100 million. And the killings continue in such communist hell-holes as North Korea.

Today the former communist states range from robustly democratic to unpleasantly authoritarian. However, all have moved light years beyond what President Ronald Reagan so accurately termed the Evil Empire. Freedom now is widely viewed as the normal human condition.

What seems inevitable today was not obviously so in 1989, however. As the year dawned, the Soviet bloc was stirring. In Russia Mikhail Gorbachev had unleashed perestroika and glasnost; several satellite regimes were trembling.

Still, liberty had always seemed to end up stillborn in the Soviet empire. Somewhat less thuggish apparatchiks, not cosmopolitan liberals, replaced brutal murderers in the USSR. The 1953 East German demonstrations, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and the 1968 Prague Spring were all summarily crushed. Poland's Solidarity movement was suppressed in the dead of cold night in December 1981.

But 1989 was different.

Hungary led the way. The man who betrayed his colleagues in 1956, Janos Kadar, had been deposed the previous year. The murdered revolutionary leaders, most notably Imre Nagy, were reburied. Plans for multiparty elections were announced. The Communist Party was dissolved.

In Poland the Solidarity union stirred anew and the communist leadership retreated. The regime was foolish enough to hold free elections — which it lost, dramatically.

Hungary tore down its wall with Austria. It didn't matter so much to Hungarians, who already had been allowed to travel. But Budapest's action freed everyone else in Eastern Europe, who had been allowed to vacation within the Soviet bloc. In particular, East Germans began streaming out of their country and then through Hungary. Others fled to the West German embassy in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The human flood destabilized East Germany, the formerly bedrock Soviet satellite that trailed only Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania as Eastern Europe's most rigid and authoritarian regime.

Demonstrations first occurred in the so-called German Democratic Republic during the spring over yet another predictably fraudulent election. By the fall there were weekly marches in Leipzig: The GDR leadership temporized, causing the number of protesters to multiply. Communist Party boss Erich Honecker wanted to shoot them; rather than commit mass murder, the Politburo dumped Honecker. On November 4 a million people gathered in Alexanderplatz in East Berlin to demand the end of communism.

On November 9 the regime opened the Wall. In fact, the desperate communist leadership had decided only to relax travel restrictions, but Politburo member and spokesman Guenter Schabowski misunderstood his colleagues' decision and announced at a press conference that the border was opening at that moment. Tens of thousands of people gathered at still closed checkpoints, causing befuddled border guards to stand aside. The Berlin Wall was open, never to be closed again. Within a year the ugly, brutish regime, which had distinguished itself by shooting desperate people seeking to escape to freedom, disappeared.

The other European communist autocracies fell as well. Bulgaria dumped its ruler of 35 years, Todor Zhivkov. The tottering Czech regime yielded power in the so-called "Velvet Revolution." A mixture of popular demonstrations and military revolt unseated the monstrous Ceausescus in Romania. As revolution erupted they fled by helicopter. Their pilot observed: "They look as if they were fainting. They were white with terror." On Christmas Eve they were executed after a drumhead court martial.

The newly free countries have been bedeviled by problems. Of most concern is Russia's retreat towards authoritarianism. Nevertheless, the collapse of communism remains a fantastic triumph of the human spirit. With minimal bloodshed, average people overthrew a gaggle of tyrannies. What some thought to be impossible became real, as the desire for liberty trounced the desire for power.

There were heroes in all of the communist countries. Average people willing to speak out, demonstrate, and demand their rights as human beings. Average people willing to say no to the apparatchiks who had so long lived off the workers they were supposed to represent.

Some stand out. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet novelist who chronicled the horrors of the gulag and stripped the Soviet regime of any claim to legitimacy. Dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, who was banished internally after protesting Soviet man's inhumanity to man.

Lech Walesa, the electrician who nearly a decade before the Wall's collapse famously hopped over a shipyard fence in Gdansk, Poland, to declare that the time of repression was over. The forces of reaction reasserted themselves martial law in late 1981, but nine years later Walesa was elected president of Poland.

In Czechoslovakia there was Alexander Dubcek, who attempted to give communism a human face. The playwright, and first president, Vaclav Havel, called the regime to account for its crimes. Current President Vaclav Klaus engineered his nation's adoption of market economics as well as peaceful split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

More than four decades ago Imre Nagy, Pal Maleter, and thousands of Hungarian revolutionaries demanded freedom and were murdered by the Soviets and their Hungarian stooges. In 1989 Imre Pozsgay broke with his Poliburo colleagues, calling the earlier uprising a "popular revolt." He also pushed to tear down Hungary's wall with Austria.

Even more important was Mikhail Gorbachev. He was, of course, a reform communist, not a Western-style democrat. His crackdown in the Baltic states left blood on his hands.

Nevertheless, he was the necessary transition from communist totalitarianism to everything else. His decision to loosen the repressive bonds in the Soviet Union was heroic: events spun out of his control, but he was willing to pay that price in order to humanize the most murderous political regime in human history.

Equally important was his decision to keep the Soviet troops in their barracks throughout Eastern Europe. Moscow had ruthlessly crushed all previous attempts by subject peoples to lessen, let alone eliminate, communist repression. In 1989, however, Gorbachev let Eastern European communist leaders stand alone. They could not count on the loyalty of their own militaries. Nor could they depend on Soviet aid. In every country but Romania the ruling elites blinked. In the latter they lost anyway.

Finally, there was Ronald Reagan. He understood what communism was about, that it truly was an "Evil Empire." But he also believed that communism could be defeated, that the most ruthless totalitarian system ever created could be tossed into the dustbin of history.

On June 12, 1987 he stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate and said: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Another 29 months would pass, and Ronald Reagan would leave office, but the Brandenburg Gate did open.

Today it is almost as if the Wall never existed. Only a few small sections remain of the massive concrete structure that ran roughly 100 miles around West Berlin, a free island deep within the Evil Empire. Yet it is a testament to man's inhumanity to man which we can ill afford to forget.

The "wall" started out as barbed wire along streets, followed by brick walls. The structure grew more fearsome over time, mixing concrete walls, wire mesh fencing, watch towers, and anti-vehicle trenches. Yet several thousand people made it over, under, or around the Wall and border fortifications lining the rest of the border between the two Germanys. Human ingenuity knows few bounds when people are seeking freedom.

Alas, far more people failed in their attempt to be free. Tens of thousands of East Germans were imprisoned for "Republikflucht," or attempting to flee the East German paradise. Worse, roughly 1,000 people were murdered attempting to escape East Germany, some 200 from Berlin.

The first person to die while attempting to escape was 58-year-old Ida Siekmann, who jumped from her building to the bordering road in West Berlin on August 22, 1961 (the structure was later demolished to create a "death strip"). Two days later a 24-year-old tailor, Guenter Litfin, was shot and killed while attempting to swim the River Spree.

A year later an 18-year-old bricklayer, Peter Fechter, was shot and left to bleed to death in the death strip near Checkpoint Charlie within full view of residents in West Berlin — who could do nothing for him. On February 6, 1989, 20-year-old Chris Gueffroy became the last East German to be murdered while seeking to escape his national prison. He and a friend thought the order to shoot had been lifted; he was hit ten times and died on the spot. His friend was injured but survived — to spend time in prison. On March 8, 32-year-old Winfried Freudenberg, an electrical engineer, became the last person to die in an escape attempt, when his home-made balloon crashed.

The fall of the Wall, and the evil system behind it, deserves to be celebrated. Not just on November 9. But every day.

Two decades later much remains to be done by those who love liberty. Abroad tyranny remains: North Korea's odious dictatorship brutalizes and starves its people, the Castros' dictatorship remains in power a half century after the Cuban revolution, and China has reformed its economy, not its political system. Russia is retrogressing, while in some Eastern European states economic reforms have stalled, political systems have deadlocked, and communist crimes remain unpunished.

At home liberty is threatened, though not as dramatically. The expansive welfare state rather than the brutal authoritarian state is on the march, threatening to consume the health care system. While spending wildly on bailouts, pork, and everything in between, Congress is considering a massive energy tax, which would devastate the private economy. Our society seems set to become both less free and less prosperous.

Yet hope remains. Two decades ago what had only seemed to be a faint dream became a reality. The Berlin Wall fell. Communism disappeared. Hundreds of millions of subjects of the Soviet empire became free.

The spirit of liberty remains. Sometimes deeply buried. But the spirit of liberty remains.

Such a magazine, in print or digitally, is sorely needed now. Interactive civics classes have been replaced by testing and retesting assembly lines of students so that the state can evaluate whole schools rather than individual, evolving citizens. David Souter warned in May, as he was retiring from the Supreme Court, that surveys show many Americans cannot name the basic three branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial). He stressed that "(we need) to start the re-education of a substantial part of the public."

Souter's concern about "the restoration of the self-identity of the American people" was the urgent theme in the first issue of Constitution (Fall 1988) in Lynne Cheney's article "A Fading Heritage."

At the time, she was chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and we used to share, in phone conversations, our forebodings of the growing spread of "political correctness" on campuses and at large — a compulsory conformity of opinions that would have been foreign to such free-thinkers as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

I have not spoken with Lynne Cheney for a long time, figuring she would hardly welcome my call after what I've written about her husband, former vice president Dick Cheney. But I continue to find her article in Constitution energizing and disturbingly contemporary.

"Consider," she wrote then, "how little history is required of our students. Once it was taught every year kindergarten through 12th grade; now many states require but one year." If that, these days.

Today, in a contemporary book that should be in every school, and certainly within reach of members of Congress and the Obama administration, The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country and Why It Can Again (Bloomsbury USA, New York) — Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes write: "We are not burdened by a sense of history, our own or anyone ... Our sense of our own past, to put it politely, is thin and growing thinner. The evidence for this is all around us."

Lynne Cheney, in the magazine Constitution, quoted a political philosopher who had been chosen in 1986 as the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Council on the Humanities. Leszek Kolakowski emphasized in that lecture that among America's young, "the erosion of a historically defined sense of 'belonging' plays havoc in their life and threatens their ability to withstand possible trials of the future."

"Havoc," for example, surely exists among those of our young whose acute need 'to belong' somewhere brings them into the increasingly brutal gangs, not only in urban centers.

And many other youths, including in prestigious lower schools and colleges, would be very hard put to say why we have the First, Fifth, Fourth and Ninth Amendments in our Constitution, let alone tell why they could be so important in their own lives. Where are their moorings as Americans?

And how many in or out of school have a meaningful or even scant knowledge of such contributors to the roots of this nation as George Washington (except maybe for the cherry tree), Tom Paine, John Marshall, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain or Elizabeth Cady Stanton?

