From The Daily Beast Nick Gillespie writes Relax—Both Parties Are Going Extinct

excerpts:

What’s going on? The short version is that political, cultural, and even economic power has been decentralizing and unraveling for a long time. Whether you like it or not, The Libertarian Moment is here, a technologically driven individualization of experience and a breakdown of the large institutions—governments, corporations, churches, you name it—that used to govern and structure our lives. The result is that top-down systems, whether public or private, right wing or left wing, have less and less ability to organize our lives. That’s true whether you’re talking about the workplace, the bedroom, or the bar down the street (that may now be serving legal pot). This is mostly good, though it’s also profoundly disruptive too.

For liberals, it’s always 1965 and social justice is just one mega-entitlement program away from arriving. For conservatives, it’s always 1980 and the next tax cut will solve all problems forever. Each side can appreciate some but not all aspects of decentralization. Conservatives and Republicans can embrace it when it applies to some economic issues and to things like school choice, but they can’t abide the profusion of sexual and cultural identities and the diminution of authority in general. Liberals and Democrats may be more comfortable with some of the latter but then they want tighter and tighter controls and limits on all sorts of commercial transactions.

In a world where you can personalize and individualize your online experience, your clothing, your work situation, even your sexuality, why would anyone join up for ossified, rigid, centuries-old groups such as the Democrats or Republicans? “The Repulican brand sucks,” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said recently of his own party, which he compared to Domino’s Pizza. If the Republicans are Domino’s, then the Democrats are Pizza Hut. Neither is appealing in a world of easy-to-find gourmet fare.

And that’s why the future of politics and policy doesn’t belong to doctrinaire Democrats or Republicans who want to control large swaths of everyday life. It belongs ultimately to the libertarian decentralists such as Paul who not only understand what is happening to America but are growing comfortable with it. Americans are increasingly wary of government’s power, and they don’t want it to teach a single set of morals either. Everything is proliferating and people just want a government that will keep people from starving on the streets and get out of the way as they go to the corner pot shop to buy edibles to take to their friends’ gay wedding celebrated by ministers who are not forced to do so.

Politicians and parties who champion policies that embrace economic and social decentralization will own the future, even as they wield less power by letting people discover how they actually want to live. Whoever wins tonight would do well to remember that. Because if they don’t, they’ll be losers again, and sooner than you think.

tips to Carpe Diem

HKO

Culture, commerce and technology drives politics- not the other way around.  Regulations that govern cabs are rendered obsolete by Uber, energy policies are upended by fracking, and increasingly efficient energy consumption, the Post Office is impacted by the internet.  Thsi makes politics increasingly irrelevant.  Worse political solutions and policies become quickly ossified.  Government policy is a blunt instrument and too slow to change in a world that moves as fast as we now do.

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