Matt Welch on the 'Beyondist' Politics of Jeff Bezos

As the commentary about Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post has illustrated, even the mildest and most unobtrusive strains of libertarianism can scramble the conventional assumptions and categorizations that have long ossified elite political discourse. But potentially more radical to the body politic and its hometown newspaper, argues Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch, is the strong likelihood that Bezos, like an emerging plurality of the Americans his company serves so well, just doesn't define himself through affiliations with political tribes. The man who helped create the "Long Tail" economy may just embody and advance what could be called Long Tail politics, or the notion that individual political and ideological identities are far more varied, fluid, and ad hoc than those the political class deem "not visibly objectionable."