"Ideally," Lynne Cheney advised, "there would be fewer textbooks used in our schools. Teachers would enlighten their students with current and classic works of literature or historical documents. But to find and bring these into the classroom takes a breadth of knowledge that may be beyond some teachers ... because their preparation has been misdirected ... taking just courses in education. Because time spent taking these types of courses is time that cannot be spent studying 'content' areas like history, teachers find themselves knowing less than they should about the subjects they are teaching."

This includes knowing less about what students should know about this nation so that they can begin to feel they "belong" to it.

If an American roots coalition can be formed — across political and professional lines — with maybe Lynne Cheney involved, our history can be brought off the pages and into Americans' lives. David Souter is already showing the way, having joined a committee in his home state that is changing the civic curriculum for New Hampshire's public schools.

During his retirement speech at Georgetown University Law Center, Souter looked at his audience, saying: "If I can do it, you can do it, too."

A book I would love to see come into all Americans' lives is by a master narrator of our identities, Ray Raphael, whose abundant volume, Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation (New Press) has the reverberating impact of the former CBS-TV series You Are There!

When, for instance, in 1772, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, as Samuel Adams, James Otis and other patriots formed a Committee of Correspondence to inform all the colonies of British abuses of these Americans' privacy rights in their homes and offices, you too are there in a meeting that was vital in precipitating the American Revolution. That's how to make the Fourth Amendment come alive again! Not only in schools.

As Kathryn Sinclair, a high school student in Murfreesboro, Tenn., engaged in a First Amendment battle with her principal 25 years ago, asked me: "Why don't the schools teach why we're Americans? So few people know."

A quarter-century later, sadly, there still isn't a reassuring answer for her.

In New Jersey, Democratic governor Jon Corzine has done surprisingly well with his "make fun of the fat kid" reelection strategy, yet portly Republican Chris Christie retains a narrow advantage.

In Virginia, the GOP's Bob McDonnell is comfortably ahead in a state that Obama won by over 200,000 votes, and a Sunday poll had Conservative Party upstart Doug Hoffman 16 points ahead of his Democratic opponent in New York's 23rd congressional district.

If history is any guide, Democrats have reason to worry about 2010. In every midterm election but two since the end of WWII, the president's party has lost seats, and it's a fair bet that the Blue Team faces double-digit losses next year.

The "Hopefest 2009" aura surrounding Obama's inauguration reminds us that Americans are still suckers for the romance of Camelot. But though we periodically swoon for heroic presidents who pledge to heal the country and the world, when we sober up, we vote to check the hero's power.

In fact, in the past half century, voters have opted for divided government over 60 percent of the time. We Americans rest easier when the purse and sword are in different hands.

Why shouldn't we, given the horrors of one-party government? Whenever one faction controls both elected branches, checks and balances disappear.

My colleague Bill Niskanen, former chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, points out that since the start of the Cold War, we've had only a dozen years of real fiscal restraint: Six under Eisenhower and a Democratic Congress, and six under Clinton and a GOP majority.

Per Niskanen's calculations, since FDR, unified governments have spent roughly three times as fast as divided ones, and they've been much more likely to waste blood and treasure abroad.

The Framers tried to craft a constitution that gave politicians proper incentives to check each other. "Ambition [would] counteract ambition," as James Madison saw it, with congressmen keeping presidents honest and vice-versa.

Things haven't worked out as planned. Too often, party loyalty trumps constitutional fidelity, as evidenced by former House speaker Denny Hastert's self-image as a "lieutenant" of George Bush rather than a guardian of congressional prerogatives.

But when different parties hold the legislature and the executive, the Madisonian system works better. Divided government leads to many more congressional investigations into presidential misconduct, and, as two University of Chicago scholars demonstrated recently, "the White House's propensity to exercise military force steadily declines as members of the opposition party pick up seats in Congress."

When politicians wax sentimental about "the wisdom of the American people," it's usually a good idea to hold on to your wallet. If we're so smart, who's to blame for the clowns we elect?

But when it comes to separating the purse and the sword, we may be brighter than expected. A good chunk of us deliberately split our tickets. In 2004, two political scientists crunched the numbers, estimating that more than 20 percent of American voters were "cognitive Madisonians." In plain English, these voters consciously tried to "divide power and balance policy."

Even if the "cognitive Madisonians" are energized in 2010, it will be difficult for the GOP to seize the House. As analyst Charlie Cook notes, there are fewer open seats for the taking then there were during the Republican Revolution of '94.

Ironically enough, though, if things were easier for the Republicans, the embattled Obama might have a better shot at a successful presidency. Divided government tends to boost the president's approval rating.

It's no accident that the few modern presidents who left office with high popularity — Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton — had to battle a Congress controlled by the opposition. We tend to like the guy better when he doesn't have a free hand.

No doubt Obama's pulling for Corzine, Deeds, and Owens today, and for a Democratic majority in 2010. But if he knew what was good for him — and for the country — he'd silently root for divided government.

Karl Rove dreamed that he and Bush, like strategist Mark Hanna and President William McKinley in 1896, would create a generation of Republican dominance. Instead, he delivered both Congress and the presidency to the Democrats.

Bush turned off libertarian-leaning moderates and independents with his profligate spending, his excessive social conservatism, and the foundering war in Iraq.

Some of those independents voted Democratic in 2006 and 2008, figuring that the Democrats would be more tolerant and could hardly be more profligate. And what are they now seeing?

President Obama is exceeding all their fears on fiscal and economic issues. After promising a "net spending cut" during the campaign and denouncing "the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history," he has sent federal spending and the deficit soaring into the stratosphere. And voters simply don't believe his claim that he can extend health insurance to 47 million more people and extend mandated coverage without added costs.

Independents who turned against the Republicans are likely to become equally disillusioned with Obama, and there's already some evidence of that in the polls.

Support for "smaller government with fewer services" has risen in the ABC News/Washington Post poll, and independents prefer it by 61 percent to 35 percent, a margin three times as large as a year ago. The number of people who see Obama as an "old-style tax and spend Democrat" has risen by 11 percentage points.

Voters are turning against a year's worth of takeovers, bailouts, and new spending programs. Ironically, the first four months of those programs were actually Bush's doing. But Obama "owns" the whole shebang now.

In a July USA Today poll, a majority oppose Obama's health care efforts and 59 percent say he's spending too much. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll the same month, only 25 percent "strongly approve" of his health care plans, and 33 percent strongly disapprove.

Obama remains personally popular, even as support for his programs drops. But his honeymoon may turn out to be as passionate, yet brief, as a Hollywood marriage.

Despite the growing disillusionment with Democratic spending plans, polls still show that voters prefer that Democrats control Congress after next year's elections. However, the latest poll shows a three-point Democratic lead, down from seven points in July and nine points in April. And that margin is far smaller than the massive 19-point lead Democrats held over Republicans in June 2008. So in less than a year and a half, the Democratic margin has fallen from 19 points to three, the party's smallest lead since 2004.

Republicans still face the challenge of uniting their party around economic issues of lower taxes and less spending, rather than driving away moderates, professionals, and rugged-individualist Westerners with their socially conservative crusades.

In usually Republican Virginia, gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell saw his lead cut in half when The Washington Post uncovered a document in which he had proposed that Republicans seek to "punish" homosexuality and declare working women "detrimental to the family."

One big problem for Republicans in 2006 and 2008 was that their own voters were embarrassed and disillusioned, while Democratic activists were energized. In 2010, as in 1994, it looks like conservatives and Republicans will be the energized, determined part of the electorate. The GOP is raising more money than the Democrats this year, a rare accomplishment for the minority party. One advantage for Democrats is that in 1994, no one saw the Republican surge coming. This time, people do.

Charlie Cook, the dean of political prognosticators, may have been a bit too strong when he said that the growing fears of moderate and independent voters that "Washington was taking irreversible actions that would drive mountainous deficits higher,... that government was taking on far more than it could competently handle and far more than the country could afford, [and] expanding too far, too fast" should "terrify" Democrats. But they are no doubt worried.

I'm not so sure. But at least the conservatism of Sen. Robert Taft, Sen. Barry Goldwater, and Reagan stood for a limited constitutional government in opposition to the federal aggrandizement of the New Deal and the Great Society. Back in the FDR-JFK-LBJ years, conservatives even stood for congressional government and against the imperial presidency.

But what does conservatism stand for today, other than opposition to President Obama? President Bush expanded entitlements, increased federal spending by more than a trillion dollars, federalized education, launched "nation-building" projects in two far-flung regions, and accumulated more power in the White House than any previous president.

Yet the masses assembled at the Conservative Political Action Conference chanted "Four More Years!" at him in the eighth year of his reign. Is that really a record that conservatives wanted more of?

Steven F. Hayward suggests in today's edition of The Washinton Post that one reason for conservatism's having gotten off track, one that I've heard from other, mostly older, conservatives: A movement once led by William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman now gets its intellectual direction from talk show hosts and bloggers. Where are the tomes of yesteryear?

Well, it's a fast-paced, market-driven world. If celebrities and rabble-rousing are what sell, then we'd better hope for some smart ideas on the airwaves. And it's not like conservatives are alone in this trend.

Buckley jousted with John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter face off with Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore. Six years ago the Boston Globe noted that liberal books were, at least briefly, dominating the New York Times bestseller list.

Along with Hillary Clinton's autobiography, those books were "Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)," "Big Lies," "Thieves in High Places," and "Stupid White Men." Not exactly a sign of the intellectual depth of American liberalism.

The good news about the Obama era is that the president has returned the issue of the size, scope, and power of the federal government to center stage. And that in turn has revived the long-dormant small-government spirit in American conservatism.

In that regard, I'm more positive than Hayward is about the "tea party" movement. True, it is somewhat "unfocused," without a clear "connection to a concrete ideology." But it reflects and galvanizes the natural American antipathy to big government.

Now the responsibility of the conservative media and political leaders is to give the tea partiers a positive cause to rally around, by shining light on scholars with good ideas. There are plenty of free-market intellectuals today, far more than in the era when Milton Friedman dined alone. Glenn Beck does indeed sometimes devote significant time to a single intellectual; other talk show hosts should do the same.

Conservatives often prefer the prudent and cautious spirit of Edmund Burke and F. A. Hayek to the more libertarian and "progressive" vision of Thomas Jefferson. But neither Burke nor Hayek believed simply in standing athwart history, crying "Stop!"

Burke, after all, was a Whig, not a Tory, and a supporter of the American Revolution. And Hayek insisted that he was not a conservative:

"Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place."

