If the 20th Century was the Road To Serfdom, it can hardly have been a long march to increased freedom. If progressives and liberals are the authoritarian enemy, it can hardly be that their victories have, on the whole, made us more free. Since the 20th Century was when the bad stuff really got going, how can it NOT be appropriate to be thoroughly nostalgic for the 1880’s as a Lost Golden Age?
While left unsaid, it seems pretty clear to me that the corollary of this particular observation is this - since the "evidence" libertarians use to defend their position is faulty, their theory is falsified.
Since the Republican Party lost control of Congress in 2006, then the White House in 2008, conservative ideologues have argued that, in fact, the Republicans in Congressional leadership positions, and the Bush Administration, were not, in fact, conservative. To the extent that, in fact, they didn't act in accordance with certain conservative principles - shrinking the size and scope of the federal government, introducing balanced budgets - then, indeed that is true. It seems to me, however, that Dennis Hastert, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, and George W. Bush were, indeed, conservatism personified up until the moment they lost power; they certainly believed so and argued forcefully for this position. There are two conclusions one can draw from this (if one is sane). Either, a) they were lying and not, in fact, conservative (and all the conservatives who supported them were dupes; which would be a corollary of that particular conclusion); or, b), conservativism is not what its supporters and "theorists" suppose it to be. In either case, it seems to me, the dismal record of failure across the board of the Bush Administration, and its support among conservative elites through most of its duration pretty much falsifies conservative political thought as a socio-political theory.
For some odd reason, as much as we would like to pretend we are all scientific in our approach to the world, the fact is our social and political theories continue to live on even long after they have been falsified by events. Libertarianism and conservatism, for all intents and purposes, are failures as social and political theories for one simple reason - they are contrary to fact. This does not necessarily leave us with only liberalism (in its American variety, at least) as the only viable alternative. What it does mean, at least to me, is that those who argue at some level of vigor so conservative or libertarian social and political principles are supporting discredited theories. Like biologists who continued to deny the efficacy of evolution and genetics in the early 20th century; geologists who supported catastrophism; or physicists who attempted to discover, via experiment, the luminiferous ether after Einstein, these folks are supporting theories that are no longer have any explanatory power.
