George Will on The Age of Abundance

The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture , the new book by reason contributing editor Brink Lindsey, an excerpt from which is our July cover story (already in your hands if you are a subscriber ) gets some serious love from George Will in this coming Sunday's New York Times. Will's summation, with a very apposite final word:

Lindsey rightly says that "today's typical red-state conservative is considerably bluer on race relations, the role of women and sexual morality than his predecessor of a generation ago." And "the typical bluestate liberal is considerably redder than his predecessor when it comes to the importance of markets to economic growth, the virtues of the two-parent family and the morality of American geopolitical power." In "the bell curve of ideological allegiance," the large bulging center has settled, for now, on an "implicit libertarian synthesis, one which reaffirms the core disciplines that underlie and sustain the modern lifestyle while making much greater allowances for variations within that lifestyle." If so, material abundance has been, on balance , good for us, and Lindsey's measured cheerfulness is, like his scintillating book, reasonable.

Brink talks up the book on the Daily Show.