Many paranoid social conservatives blame the triumph of moral liberalism on a conspiracy of sinister secular humanists, using the media and the public schools to indoctrinate their children and grandchildren in a godless morality. But the truth is that social conservatism has been undermined by technological progress, which has increased the opportunities for freedom in matters of sex and censorship while raising the costs of enforcing traditional norms.

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I distinguish conservatives from libertarians, who, on issues of personal liberty, tend to side with liberals. Since World War II, mainstream conservatives have opposed every expansion of personal liberty in the United States.

During the civil rights era, the leading conservative politician, Barry Goldwater, and the leading conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr., along with most of their followers opposed federal laws banning racial discrimination. To their credit, they later admitted they had been mistaken; indeed, both Buckley and Goldwater supported gay rights late in their careers. But at the time that conservative support for a color-blind society might have made a difference, the leaders of American conservatism sided with the Southern segregationists. They claimed they did so, not because of racial prejudice, but because they feared federal tyranny — a weaselly stance that, in practice, made them side with white supremacist tyranny at the state level. If they had truly believed in their own propaganda about federalism, conservatives could have opposed federal civil rights legislation while campaigning for civil rights laws at the state level. They didn’t.

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Unfortunately, the case for infrastructure investment has suffered from the lack of a plausible vision of the next American infrastructure.  Unlike in the 1860s, when the transcontinental railroad caught the public imagination, and the 1950s, when the interstate highway system symbolized a promising future, the present day lacks a consensus about what America’s future infrastructure should be.

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This is not just a French phenomenon, nor is it limited to immigration policy. In most of the world’s advanced democracies, the egalitarian left and the nationalist right are growing in strength among voters. After three decades in which apostles of financial deregulation, offshoring and immigration liberalization dominated the capitals of major Western countries, the pendulum is swinging in the other direction.

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The dominant approach to tax reform is considered to be “centrist” and symbolized by, among others, the Simpson-Bowles plan.

In what is advertised as a grand bargain between the right and the left, tax rates will be lowered, to appease conservatives, in return for closing many tax expenditures or “loopholes” (for some reason this is presented as a concession to liberals). Revenue that would otherwise be sheltered from taxation by the abolished loopholes would, to some degree, raise overall federal revenue collection, even with lower rates.

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In my new book "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States," I argue that American government has often lagged a generation or two behind technology-induced economic change. Following the birth of the U.S. in a world of water and wind, of sailing ships, canals and water-wheels, the American economy has been transformed by three “industrial revolutions.” The first, based on the steam engine, produced the railroad and the steam-powered factory as well as the telegraph. The key technologies of the second industrial revolution were the internal combustion engine, installed in cars, trucks, ships, trains and planes, and electric power generation. The most recent industrial revolution, the third, is based on information technology, which is rapidly transforming everything from the way we work to the way we play.

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The U.S. Constitution, like many state constitutions, really is two constitutions in one. There is the black-letter constitution, which consists of rules about which there is little or no dispute. Most of these have to do with qualifications for representatives, like Article I, Section 3, Clause 1, as amended: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.” Not a whole lot of room for interpretation there.

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The government does not sell U.S. citizenship directly — yet.  But already it sells citizenship indirectly. Rich foreigners who put up a minimal amount of money in “investments” in the U.S. are permitted to buy green cards for themselves and their families, which permit them to apply after five years for the coveted privilege of American citizenship.

Here’s how it works. The EB-5 immigration program allows citizens of foreign countries who do not qualify for admission to the U.S. under any other immigration category (such as relatives of U.S. citizens or guest workers) to buy the right to live and work here by investing at least half a million dollars in the U.S. in a government-approved investment. If the investment lasts for two years, green cards authorizing legal permanent resident status are issued to the investors and their families. Up to 10,000 people a year can be admitted to the U.S. under the EB-5 program.

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That is what makes the policy of Delta Airlines so shockingly un-American.  In Austin, Delta had not one but two lines that fed into the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint area. One line was mixed race, mixed class and mixed age. The other line was usually empty. Now and then a white, middle-aged man would appear in the second line and the first line would be halted as he went directly into the TSA checkpoint.