He called himself a liberal, and he thought that Margaret Thatcher, with her vigorous program of free-market reform, was also a liberal. By whatever name, modern American conservatives would do well to take to heart Hayek's rallying cry:

"We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is … a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty …which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible."

The trick for 21st-century American conservatives, conservatives in a country founded in libertarian revolution, is to decide which traditions are worth holding on to. I would suggest as a good first rule that we allow the natural evolution of society and market, while limiting coercive intervention into those processes.

Conservatism should make its peace with natural social change, before it loses the entire younger generation, while reaffirming its commitment to freedom and limited government.

Judging by the massive crowd on Saturday that descended on Washington for the 9/12 March, you'd have to be deaf not to recognize that small-government conservatism remains a vital part of the national conversation.

If you've been fed a steady media diet of MSNBC over the last few months, though, you could be excused for fearing a Pennsylvania Avenue takeover by a rabble of pitchfork-wielding cranks and extras from "Deliverance." But the crowd — "in excess of 75,000 people," according to a D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services spokesman — was made up of orderly, pleasant, middle-class Americans from all across the country.

In my two hours at the protest, I didn't see a single "Birther" sign, and spied only one racially insensitive caricature. "Many of the signs," the liberal Center for American Progress alleges on its blog, "attacked President Obama using explicit racial and ethnic smears" — a claim that's simply false.

It used to irk liberals no end when conservatives crashed peace marches, snapped pictures of the nuttiest signs, and used them to condemn all Iraq war opponents as troop-hating traitors. That didn't stop CAP'ers from trying the same tactic, to little avail.

The gallery of "racist, radical portrayals" they posted after spending hours looking at tens of thousands of signs contains few that fit the bill. (If an "Obamunism" placard featuring the president in a Che beret gives you the vapors, you're probably too delicate to watch cable news without prescription tranquilizers.)

Surprisingly, for a march held the day after the 9/11 anniversary, the war on terror wasn't a prominent issue. Very few of the signs reflected the militarism and fearmongering that's been all too popular on the Right in recent years. The most common 9/12 themes were pro-Constitution, anti-czar, anti-Obamacare, and anti-bailout.

Amid the sea of hand-lettered placards were quite a few that warmed this columnist's cold libertarian heart, like "I am John Galt" and "What Would Mises Do?" "Austrian Business Cycle Theory!" blared a sign carried by a white-haired fellow, obviously pleased with his own erudition. Several 9/12'ers carried signs reading simply, "Liar" — a smart choice for the dedicated protester, as it will rarely have to be replaced from election to election.

None of this is to suggest, however, that the 9/12 March showed all was right with the Right. Movement conservatism clearly has a long-term demographic problem.

The crowd was disproportionately middle-aged, and whiter than a Jimmy Buffett concert. Some of the "outreach" efforts on the main stage were condescending and embarrassing, as when the organizers handed the microphone to right-wing rapper "Hi-Caliber." Suffice it to say that "Republican hip-hop" is every bit as excruciating as the concept suggests.

The Republican leadership's decision to position the party as Medicare's most passionate defender may be tactically smart in the short term, but it's hardly consistent with limited government, to say nothing of fiscal sanity."Deep Medicare cuts are just one of the mounting reasons why Americans are losing faith in the Democrats' government takeover of health care," House Minority Leader John Boehner declares on his web page, oblivious to the contradiction.

It would be comforting to think that the GOP is out of touch with its conservative base here, but that's unlikely. A 2007 Harris poll showed that only 2 percent of Republicans support Medicare cuts to help close the deficit.

Even so, the public seems increasingly resistant to new big-government schemes. In a recent column, Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, argues that Medicare could never have passed in the current political climate: "Broad distrust of government — which was not evident in the 1960s — is an important reason why Americans are reacting so differently to health care reform in 2009 than they did in 1965."

That rising distrust of big government — of which Saturday's march was the most vivid recent example — shows this much at least: "The death of conservatism" has been greatly exaggerated.

The poverty of those years caused many to emigrate from the country, mostly to the U.S. Upper Midwest. Beginning in the 1870s, Sweden created the conditions for developing a high-growth, free-market economy with a slowly growing government sector. As a result, Sweden for many years had the world's fastest-growing economy, ultimately producing the third-highest per capita income, almost equaling that in the United States by the late 1960s. Sweden became a rich country before becoming a welfare state.

Sweden began its movement toward a welfare state in the 1960s, when its government sector was about equal to that in the United States. However, by the late 1980s, government spending grew from 30 percent of gross domestic product to more than 60 percent of GDP.

Most full-time employees faced marginal tax rates of 65 percent to 75 percent, as contrasted with 40 percent in 1960. Labor-market regulations were introduced to make it very difficult to fire workers. Business profits were taxed heavily, and financial markets were regulated heavily. By 1993, the government budget deficit was 13 percent of GDP and total government debt was about 71 percent of GDP, which led to a rapid fall in the value of the currency and a rise in inflation.

These policies and outcomes greatly diminished the incentives to work, save and invest. Economic growth slowed to a crawl. Other countries that avoided the excess spending, taxing and regulation of Sweden grew more rapidly, leaving Sweden in the dust. Sweden is still a prosperous country, but far from the top, and its per capita income has fallen to just about 80 percent of that in the United States.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Sweden began an economic course correction that continues today. Marginal tax rates were reduced for most of the population, and this trend is expected to continue.

The wealth tax and inheritance tax were abolished. Financial markets, telecommunications, electricity, road transport, taxis and other activities were deregulated. Privatization of industry was begun, and the current government is continuing the process. The generosity of some welfare and other benefits has been reduced, with the goal of making work more economically rewarding relative to government benefits. Also, trade liberalization has been expanded greatly. The result has been a pickup in economic growth, and Sweden is no longer falling further behind other developed countries.

One notable success has been pension reform. Sweden was the first nation to implement a mandatory government retirement system for all its citizens. Sweden, like the United States and most other countries, was faced with an increasing, unfunded social security liability as a result of low birthrates and people living much longer. After studying the problem in the early 1990s, the Swedes approved, in 1998, moving toward a Chilean private pension system, first developed by former Chilean Labor Minister Jose Pinera. (Seventeen countries have adopted variations of the Pinerian system, which has been very successful in Chile.)

The new Swedish pension system has four key features, including partial privatization, individual accounts, a safety net to protect the poor and a transition to protect retirees and older workers. The benefits have been substantial budgetary savings, higher retirement income and faster economic growth.

Those who wish to chase the Swedish model need first to decide which model they seek: The high-growth, pre-1960 model; the low-growth model of the 1970s and 1980s; or the reformist, welfare-state model of recent years. The irony is that the current Democratic Congress and administration are rapidly emulating the parts of the Swedish model that proved disastrous and rejecting those parts that are proving to be successful.

Most Swedes now understand that they still have a good distance to go to further strengthen the market economy to ensure continued growth. Thus, they continue to move toward reducing the size of government rather than increasing it.

If the Obama Democrats were wise enough to learn from the Swedes, they would be moving toward trade liberalization rather than away from it. They would be moving to at least partially privatize Social Security. They would not seek to prevent the abolition of the death tax. They would be reducing rather than increasing regulations. They would be reducing rather than trying to increase marginal tax rates on work, saving and investment. They would be reducing the corporate income tax as was done in Sweden.

Finally, the Obama Democrats would be reducing government spending rather than increasing it and not running deficits as large as those that almost sank the Swedish economy 16 years ago.

When Gallup recently asked voters to describe themselves politically, 40 percent of Americans describe their views as conservative, 35 percent as moderate, and 21 percent as liberal — a recent shift in the conservative direction.

See the Gallup report here.

But in a 2006 Zogby Poll, 59 percent of voters said they would describe themselves as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal." They don't fit comfortably into either party's base. Many of these are the independents who should rightly be the hot cheerleaders of the electorate, extravagantly courted by both parties. [Disclosure: Cato paid for this question, but the poll itself was Zogby's regular Thursday-after-the-election poll of people who said they voted.]

Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center found that the much-discussed, much-pandered-to "bases" of the two parties accounted for only about a quarter of the electorate: 11 percent of Americans describe themselves as liberal Democrats, 15 percent conservative Republicans. Independents grew from 30 to 39 percent of the electorate in just five months after the 2008 election.

See the Pew report here.

Libertarian — or fiscally conservative, socially liberal — voters are often torn between their aversions to the Republicans' social conservatism (and, for some of them, military adventurism) and the Democrats' fiscal irresponsibility. Usually they end up voting on the basis of economics.

Research that David Kirby and I have done shows that libertarian-leaning voters have typically given up to 70 percent of their votes to Republicans. But in 2004 and 2006, that number fell off sharply. Republican congressional candidates barely held a majority of libertarian votes in 2006, and of course the Republicans took a pounding in that election.

Why did those voters turn away from the Republicans? Well, Bush and the Republican Congress stuck to their social-conservative guns: they sought to ban gay marriage, limit stem cell research, and insert the federal government into Terry Schiavo's hospital room.

They got bogged down in an unnecessary and endless war, and they asserted extraordinary powers of surveillance and arrest. Meanwhile, they managed to add more than a trillion dollars to the federal budget and launched the biggest new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. So those who had been willing to accept some social conservatism as the price of fiscal responsibility realized they'd made a bad bargain.

Some of those independents voted Democratic in 2006 and 2008, figuring that the Democrats would be more tolerant and could hardly be more profligate. And what are they now seeing?

President Obama is exceeding all their fears on fiscal and economic issues. After promising a "net spending cut" during the campaign and denouncing "the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history," he has sent federal spending and the deficit soaring into the stratosphere.

Meanwhile, he's not delivering what some of his voters hoped for on social issues. No gay marriage, even as Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, conservative superlawyer Ted Olson, and the legislature of crusty New Hampshire sign on.

No end to the drug war, even though he's the third president in a row to have acknowledged using drugs. He even mocked a question about drug legalization at his online town hall. ("Dude, we elected that guy, what's up with that?" is Reason editor Matt Welch's summary of the blogosphere's reaction.) No pullout from Iraq.

So once again fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters are starting to wonder if they made a bad bargain.

Independents who turned against the Republicans are likely to become equally disillusioned with Obama, and there's already some evidence of that in the polls. Support for "smaller government with fewer services" has risen in the ABC News/Washington Post poll, and independents prefer it by 61 to 35 percent, a margin three times as large as a year ago. The number of people who see Obama as an "old-style tax and spend Democrat" has risen by 11 percentage points.

