Art is lost the conservative said, let us weep for the soul of man.

Apparently John C. Wright’s claims liberals were anti-beautiful art fits neatly into the current right-wing zeitgeist. Here we have one conservative seething that liberals are destroying beauty in art because we left-wingers can’t separate art from politics. And rape apologist Rod Dreher explains that conservatives make better art because great art requires drawing on archetypes and archetypes are traditional and therefore conservative. Or something like that.
Of course, complaints about modern art and how liberals demand art be politically correct have a long pedigree, so perhaps it’s coincidence all these posts show up fairly close together.
•Another long-standing tradition is predicting that libertarianism is finally about to catch on. Roy Edroso links to an NYT piece trotting out the usual cliches: libertarians are contemptuous of both Republicans and Democrats (this is often taken as a sign of independent thinking in the media). Young voters support legalizing pot and gay marriage which shows they want government out of their private lives, just like libertarians, and they don’t like either party’s handling of the economy. Is this the hour of libertarian triumph?
As Edroso notes, the article hardly touches on economic policy, which is the truly big issue for libertarians: they want regulation on business gone, dead, pushing up daisies (as I’ve mentioned before, the real reason libertarianism misses it’s moment is that most people realize this would suck for everyone who’s not rich or a corporation). For a fair number of them, social libertarianism (get the government out of the bedroom) is not part of the deal or at least a minor one. One of the interviewees in the NYT story says that of course she thinks government should get out of deciding who can get married … which means changing the law to let gay people get married is wrong. And Rand Paul (held up in the article as the Great Libertarian Leader Who Can Win!) is willing to support a federal gay marriage amendment (he fuzzes his position a little here). And then there’s libertarian Bryan Caplan, who argues women were freer in the 1800s than today because the lack of regulation far outweighs the legal restrictions on women.
As the blogger Digby has pointed out, there was a lot more libertarian support for Republicans than Democrats in the past couple of elections (if someone has counter-statistics that prove me wrong, feel free to do so). Yet Repubs are more aggressively interventionist on war issues than Dems and very, very anti social libertarianism. The only libertarian issue where they overlap is deregulation. So apparently that’s good enough.
•Slacktivist has noted many times that Roe vs. Wade was no big deal to most Protestants, including evangelicals, when it first hit. Then over the years, it became a flashpoint, a fundamental issue. And now the push against birth control shows the same trend as sexist theocrats—oh, I’m sorry, deeply religious people concerned that using birth control isn’t “openness to life”—push to establish anti-birth control as an issue for Protestants too.
•However you here far more complaints from feminists than right-to-lifers about discrimination against pregnant women.
•The right continues crying that culture is left-wing and conservatives must take it back somehow!
•A black woman writes about a shopping trip to Best Buy. She says she’s used to being asked for her receipt but even that wasn’t good enough, and an employee wouldn’t let her leave until a salesperson vouched for her.
•This profile of gun activist Larry Pratt is striking because Pratt seems to embody so many conservative aspects. For instance, when the government is crushing left-wingers he’s all for it but when it infringes on gun rights, it’s Satan incarnate. He emphasizes the absolutist radical-left approach (no deviation from ideology!) that I’ve mentioned before. And he’s apparently fine attending white-supremacist and anti-semitic conferences as a supporter.