If you look at the last 40 years instead of just the last 4, the trend is obvious and undeniable. It's just not tenable to say that we've reached an inflection point and now the default course is a complete reversal of the last half-century's progress regarding racism, civil rights, divorce rights, sexual freedom, reproductive freedom, gay rights, criminal procedure, free expression, gambling, and even society's attitude towards substance use. It's just historically illiterate to say the sky is falling and we are in -- or even headed toward -- a police state.

By contrast, the last seventy years have seen an enormous erosion of our economic freedoms: minimum wage, maximum hours, plant closure notice, family leave, "equal pay for equal work", numeric goals in minority hiring, union exemptions from antitrust, growth controls, urban planning, rent control, monumental intergenerational inequity through a socialized retirement pyramid scheme, massive regulation of healthcare, socialized health insurance, farm subsidies, federalization of education, environmental regulations based on bureaucratic rules instead of market incentives, etc. etc.

The trend is clear. The major threat to liberty in twenty-first century America will not be from right-wingers legislating morality or invoking foreign enemies. It will be from left-wingers invoking economic inequality, and from neophobes invoking fear of the changes that progress inevitably requires.

Right-wingers will inevitably fail because Americans are fundamentally decent. Left-wingers will ultimately fail because the verdict of history, and the prosperity all around us, demonstrates that they are obviously wrong. But neophobes will be an indefinite threat, because they can always claim that the End Is Near, and no track record of failed doomsaying can shake their conviction that this time they're right.

You may not agree with my libertarian perspective on economic freedoms, but you can't pretend that your contrary perspective isn't betrayed when you ask "how it is the American people would vote as they did".  Being a Bright is supposed to just mean being a philosophical naturalist, and it's a mistake to assume that a philosophical naturalist would automatically support Kerry over Bush.