In a USA Today poll, a majority oppose Obama's health care efforts and 59 percent say he's spending too much. In another ABC/Washington Post poll, only 25 percent "strongly approve" of his health care plans, and 33 percent strongly disapprove. His honeymoon may turn out to be as passionate, yet brief, as Britney Spears' Las Vegas marriage.

It's hard out here for a fiscally conservative, socially liberal voter. But at least there's always the other party to try again.

I will not attempt to reproduce what I heard and learned, but I do wish to recommend at least one piece of reading material that could, if paid close attention to, set the record straight about how America got into its various economic messes.

I have in mind professor Robert Higgs' path-breaking Crisis and Leviathan (Oxford University Press, 1987). This book is a real gem. It shows with extensive research and analysis that those running governments repeatedly - and often deliberately - take advantage of economic troubles so as to amass power, and once the troubles have subsided rarely return the power to their populations. Instead they hoard it.

Some of the lectures I heard included PowerPoint presentations, and it was fascinating to see direct quotations and sometimes video and audio records of major government officials being openly gleeful about how the current economic fiasco provides them with the chance to grab power. They didn't even think of disguising their opinions but declared unabashedly that this is a great time to take advantage, for all those who like meddlesome government.

Something else that was clear from many of the lectures is that a great many people in American government, both at the time of the New Deal and now, reject completely the ideas and ideals of the major American Founders and believe, with the likes of Alexander Hamilton, that America should be a top-down political system, a monarchy.

Such people denied then, and do now, that individuals have any rights except the privileges granted to them by administrators of governments (just as in the past such people believed that it is the king who hands out privileges, selects the favored in the population, with no regard to anything like natural, individual rights).

In one of my lectures I laid out how the Lockean theory of individual rights presents us all with bulwarks against tyranny by requiring the limitation of governmental powers. Because of this revolutionary theory, the U.S. Constitution laid out a very limited set of powers for government and recognized that it is citizens who have sovereignty, not states.

Just now, of course, this idea is not even given the slightest respect by Obama and Co. When, for example, Obama claimed that all economists agree with him about the need for a massive stimulus, some researchers at the Cato Institute produced a document with the names of about 250 respected professors of economics from universities and colleges around the country who disputed the wisdom of the stimulus.

What was especially fascinating about the historical lectures at Cato University is that they showed that the same kind of prevarications dominated previous episodes of economic crises even though in every case the cause of them was widely known to be earlier government malpractice. Despite this, the lies are now repeated by some of the most prestigious academic cheerleaders of Obama's policies!

Taxes reduce liberty and often erode the value of property. Most regulations reduce liberty and some erode property values and even endanger life. We now spend much of our lives trying to figure out how to reduce our tax burdens and to comply with never-ending government regulations and forms.

In mid-July of each year, several thousand economic libertarians meet in libertine Las Vegas as part of the annual FreedomFest.

They come to discuss how they can keep the foot of government light by removing ever-growing government restrictions on their liberty, and how they can personally protect their property (savings and investments). Speakers range from chief executive officers, such as Steve Forbes of Forbes magazine and John Mackey of Whole Foods; media economic gurus, such as Larry Kudlow of CNBC and Steve Moore and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal; to think tank leaders, well-known economists, tax lawyers, and investment advisers.

Most of those who enter government, either as elected politicians or bureaucrats, do not start out to deliberately erode basic freedoms and property rights, but all too many in the political class act like children -- irresponsibly and thoughtlessly.

It has been widely reported that not one of the several hundred members of Congress who voted for the "stimulus package" or the "cap-and-trade bill" (each piece of legislation containing more than 1,000 pages) actually read, let alone understood, what was in these bills.

The stimulus bill is objectively not working as promised by the advocates because, as many correctly warned, it is not possible for either individuals or governments to spend themselves into prosperity, nor will the political forces allow tax revenues to be spent wisely and effectively. If you look at the Obama officials' unemployment projections (with and without the stimulus bill), as well as the actual unemployment numbers, it is ironic that, if those in the Obama administration had not put forth the stimulus bill, the economy, by their own projections, would probably have been better off.

The environmental cap-and-trade bill that has passed the House, but not yet the Senate, will greatly increase every American's energy costs but will have such a minor effect on the climate that it could not possibly pass any reasonable cost-benefit test. The unintended consequence is to make every American poorer with fewer job opportunities -- and, as we know, poorer countries invariably do more damage to the environment than rich countries (e.g., Switzerland versus India).

The latest bit of silliness is the new effort to "stabilize oil prices." Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, writing in the Journal, demand that governments "supervise" oil prices.

The new head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler, appointed by President Obama, says the commission will act to reduce "oil price speculation." These efforts are cheered on by economic know-nothings in the media.

Every beginning economics student should know that prices allocate scarce resources and motivate future production. If governments try to control prices, oil companies and investors will invest less in new production, thus reducing future supply, which will lead to higher prices in the future. Speculators are necessary to allow producers to shift part of the risk of their investments.

In responding to critics of oil speculation, Donald J. Boudreaux, chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, noted that the critics presume "that all speculators speculate long and that doing so is a sure thing. Neither presumption is valid. It's just as easy to speculate short as it is to speculate long. And if speculation were as risklessly profitable as [the critics] presume it to be, then high gasoline prices would pose no problem because everyone would be raking in the riches by speculating in oil markets." Furthermore, the Obama administration is busy canceling leases on areas opened for oil exploration by the Bush administration. The unintended consequence is that America will be more dependent on foreign oil and prices will be higher for American consumers.

Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota and Max Baucus of Montana have made a series of legislative proposals to restrict and make it more costly for Americans to move businesses and financial assets out of the United States, and make it more costly for foreign institutions to invest here.

These proposals will have the obvious consequence of driving needed foreign investment out, and the unintended consequence of spurring U.S. companies to domicile and move operations (and jobs) elsewhere and making it more difficult for Americans outside the United States to get needed foreign bank accounts.

If these senators were actually the public servants they claim to be, they would do serious cost-benefit analyses before proposing daffy ideas that will be very costly to their fellow Americans in terms of economic growth, jobs and liberty.

Events like FreedomFest are important because they help citizens understand their liberties are being eroded and that eternal vigilance (and action) is required to preserve what we have and develop realistic programs to roll back the forces of both intentional and unintentional government oppression.

More horrifying still, soon they'll all be able to vote.

The generation born from the late 1970s to the early '90s has been called "Gen Y," "GenNext," and "the Millennials." Its name is Legion. But whatever name they go by, and despite their image as web-savvy individualists, when it comes to politics, young voters are as collectivist as they come.

In May, the Center for American Progress released a lengthy survey of polling data on Millennials, concluding that they're a "Progressive Generation," eager to increase federal power.

CAP is the leading Democratic think tank, so it has a vested interest in that conclusion. But they're on to something. In the last election, 18-to-29 year-olds went for Barack Obama by a 34-point margin.

The CAP report shows that Gen Y is substantially more likely to support universal health care, labor unions, and education spending than older voters. And other surveys support CAP's "Progressive Generation" thesis.

In 2008, the nonpartisan National Election Study asked Americans whether "the free market" or "a strong government" would better handle "today's complex economic problems." By a margin of 78 to 22 percent, Millennials opted for "strong government."

Kids today are a credulous bunch. The 2007 Pew Political Values survey revealed "a generation gap in cynicism." Where 62 percent of Americans overall view the federal government as wasteful and inefficient, just 42 percent of young people agree.

No wonder, then, that GenNext responds to President Obama's call for "public service," roughly translated as "a federal paycheck."

Here, they differ dramatically from their skeptical "Generation X" predecessors. A 1999 survey asked Gen X college seniors to name their ideal employers; they "filled the entire list with for-profit businesses like Microsoft and Cisco." What a difference a generation makes. In the same poll today, Gen Y prefers the State Department, Teach for America, and the Peace Corps. That's a problem for a country built on the entrepreneurial spirit.

What lessons can the GOP, nominally the party of limited government, learn from all this?

First, by staking so much of their electoral success on "social issues" voters, Republicans have lashed themselves to a sinking demographic. At 16 percent of voters currently, Millennials will grow to nearly 40 percent of the electorate by 2020 — and they couldn't care less about the "culture wars."

Young voters are twice as likely as older ones to support gay marriage. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, of all people, has the sensible political position here: Conservatives ought to give up on marriage amendments, letting the issue get sorted out on "a state-by-state basis."

Second, given the rising strength of younger voters, beating the war drum isn't the way forward for the GOP: "Millennials have generally been the age group most hostile to the war in Iraq," CAP reports, and they're less likely than their elders to embrace a militarized war on terror.

Republicans can compromise on these issues without violating any principle that's essential to conservatism. But Millennials' romantic view of federal activism presents a more serious challenge to small-government conservatives. Luckily, this may be a problem that will work itself out on its own.

David Brooks, every liberal's favorite conservative, argues that the old Reagan-Goldwater antigovernment spirit made sense once, but today it's an anachronism. When this generation was but a gleam in its parents' eyes, Brooks points out, tax rates were 70 percent, inflation was rampant, and "the capitalist world was headed to a Swedish welfare model."

Oddly enough, that sounds like the world young voters will be facing very soon, as the Baby Boomers retire, and our wealth-destroying Social Security system forces every two Millennials to carry one aging hippie on their backs.

The rising generation is about to get a hard lesson in the costs of activist government. Before long, they may start to see the wisdom in Reagan's aphorism that "government is not the solution to our problems: government is the problem."

Sanford isn't the first Republican leader to stumble in his private life.

He's not even the first one this month. A week earlier, it was Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) revealing his own affair. And these revelations hurt Republicans more than Democrats because of the perception that Republicans set themselves up as moral arbiters. So Democrats are, in the unusually honest words of talk show host Bill Press, "gleeful tonight because another Republican hypocrite bites the dust."

If the Republicans keep making morality a public issue, and then fail to live up to those standards themselves, they're in for a long period in the wilderness.

After the revelation of the affair, The Washington Post dubbed Sanford "a Bible-quoting social conservative." Nancy Pelosi's filmmaking daughter calls him "another family values hypocrite." But let's keep this hypocrisy charge in perspective. True, Mark Sanford quotes the Bible — along with Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, and Scottish historians. He's a quoter. He's anti-abortion and has opposed gay marriage and civil unions.

But until his downfall he was never regarded as a vocal social conservative. He was a tax-cutting, budget-cutting fiscal conservative who was the most vocal opponent of President Obama's massive spending increases. He'd even been accused of being a libertarian for his emphasis on economic issues and his opposition to the intrusive Real ID program.

