A sad fact of politics is that social and economic liberals often find themselves on opposing sides of the debate. Support gay marriage and drug legalization and you're on the left; support low taxes and private enterprise and you're on the right. A new Gallup poll suggests that, in America at least, that might be changing. Gallup regularly does polls of people's liberalism, asking social and economic questions separately. Both viewpoints are now on the rise:
It's encouraging to see both on the rise in the US. The old left-right dichotomy may be dying, and thank goodness for that. There's no paradox between wanting freedom in your private life and freedom in your working life. Quite the opposite, in fact. It's the people who only care about freedom in one sphere, while trying to control other people's lives in the other sphere, who are engaged in a contradiction. Let's hope we see more evidence that those fair-weather liberals are on the way out, and consistent freedom-lovers are on the way in.