“Who are those guys?” I asked a TSA officer, when I reached the front of the second-class citizen line.

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The importance of geography in American politics could not be clearer. To begin with, there is the red state-blue state map, showing Republican-leaning states in the form of an L uniting the West and South and Democratic-leaning states clustered in the Northeast, around the Great Lakes and on the West Coast. From election to election, states shift from one color category to another, but the pattern remains remarkably stable.

Within parties, geography is just as important. In the Republican primaries, Mitt Romney’s base is the Northeast and parts of the West. Rick Santorum does best in the Midwest, Newt in the South.

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In its views on taxation, the American right is the most divorced from reality. As the fantasy economic plans of the various Republican presidential candidates prove, the right is still stuck in the Reagan era, calling for more and more tax cuts, with undefined spending cuts to be made at some future date, and with deficits and debt tolerated in the meantime — at least if Republicans control the political branches of the federal government.

The right’s derangement on the subject of taxation is often blamed on the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, or tax-revolt populists like California’s Howard Jarvis in the 1970s. But it has deeper philosophical roots in the libertarian movement, which dominates the right’s economic policy, though not its foreign policy or social policy.

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Romer and Boskin agree that government should do nothing to save or promote the manufacturing sector in the United States.  Their critiques of industrial policy, in turn, have produced responses by prominent advocates of federal aid for technological innovation and manufacturing, including Clyde Prestowitz, a former Reagan administration official and founder of the Economic Strategy Institute.

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Consider what Pat Buchanan and other social conservatives called “the culture war” in the 1980s (after Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church in 19th-century Imperial Germany). Even with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade is in no danger of being overruled. The most that conservatives can do is back state-level initiatives like forcing pregnant women to view sonograms of fetuses — initiatives that are soon slapped down by the federal courts.

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In debates in the 1980s and 1990s, the term was often associated with proposals to emulate one or another aspect of the export-oriented Japanese model. Today, however, critics use “industrial policy” in blanket condemnations of any government support of particular technologies as well as particular industries and particular companies.  Industrial policy, they allege, is both un-American and doomed to failure.

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How can otherwise sane people believe such lunacy?  The answer is that members of the right-wing counterculture are brainwashed -- that is the only appropriate term -- by  the apocalyptic propaganda ground out constantly by the conservative media establishment. A perfect example is a recent essay by Philip Klein, a senior editorial writer of the Washington Examiner, the right-wing newspaper owned by the billionaire Philip Anshutz:  “The Welfare State Is Destroying America.”

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America may not have titled aristocrats, but it has always had patrician families, defined by a combination of wealth, educational affiliations and public service.  Today’s Republicans may sound like George Wallace in their denunciations of paper-pushing bureaucrats and pointy-headed intellectuals, but their presidential selection pool is a very selective country club.

Between 1980 and 2008, inclusive, there have been eight presidential elections.  The Republicans have nominated five presidential candidates — Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and John McCain.  During the same time, the Democrats have nominated seven presidential candidates — Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama.

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The relative lack of controversy marks a contrast with the last great transformation of American foreign policy, which took place at the end of the Cold War.  Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was clear that the Soviet-American conflict that had structured U.S. foreign policy since the late 1940s was coming to an end.  For several years there was a vigorous debate in the mainstream media as well as expert circles about what should replace the Cold War strategy of containment of communism as the basis of American grand strategy.

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 By equating the Civil Rights Act, which expanded American civil liberty, with the Patriot Act, which reduced it, on the grounds that both are federal laws with sanctions, Ron Paul displays the moral idiocy of someone who declares that a person who pushes a little old lady out of the path of a bus is just as bad as a person who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus, because both are equally guilty of pushing little old ladies around.

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Optimists are an endangered species, now that it appears that we are at best in the end of the beginning of a prolonged crisis of the world economy, not the beginning of the end.  Hopes that the global financial crash of 2008 would be followed by a deep recession and then a sharp recovery have faded.  Coordinated stimulus programs by major countries  in the early stages of the crisis probably helped to limit the damage, but they did not produce a recovery.  The alternatives — beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies and budgetary austerity — can only make things worse in the short run.

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