As a small-government conservative who focused on cutting the size of government, he stood squarely in the tradition of Ronald Reagan. And maybe also the tradition of former Sen. Phil Gramm, who ran for president in 1996. When "family values" leaders challenged Gramm's emphasis on economic issues, he told them, "I ain't running for preacher."

Of course, Bill Clinton was elected and re-elected despite evidence of his imperfections as a husband — and a strong majority of voters did not think he should resign after his affair with a White House intern. But voters seem to judge Republicans, who tend to make private morality a political issue, differently.

So this looks like a huge setback for Sanford, for the small-government voters he might have led, and for the Republican Party, which is desperately in need of a leader who can restore the GOP's reputation for fiscal responsibility.

Maybe it's time to stop demanding perfection from politicians. The current combination of religious-right moralizing and the 24-hour news cycle means that elected officials are subjected to scrutiny that few of our past presidents could have survived.

In 1987, Judge Douglas Ginsburg was forced to withdraw his nomination for the Supreme Court because he was discovered to have smoked marijuana. But now our last three presidents have acknowledged youthful drug use.

In his book The Age of Abundance and in other writings, my colleague Brink Lindsey has argued that there is a "libertarian center" in American politics.

Over the past 40 years or so, we have eliminated many government restrictions on both personal and economic freedom. Abortion, birth control, interracial marriage, and homosexuality are legal. Divorce laws have been liberalized, and free speech is better protected. And at the same time top income tax rates have been reduced, and New Deal-era micromanagement in the transportation, energy, communications, and financial sectors has been rolled back.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, since the 2008 election the number of independents has been growing, and they tend to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. That's a constituency Republicans must appeal to.

Even among Republican voters, exit polls in 2004 found that 28 million Bush voters supported either marriage or civil unions for same-sex couples — suggesting that lots of Republicans don't fit the popular image of the socially conservative "Republican base."

Young voters are another constituency disgusted with the current Republican Party. Barack Obama carried young voters by more than two to one in the 2008 election. Voters 18 to 29 delivered Indiana and North Carolina to Obama. Republicans can't win the future without doing better among young voters, and their image as narrow-minded moralists is a big obstacle.

Voters overlooked Bill Clinton's private sins because they liked his approach to politics and policy. Are Republican voters ready to do the same? If they insist that their leaders be Puritans both publicly and privately, they're likely doomed to a long winter of disappointment.

As a result, her Commentary pages tended to be on the cutting edge of policy debates, which often resulted in constructive change. She truly was a great lady - principled, wise and always of good humor.

As is the case with many academic and professional economists, I occasionally wrote articles for papers such as The Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal, but never really considered doing it on a regular basis. About eight years ago, Mary Lou called me and said "Richard, you have a knack for making complex economic issues understandable and interesting, and I encourage you to write a regular column for us." Obviously, I was highly flattered and readily agreed to give it a try. And thus, after several other careers, I became a middle-aged protege of Mary Lou.

Mary Lou and I had dinner every couple of months where I was often treated to Virginia and Washington area history lessons. Over her long career as a reporter and commentator, she had known most of the key players who made what the modern Virginia is today. Her stock of knowledge on the evolution of Virginia from a largely segregated rural state to a very civil, prosperous, high-tech powerhouse was unrivaled. She had begun to work on a book about how the leaders of Virginia finally gathered the courage and wisdom to manage the desegregation of the state in a civil manner. We can only hope she had sufficient notes so that the project can be completed as one of the many lasting tributes to her.

My last dinner with Mary Lou was on June 10. As I took her home, she said: "Richard, thank you for taking an old lady to dinner, because it is always fun for me." And yet I was thinking I was the lucky one to have been in the company of a most remarkable entertaining and interesting lady.

Deeply concerned at how little knowledge Americans have of how this republic works, Justice Souter cited as an example that the majorities of the public can't name — according to surveys — the three branches of government.

Who we are, Souter continued, "can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood." What is needed, he said, "is the restoration of the self-identity of the American people. ... When I was a kid in the eighth and ninth grades, everybody took civics. That's no longer true. (Former Justice) Sandra Day O'Connor says 50 percent of schools teach neither history nor civics." Justice Souter continued that when he was in school, "civics was as dull as dishwater, but we knew the structure of government."

This alert to the citizenry was almost entirely ignored by the press.

Admirably, O'Connor is trying to engage students in learning who they are as Americans through her Web site: Our Courts - 21st Century Civics (www.ourcourts.org). The site asks students what part of government they would most want to be a part of. And she invites teachers to click and "find lesson plans that fit your classroom needs."

Two years ago, David Boaz of the Cato Institute (where I am a senior fellow) quoted from a Washington Post article by Naomi Wolf: "Teenagers and young adults ... have little idea what liberty is. Few (young Americans) realize that 'due process' means that they can't be locked up in a dungeon by the state and left to languish indefinitely."

And the 2008 annual "State of the First Amendment" survey by the First Amendment Center (www.firstamendmentcenter.org) reported that 66 percent of Americans at least mildly agreed that the government should require TV broadcasters to offer an equal allotment of time to conservative and liberal broadcasters, and that 62 percent of Americans would apply the same requirement to newspapers.

In this republic, the government must regulate the fairness and balance of what we free citizens see and read? Not even King George III insisted that Tom Paine, Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson must be fair and balanced.

It was Jefferson — as you can see near the main entrance of the Library of Congress' James Madison Memorial Building — who told future generations of Americans how to never forget who they are:

"What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?"

Jefferson also counseled: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. ... Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against the evils (of misgovernment)."

How deep our ignorance of who are has grown since Alexis De Tocqueville wrote in 1831 (Democracy in America): "In New England, every citizen receives the elementary notions of human knowledge; he is moreover taught the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its Constitution.

"In the States of Connecticut and Massachusetts, it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon."

Am I exaggerating in speculating that now in our schools, homes and streets, there are many such phenomena largely ignorant of why they are Americans. Also, I would add the many in our state legislatures and in Congress.

And Obama, asking us to be "anchored in our timeless ideals," says nothing about his National Security Agency's accelerating attacks on our individual privacy as its enormous supercomputer (code name: "Black Widow") devours the Fourth Amendment in our Bill of Rights. The Baltimore Sun's national security correspondent, David Wood (Oct. 26, 2008), reports:

"(The Black Widow) scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour" as it extracts "key words and patterns" of our communications to harvest and database possible threats to national security.

There's no way to get your name removed from that bottomless hole of suspects because you can't find out whether it's there. Imagine Jefferson's reaction if he'd been able to foresee the Government Black Widow at large in this republic.

The National Center for Constitutional Studies' book, The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World, tells of a popular textbook for children, a Catechism of the Constitution — with questions and answers on the foundations of who we are as citizens. It was published in 1828! Any such children's books now?

In the continuing debate on amending No Child Left Behind — and other federal surges in educational reform — I have seen hardly any mention of the imperative need of what Justice David Souter calls for: "the restoration of the self-identity of the American people."

On the eve of the American Revolution, James Madison spoke of a "spirit of liberty and patriotism animating all degrees and denominations of men." What happened to it?

The sentiment is nothing new. Political progressives such as Krugman have been decrying increases in income inequality for many years now. But Krugman has added a novel twist, one that has important implications for public policy and economic discourse in the age of Obama. In seeking explanations for the widening spread of incomes during the last four decades, researchers have focused overwhelmingly on broad structural changes in the economy, such as technological progress and demographic shifts. Krugman argues that these explanations are insufficient. "Since the 1970s," he writes, "norms and institutions in the United States have changed in ways that either encouraged or permitted sharply higher inequality. Where, however, did the change in norms and institutions come from? The answer appears to be politics."

To understand Krugman's argument, we can't start in the 1970s. We have to back up to the 1930s and '40s—when, he contends, the "norms and institutions" that shaped a more egalitarian society were created. "The middle-class America of my youth," Krugman writes, "is best thought of not as the normal state of our society, but as an interregnum between Gilded Ages. America before 1930 was a society in which a small number of very rich people controlled a large share of the nation's wealth." But then came the twin convulsions of the Great Depression and World War II, and the country that arose out of those trials was a very different place. "Middle-class America didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation."

The Great Compression is a term coined by the economists Claudia Goldin of Harvard and Robert Margo of Boston University to describe the dramatic narrowing of the nation's wage structure during the 1940s. The real wages of manufacturing workers jumped 67 percent between 1929 and 1947, while the top 1 percent of earners saw a 17 percent drop in real income. These egalitarian trends can be attributed to the exceptional circumstances of the period: precipitous declines at the top end of the income spectrum due to economic cataclysm; wartime wage controls that tended to compress wage rates; rapid growth in the demand for low-skilled labor, combined with the labor shortages of the war years; and rapid growth in the relative supply of skilled workers due to a near doubling of high school graduation rates.

Yet the return to peacetime and prosperity did not result in a shift back toward the status quo ante. The more egalitarian income structure persisted for decades. For an explanation, Krugman leans heavily on a 2007 paper by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin, who argue that postwar American history has been a tale of two widely divergent systems of political economy. First came the "Treaty of Detroit," characterized by heavy unionization of industry, steeply progressive taxation, and a high minimum wage. Under that system, median wages kept pace with the economy's overall productivity growth, and incomes at the lower end of the scale grew faster than those at the top. Beginning around 1980, though, the Treaty of Detroit gave way to the free market "Washington Consensus." Tax rates on high earners fell sharply, the real value of the minimum wage declined, and private-sector unionism collapsed. As a result, most workers' incomes failed to share in overall productivity gains while the highest earners had a field day.

This revisionist account of the fall and rise of income inequality is being echoed daily in today's public policy debates. Under the conventional view, rising inequality is a side effect of economic progress—namely, continuing technological breakthroughs, especially in communications and information technology. Consequently, when economists have supported measures to remedy inequality, they have typically shied away from structural changes in market institutions. Rather, they have endorsed more income redistribution to reduce post-tax income differences, along with remedial education, job retraining, and other programs designed to raise the skill levels of lower-paid workers.

By contrast, Krugman sees the rise of inequality as a consequence of economic regress—in particular, the abandonment of well-designed economic institutions and healthy social norms that promoted widely shared prosperity. Such an assessment leads to the conclusion that we ought to revive the institutions and norms of Paul Krugman's boyhood, in broad spirit if not in every detail.

There is good evidence that changes in economic policies and social norms have indeed contributed to a widening of the income distribution since the 1970s. But Krugman and other practitioners of nostalgianomics are presenting a highly selective account of what the relevant policies and norms were and how they changed.

The Treaty of Detroit was built on extensive cartelization of markets, limiting competition to favor producers over consumers. The restrictions on competition were buttressed by racial prejudice, sexual discrimination, and postwar conformism, which combined to limit the choices available to workers and potential workers alike. Those illiberal social norms were finally swept aside in the cultural tumults of the 1960s and '70s. And then, in the 1970s and '80s, restraints on competition were substantially reduced as well, to the applause of economists across the ideological spectrum. At least until now.

Stifled Competition

The economic system that emerged from the New Deal and World War II was markedly different from the one that exists today. The contrast between past and present is sharpest when we focus on one critical dimension: the degree to which public policy either encourages or thwarts competition.

The transportation, energy, and communications sectors were subject to pervasive price and entry regulation in the postwar era. Railroad rates and service had been under federal control since the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, but the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 extended the Interstate Commerce Commission's regulatory authority to cover trucking and bus lines as well. In 1938 airline routes and fares fell under the control of the Civil Aeronautics Authority, later known as the Civil Aeronautics Board. After the discovery of the East Texas oil field in 1930, the Texas Railroad Commission acquired the effective authority to regulate the nation's oil production. Starting in 1938, the Federal Power Commission regulated rates for the interstate transmission of natural gas. The Federal Communications Commission, created in 1934, allocated licenses to broadcasters and regulated phone rates.

Beginning with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, prices and production levels on a wide variety of farm products were regulated by a byzantine complex of controls and subsidies. High import tariffs shielded manufacturers from international competition. And in the retail sector, aggressive discounting was countered by state-level "fair trade laws," which allowed manufacturers to impose minimum resale prices on nonconsenting distributors.

Comprehensive regulation of the financial sector restricted competition in capital markets too. The McFadden Act of 1927 added a federal ban on interstate branch banking to widespread state-level restrictions on intrastate branching. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 erected a wall between commercial and investment banking, effectively brokering a market-sharing agreement protecting commercial and investment banks from each other. Regulation Q, instituted in 1933, prohibited interest payments on demand deposits and set interest rate ceilings for time deposits. Provisions of the Securities Act of 1933 limited competition in underwriting by outlawing pre-offering solicitations and undisclosed discounts. These and other restrictions artificially stunted the depth and development of capital markets, muting the intensity of competition throughout the larger "real" economy. New entrants are much more dependent on a well-developed financial system than are established firms, since incumbents can self-finance through retained earnings or use existing assets as collateral. A hobbled financial sector acts as a barrier to entry and thereby reduces established firms' vulnerability to competition from entrepreneurial upstarts.

The highly progressive tax structure of the early postwar decades further dampened competition. The top marginal income tax rate shot up from 25 percent to 63 percent under Herbert Hoover in 1932, climbed as high as 94 percent during World War II, and stayed at 91 percent during most of the 1950s and early '60s. Research by the economists William Gentry of Williams College and Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University has found that such rates act as a "success tax," discouraging employees from striking out as entrepreneurs.

Finally, competition in labor markets was subject to important restraints during the early postwar decades. The triumph of collective bargaining meant the active suppression of wage competition in a variety of industries. In the interest of boosting wages, unions sometimes worked to restrict competition in their industries' product markets as well. Garment unions connived with trade associations to set prices and allocate production among clothing makers. Coal miner unions attempted to regulate production by dictating how many days a week mines could be open.

MIT economists Levy and Temin don't mention it, but highly restrictive immigration policies were another significant brake on labor market competition. With the establishment of countryspecific immigration quotas under the Immigration Act of 1924, foreign-born residents of the United States plummeted from 13 percent of the total population in 1920 to 5 percent by 1970. As a result, competition at the less-skilled end of the U.S. labor market was substantially reduced.

Solidarity and Chauvinism

The anti-competitive effects of the Treaty of Detroit were reinforced by the prevailing social norms of the early postwar decades. Here Krugman and company focus on executive pay. Krugman quotes wistfully from John Kenneth Galbraith's characterization of the corporate elite in his 1967 book The New Industrial State: "Management does not go out ruthlessly to reward itself—a sound management is expected to exercise restraint." According to Krugman, "For a generation after World War II, fear of outrage kept executive salaries in check. Now the outrage is gone. That is, the explosion in executive pay represents a social change…like the sexual revolution of the 1960's—a relaxation of old strictures, a new permissiveness, but in this case the permissiveness is financial rather than sexual."

Krugman is on to something. But changing attitudes about lavish compensation packages are just one small part of a much bigger cultural transformation. During the early postwar decades, the combination of in-group solidarity and out-group hostility was much more pronounced than what we're comfortable with today.

Consider, first of all, the dramatic shift in attitudes about race. Open and unapologetic discrimination by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against other ethnic groups was widespread and socially acceptable in the America of Paul Krugman's boyhood. How does racial progress affect income inequality? Not the way we might expect. The most relevant impact might have been that more enlightened attitudes about race encouraged a reversal in the nation's restrictive immigration policies. The effect was to increase the number of less-skilled workers and thereby intensify competition among them for employment.

Under the system that existed between 1924 and 1965, immigration quotas were set for each country based on the percentage of people with that national origin already living in the U.S. (with immigration from East and South Asia banned outright until 1952). The explicit purpose of the national-origin quotas was to freeze the ethnic composition of the United States—that is, to preserve white Protestant supremacy and protect the country from "undesirable" races. "Unquestionably, there are fine human beings in all parts of the world," Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) said in defense of the quota system in 1965, "but people do differ widely in their social habits, their levels of ambition, their mechanical aptitudes, their inherited ability and intelligence, their moral traditions, and their capacity for maintaining stable governments."

But the times had passed the former Klansman by. With the triumph of the civil rights movement, official discrimination based on national origin was no longer sustainable. Just two months after signing the Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, ending the "un-American" system of national-origin quotas and its "twin barriers of prejudice and privilege." The act inaugurated a new era of mass immigration: Foreign-born residents of the United States have surged from 5 percent of the population in 1970 to 12.5 percent as of 2006.

This wave of immigration exerted a mild downward pressure on the wages of native-born low-skilled workers, with most estimates showing a small effect. Immigration's more dramatic impact on measurements of inequality has come by increasing the number of less-skilled workers, thereby increasing apparent inequality by depressing average wages at the low end of the income distribution. According to the American University economist Robert Lerman, excluding recent immigrants from the analysis would eliminate roughly 30 percent of the increase in adult male annual earnings inequality between 1979 and 1996.

Although the large influx of unskilled immigrants has made American inequality statistics look worse, it has actually reduced inequality for the people involved. After all, immigrants experience large wage gains as a result of relocating to the United States, thereby reducing the cumulative wage gap between them and top earners in this country. When Lerman recalculated trends in inequality to include, at the beginning of the period, recent immigrants and their native-country wages, he found equality had increased rather than decreased. Immigration has increased inequality at home but decreased it on a global scale.

Just as racism helped to keep foreign-born workers out of the U.S. labor market, another form of in-group solidarity, sexism, kept women out of the paid work force. As of 1950, the labor force participation rate for women 16 and older stood at only 34 percent. By 1970 it had climbed to 43 percent, and as of 2005 it had jumped to 59 percent. Meanwhile, the range of jobs open to women expanded enormously.

Paradoxically, these gains for gender equality widened rather than narrowed income inequality overall. Because of the prevalence of "assortative mating"—the tendency of people to choose spouses with similar educational and socioeconomic backgrounds—the rise in dual-income couples has exacerbated household income inequality: Now richer men are married to richer wives. Between 1979 and 1996, the proportion of working-age men with working wives rose by approximately 25 percent among those in the top fifth of the male earnings distribution, and their wives' total earnings rose by over 100 percent. According to a 1999 estimate by Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution, this unanticipated consequence of feminism explains about 13 percent of the total rise in income inequality since 1979.

Racism and sexism are ancient forms of group identity. Another form, more in line with what Krugman has in mind, was a distinctive expression of U.S. economic and social development in the middle decades of the 20th century. The journalist William Whyte described this "social ethic" in his 1956 book The Organization Man, outlining a sensibility that defined itself in studied contrast to old-style "rugged individualism." When contemporary critics scorned the era for its conformism, they weren't just talking about the ranch houses and gray flannel suits. The era's mores placed an extraordinary emphasis on fitting into the group.

"In the Social Ethic I am describing," wrote Whyte, "man's obligation is…not so much to the community in a broad sense but to the actual, physical one about him, and the idea that in isolation from it—or active rebellion against it—he might eventually discharge the greater service is little considered." One corporate trainee told Whyte that he "would sacrifice brilliance for human understanding every time." A personnel director declared that "any progressive employer would look askance at the individualist and would be reluctant to instill such thinking in the minds of trainees." Whyte summed up the prevailing attitude: "All the great ideas, [trainees] explain, have already been discovered and not only in physics and chemistry but in practical fields like engineering. The basic creative work is done, so the man you need—for every kind of job—is a practical, team-player fellow who will do a good shirt-sleeves job."

It seems entirely reasonable to conclude that this social ethic helped to limit competition among business enterprises for top talent. When secure membership in a stable organization is more important than maximizing your individual potential, the most talented employees are less vulnerable to the temptation of a better offer elsewhere. Even if they are tempted, a strong sense of organizational loyalty makes them more likely to resist and stay put.

Increased Competition, Increased Inequality Krugman blames the conservative movement for income inequality, arguing that right-wingers exploited white backlash in the wake of the civil rights movement to hijack first the Republican Party and then the country as a whole. Once in power, they duped the public with "weapons of mass distraction" (i.e., social issues and foreign policy) while "cut[ting] taxes on the rich," "try[ing] to shrink government benefits and undermine the welfare state," and "empower[ing] businesses to confront and, to a large extent,crush the union movement."

Obviously, conservatism has contributed in important ways to the political shifts of recent decades. But the real story of those changes is more complicated, and more interesting, than Krugman lets on. Influences across the political spectrum have helped shape the more competitive more individualistic, and less equal society we now live in.

Indeed, the relevant changes in social norms were led by movements associated with the left. The women's movement led the assault on sex discrimination. The civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and '60s inspired more enlightened attitudes about race and ethnicity, with results such as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a law spearheaded by a young Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). And then there was the counterculture of the 1960s, whose influence spread throughout American society in the Me Decade that followed. It upended the social ethic of group-minded solidarity and conformity with a stampede of unbridled individualism and self-assertion. With the general relaxation of inhibitions, talented and ambitious people felt less restrained from seeking top dollar in the marketplace. Yippies and yuppies were two sides of the same coin.

Contrary to Krugman's narrative, liberals joined conservatives in pushing for dramatic changes in economic policy. In addition to his role in liberalizing immigration, Kennedy was a leader in pushing through both the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 and the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which deregulated the trucking industry—and he was warmly supported in both efforts by the left-wing activist Ralph Nader. President Jimmy Carter signed these two pieces of legislation, as well as the Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978, which began the elimination of price controls on natural gas, and the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, which deregulated the railroad industry.

The three most recent rounds of multilateral trade talks were all concluded by Democratic presidents: the Kennedy Round in 1967 by Lyndon Johnson, the Tokyo Round in 1979 by Jimmy Carter, and the Uruguay Round in 1994 by Bill Clinton. And though it was Ronald Reagan who slashed the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent in 1981, it was two Democrats, Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, who sponsored the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which pushed the top rate all the way down to 28 percent.

What about the unions? According to the Berkeley economist David Card, the shrinking of the unionized labor force accounted for 15 percent to 20 percent of the rise in overall male wage inequality between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. Krugman is right that labor's decline stems in part from policy changes, but his ideological blinkers lead him to identify the wrong ones.

The only significant change to the pro-union Wagner Act of 1935 came through the Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed closed shops (contracts requiring employers to hire only union members) and authorized state right-to-work laws (which ban contracts requiring employees to join unions). But that piece of legislation was enacted in 1947—three years before the original Treaty of Detroit between General Motors and the United Auto Workers. It would be a stretch to argue that the Golden Age ended before it even began.

Scrounging for a policy explanation, economists Levy and Temin point to the failure of a 1978 labor law reform bill to survive a Senate filibuster. But maintaining the status quo is not a policy change. They also describe President Reagan's 1981 decision to fire striking air traffic controllers as a signal to employers that the government no longer supported labor unions.

While it is true that Reagan's handling of that strike, along with his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, made the policy environment for unions less favorable, the effect of those moves on unionization was marginal.

The major reason for the fall in unionized employment, according to a 2007 paper by Georgia State University economist Barry Hirsch, "is that union strength developed through the 1950s was gradually eroded by increasingly competitive and dynamic markets." He elaborates: "When much of an industry is unionized, firms may prosper with higher union costs as long as their competitors face similar costs. When union companies face low-cost competitors, labor cost increases cannot be passed through to consumers. Factors that increase the competitiveness of product markets increased international trade, product market deregulation, and the entry of low-cost competitors—make it more difficult for union companies to prosper."

So the decline of private-sector unionism was abetted by policy changes, but the changes were not in labor policy specifically. They were the general, bipartisan reduction of trade barriers and price and entry controls. Unionized firms found themselves at a critical disadvantage. They shrank accordingly, and union rolls shrank with them.

Postmodern Progress

The move toward a more individualistic culture is not unique to the United States. As the political scientist Ronald Inglehart has documented in dozens of countries around the world, the shift toward what he calls "postmodern" attitudes and values is a predictable cultural response to rising affluence and expanding choices. "In a major part of the world," he writes in his 1997 book Modernization and Postmodernization, "the disciplined, self-denying, and achievement-oriented norms of industrial society are giving way to an increasingly broad latitude for individual choice of lifestyles and individual self-expression."

The increasing focus on individual fulfillment means, inevitably, less deference to tradition and organizations. "A major component of the Postmodern shift," Inglehart argues, "is a shift away from both religious and bureaucratic authority, bringing declining emphasis on all kinds of authority. For deference to authority has high costs: the individual's personal goals must be subordinated to those of a broader entity."

Paul Krugman may long for the return of selfdenying corporate workers who declined to seek better opportunities out of organizational loyalty, and thus kept wages artificially suppressed, but these are creatures of a bygone ethos—an ethos that also included uncritical acceptance of racist and sexist traditions and often brutish intolerance of deviations from mainstream lifestyles and sensibilities.

The rise in income inequality does raise issues of legitimate public concern. And reasonable people disagree hotly about what ought to be done to ensure that our prosperity is widely shared. But the caricature of postwar history put forward by Krugman and other purveyors of nostalgianomics won't lead us anywhere. Reactionary fantasies never do.

"Your rights as an American are individual rights," Beck reminds us. "I feel like I need to keep saying that word so it stays in the front of your and everybody's mind—individual, individual, individual!" To add heft to his indignant free-associative musings, Beck turns regularly to semi-pro philosophers such as Ayn Rand Institute president Yaron Brook to decry the "ideology of altruism and collectivism" before his considerable television audience.

"The problem is, this individualist description of human nature seems to be wrong," David Brooks contended in a column from last fall that was aimed directly at the heart of the Goldwaterite right. "Over the past 30 years, there has been a tide of research in many fields, all underlining one old truth—that we are intensely social creatures, deeply interconnected with one another and the idea of the lone individual rationally and willfully steering his own life course is often an illusion." Brooks has even gone so far as to suggest that Western civilization may founder on the individualist "illusion" and that science confirms that "the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts." The GOP is at risk, Brooks says, because its emphasis on individual freedom "is the main impediment to Republican modernization."

Brooks is right that we humans are, as the biologists say, "hypersocial" animals. And it is true that many proponents of tough-minded individualism fail to grasp the profound importance of human sociality while falling for romantic myths of isolated genius. But Brooks goes wrong when he leaps from the biological facts of life to the "illusion" of individual agency and the desirability of a more communitarian culture. Beck and his friends from the Ayn Rand Institute do not defy science when they contend that real freedom is individual freedom. They do not flout Darwin when they argue that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are best ensured by an ethos of individualism and a government limited by its deference to individual rights.

Humans are unique among animals in our capacity to transmit cultural beliefs and customs from one generation to the next. The human mind is not a blank slate but a "fill-in-the-blanks slate," outlined by nature and filled in by socialization. Yet the fact that we are thoroughly social creatures built to learn and inhabit culture does not tell us what the content of our culture should be. Our hands did not evolve to play the piano and our cultural capacity did not evolve to transmit ideals of individual liberty, but it is plainly fallacious to conclude that something is therefore "wrong" with Mozart or Madison.

Our cultural capacity is precisely what allows us to transform and transcend our mammalian limits. So, yes, an individualist ethos is unnatural. But so are other travesties of nature—such as equality under the law, monotheism, vaccination, and the wheel. Like these, the American tradition of individualism is a civilizing manifestation of human sociality, not a denial of it.

And individualism works. As Brooks himself notes, individualistic societies tend to be wealthier than collectivist ones. And studies show that individualistic societies, which emphasize choice and personal fulfillment, tend to produce happier people than do collectivist societies, which are anchored by conformity, honor, and inherited obligations. By almost any measure individualism is a success.

So does Glenn Beck win this round by a knockout? That would be funny—but also a misreading of the right's populist persuaders.

Why? Because the "individualism" of latter-day disciples of Goldwater and Reagan has a strange way of disappearing as soon as they stop arguing about marginal tax rates. Glenn Beck is no different. Scratch him and you'll find a vehement nationalist whose fiery cable gospel breathes populist life into David Brooks' abstract collectivist theology.

Beck's "9/12 Project," meant to revive the fleeting American spirit of grieving, truculent solidarity that followed the 9/11 attacks, lays out nine principles and 11 values of "the greatest nation ever created." The first principle is "America is Good." What is that if not a recklessly unconditional commitment to the national collective? With his fourth principle—"The family is sacred"—Beck simply ignores the fact that no force in human history has been more corrosive to family cohesion than the individualist ideal of self-realization that he champions.

Similarly, when it comes to the "War on Terror," Beck's embrace of the rights of individuals against the state just peters out. Beck's nonchalance about warrantless wiretaps and water-boarding betrays a peculiar notion of individual liberty. And if you're an individual from another country exercising your individual right to associate freely with a willing American employer, God forbid the state should belatedly recognize your individual right by granting you "amnesty"! For too many conservatives, "individual rights" is code for their right to remain unburdened by whatever exercises of state power they happen to dislike.

So while Brooks and Beck may come out swinging from their respective corners, their "fight" ends in a loving embrace. Here is the conservative dilemma writ small. Egghead conservatives like Brooks offer a coherent communitarian philosophy of government, but would suppress (in the name of science!) the cultural innovations that have helped produce the creativity and wealth of the West. Meanwhile, talkers like Beck offer a politics of strong American families and an even stronger American security state no less collectivist then Brooks'. The language of limited government and individual liberty is mandatory in the theater of populist American nationalism, but the populist Republicans' zany pastiche of jingoist tropes merely pretends to value those ideals. In reality, it offers no real alternative to the sober collectivist vision that explicitly marginalizes them.

As the flags wave and the eagles soar, the American right's commitment to individual liberty continues to crumble. Conservatism must stand for something. But here's the big question: Can a politics of individual freedom be revived? Can it win elections? David Brooks—who knows all about "science" and the success of the hive-minded Chinese—says it can't. Beck's populist Republicans fume that Brooks is wrong, wrong, wrong. But why, then, does the substance of their politics have so much in common with his?

William Safire's Political Dictionary tells us that it originally marked the period between the little dictator's escape from Elba and rampage across Europe before his final defeat at Waterloo.

So perhaps the question to ask about presidents' first 100 days is, how much damage has our new Emperor done? In Obama's case, the answer is, a lot. He's made a running start toward transforming the federal government's role in the economy and — if such a thing is even possible — further expanding the president's role in American life.

On the bright side, though, at least this president has a sense of humor. How else can we interpret his offer to cut $100 million from a $3.9 trillion federal budget? Economist Greg Mankiw puts those numbers in perspective:

"Imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall." The new austerity plan? One fewer latte at Starbucks this year — the rest goes on the credit card.

Thus far, Obama has signed into law a major expansion of children's health insurance and a $787 billion "stimulus" package that ramps up federal involvement in health care and education — spending that's unlikely to shrink when the economy rights itself.

The projected $1.8 trillion deficit for the current fiscal year equals the entire federal budget in 2000. But have no fear, taxpayers: Obama's going to ease your burden by forcing the Department of Homeland Security to buy its supplies in bulk and cancel some magazine subscriptions.

This is a president with grand plans and vast powers. He promises a "cure for cancer in our time" and views his budget as a "blueprint" for the entire American economy. This is a president who can fire the CEO of GM without so much as a courtesy call to major shareholders — a president who wants new powers allowing him to preemptively seize financial institutions deemed "too big to fail."

But this president sweats the small stuff as well. Not a sparrow falls without our National Father noticing — and offering a seven-point plan for sparrow recovery. Last week, Obama assured Americans that the days of hidden credit card fees are over.

That followed upon his April 9 infomercial-style TV appearance urging you to take advantage of low interest rates and refinance your mortgage! This is a president who stands behind the warranty on your Chevy Suburban. You're not gonna pay a lot for this muffler! POTUS commands it.

A raccoon-eyed Dick Cheney, newly emerged from his underground bunker, growls that Obama is shrinking presidential power in national security. It's hard to see how that's so. Hype and Hope aside, Obama's anti-terror policies don't differ that much from the Bush-Cheney approach.

Obama's Justice Department has fought to retain most of the Bush-era powers governing enemy combatants and surveillance. They've embraced the Bush-Cheney position that the State Secrets Privilege bars the courthouse door to litigants who claim they've been harmed by warrantless wiretapping.

Worse, according to constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald, the Obama DOJ has gone even further than the Bush team, arguing that "all claims of illegal government surveillance are immunized in the absence of 'willful disclosure' to the public of the intercepted communications."

Conservatives who recently screamed bloody murder over a DHS report targeting "right-wing extremists" (including pro-lifers and gun enthusiasts) ought to ask themselves if it was such a good idea to have fought relentlessly to expand federal wiretapping powers over the last eight years.

So far, Americans seem broadly tolerant of Obama's power grab. In a recent Gallup poll, 86 percent think he's met or exceeded early expectations. But danger lurks for Obama in some of Gallup's numbers. More Americans reject an expanded role for government in fighting the financial crisis than support it, and only 13 percent want the expansion to be permanent.

Despite current appearances, Americans retain a healthy streak of anti-statism. Obama's overreaching may eventually lead to his Waterloo.

Like many federal assaults on the taxpayer, the SAA is a bipartisan offense: It passed by huge margins in both houses. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, the primary sponsor, got a standing ovation after the vote was in, and co-sponsor Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, gushed that "the whole Kennedy family has been a service family."

Hatch's statement neatly captures the fallacy behind the act - the notion that service to America is principally service to the American state.

The SAA is more carrot than stick, subsidizing volunteerism rather than mandating it. But the Obama administration prefers a more coercive approach if and when they can get away with it. Obama's campaign-trail plan would have forced schools to require 50 hours of community service a year, making charity as popular among teens as study hall and mandatory pep rallies.

In 2006, then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel, now Obama's chief of staff, coauthored The Plan: Big Ideas for America with New Democrat guru Bruce Reed. Among their big ideas was "universal civilian service for every young American."

"It's time for a real Patriot Act that brings out the patriot in all of us. This is not a draft," Rahm and Reed insisted. Instead, "young people will know that between the ages of 18 and 25, the nation will enlist them for three months of civilian service." See the difference?

Political elites have long believed that Americans should be forced to perform good works. We need "the moral equivalent of war," progressive philosopher William James said in 1906, a community service program that would conscript young Americans to "get the childishness knocked out of them."

Some on the Right share James's vision. Shortly after 9/11, Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, lamented that a draft would be a hard-sell politically, but subsidized national service could help address "a spiritual crisis in our national culture."

Americorps programs that had kids "living together in barracks" and performing daily calisthenics in front of city halls, should be the model for "a service program consciously structured along military lines," McCain said.

Obama's vision is less paramilitary than McCain's. But like McCain, Obama believes that politicized public service is the best way to serve one's fellow man. Obama's website brags that he "passed up lucrative law firm jobs" to work as a community organizer. (As a recovering lawyer still traumatized by the billable-hour drudgery of my past, I can assure him he didn't miss much.)

Of course, people should help their neighbors out. But why does that effort require federal subsidies?

When the government gets into the business of funding community service, the results are, unsurprisingly, politicized and wasteful. Americorps, the pride of the Clinton legacy, has, among other things, sponsored a toy-gun "buyback" program that gave kids $5 for each plastic pistol they turned in.

The price-tag for SAA - about $6 billion over five years - is hardly staggering in an era of trillion-dollar deficits. But if we're going to add to that crushing pile of debt, we ought to have a good reason. Do we?

In 1831, Alexis De Tocqueville marveled at the number of charitable associations he saw while touring America. "Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France… in the United States you will be sure to find an association." Yet today, the American intelligentsia seems to believe that unless a barn-raising gets a federal subsidy, it hasn't really happened at all.

"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," JFK declared in his inaugural address. Milton Friedman, who helped end the draft and did more for his country than most of our "public servants," pointed out how wrongheaded that perspective was: "The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country."

Americans have always been a charitable people. But when they help their neighbors voluntarily, without federal oversight or funding, it's hard for politicians to take credit for their service. Perhaps that's the real point of the Serve America Act.

Government helps make markets work, and work better. Effective mundane markets exist within the institutions of property, contract, and law — institutions well-ordered governments support. Prudent regulation helps contain the harmful spillovers of productive activity. But there is little danger the waffle market will go haywire in the absence of intense scrutiny by government authorities. The lightly regulated markets of mundane capitalism deserve our continued trust because their quiet efficiency so rarely betrays it.

Political markets — less enabled by government than made by it — operate according to fundamentally different, and less trustworthy, principles. Propped-up by subsidy, structured by central diktat and created ex nihilo by edict, political markets may arise from noble aspirations but in the end are instruments always of the privileged and powerful.

Take contemporary financial markets. (Please!) These are not so much regulated by government oversight as they are constituted by the convoluted web of regulation that dictates who may sell what to whom and on what terms. The shape of our financial markets has emerged from the gradual accretion and rare subtraction of political intervention. But it is now brutally clear that financial markets are not stable simply because they are framed by law and watched by bureaucrats. It is not so hard to see why.

In political markets, the battle for competitive advantage is in part a battle over the rules of the game. That, in turn, is a battle for the hearts of minds of regulators, who generally know less, and are far less motivated, than the industry insiders they regulate. It is no surprise when regulators come to confuse the interests of the powerful (for whom they might someday wish to work, after all) with the interests of the public. As we have recently witnessed, the heavily regulated nature of our financial markets did not keep them from going haywire and taking the entire economy down with them. Appointing a better breed of bureaucrat fixes nothing. Even now, in the morning of the Obama era, Washington remains convinced that the country is best served by "rescuing" its self-immolating Wall Street wards.

It is the failure of this capitalism that accounts for the suffering of millions and explains our bitter decline. Yet President Obama asks for more. The controversial cap and trade scheme for limiting CO2 emissions is perhaps the most striking example. A cap and trade system would introduce a new market fabricated by government to regulate the entire economy of mundane markets. Cap and trade is based on the political invention of scarcity. But the problem of determining the ideal supply of emission permits is much like the Federal Reserve's problem of determining the ideal quantity of government money. In both cases, bureaucrats must appeal to dubious mathematical models and pronounce on questions that remain the subject of raging scientific controversy. When the Fed produced the wrong answers, it helped inflate the housing bubble, which led to the ruin of our economy. Do we trust the government climate bureaucrats to do better?

Each element of a political market invites political wrangling. Obama's budget assumes the government will rake in over $600 billion from auctioning the initial round of emissions permits. But carbon-heavy businesses, already suffering from the recession, are lobbying hard to be given permits for free. Industries that fear they will be hurt by the increased cost of emissions will push for an oversupply of permits, to keep permit prices low. Companies that reckon a high emissions cost will give them an advantage over their competitors will favor a low cap that keeps permit prices high. But the higher the price, the more those harmed by them will clamor for exemptions and rebates, and many will get them. The reality of cap and trade will be a typical political market: an expensive ramshackle compromise of competing forces.

But this can look pretty good if you think your team can win the political game. Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, is certainly excited about the opportunities Obama's innovations in political capitalism offer his well-positioned corporate behemoth, which wields considerable influence in Washington. "The interaction between government and business will change forever," Immelt recently wrote in a letter to shareholders. "In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner." And GE, Immelt is sure, will profit nicely.

That's political capitalism, that's corporatism, in a nutshell. And that's the kind of disreputable market system that got us into this mess.

There, Obama echoed his 2008 opponent, John McCain, who has repeatedly warned that there's a specter haunting our country, in the form of a "pervasive public cynicism" toward government.

"Cynicism" is a scare word, meant to discredit those who cast a skeptical eye on politicians' grand designs. But Obama and McCain are right that distrust of government is on the rise.

For five decades, researchers at the University of Michigan have asked Americans "How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?"

In the early 1960s, three-quarters of respondents answered "just about always" or "most of the time." After Vietnam and Watergate, Americans weren't quite so gullible, and the trust numbers never again reached their Kennedy/Johnson-era peak.

This month, Michigan's National Election Studies group released new survey data that reveals another decline: Only some 30 percent of Americans trust the feds most of the time or always, which is down sharply from trust's post-9/11 high.

When political trust declines, the D.C. cognoscenti typically wring their hands and hold earnest conferences at the Brookings Institution, exploring how best to restore the people's faith in their rulers.

But, as usual, the political elites have it precisely backwards. Declining trust in government is a good thing, something that Americans of every political stripe ought to celebrate.

Conservatives should welcome increasing skepticism toward federal power, because that skepticism makes ambitious federal programs much less likely to pass. Vanderbilt University's Marc Hetherington, one of America's leading scholars on the subject, writes that declining faith in the feds makes "another Great Society or New Frontier... unlikely in a post-Cold War world."

Professor Hetherington leans left, so he's not happy that the data has driven him to that conclusion. But even though increased political distrust presents major challenges for the Democratic agenda, liberals should recognize that there's a silver lining in the growing cloud of skepticism.

When Americans trust their government too readily, they tend to support policies that most liberals oppose. The post-9/11 period led to the greatest rise in political trust since Watergate, which helped George W. Bush make the case for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq.

Professor Hetherington's research shows that declining trust decreases support for foreign-policy adventurism, and other scholars have shown that it also makes the public less likely to endorse restrictions on civil liberties.

In the '50s and '60s, high levels of political trust served as a presidential enabler, allowing unrestrained spying at home and unnecessary wars abroad. In 1971, just as Americans were beginning to wake up to the dangers of excessive trust in the federal government, the Watergate tapes captured an interesting exchange between Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman.

The two were debating what to do about the impending release of the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War that documented a host of government lies. Haldeman warned Nixon that the release would undermine the public's belief in "the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America," and reveal that "people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong."

No American today could pronounce that phrase, "the implicit infallibility of presidents," without a smirk, and we should be very glad about that. Our Founding Fathers knew that no man was infallible.

With that insight in mind, they designed a constitution that would prevent any one man, or body of men, from seizing unchecked power. Today's politicians and pundits may lament rising political distrust, but when the voters refuse to take claims of federal benevolence on faith, they're honoring their forefathers and fulfilling their duty as citizens.

What, after all, could be more American than distrust of government?