Welcome back. I'm Anastasia Yuglova and this is the second part of today's

podcast special. This is Brink Lindsay's answer to David Brooks. What do you make

of the point Brooks advances that upscale voters tend to be moderate, democratic, or very liberal.

Is affluence really leading to a libertarian direction if affluent people are voting for

Howard Dean, for example?

Well, I think he said it depends on the part of the country, so that in red states, more

upscale people tend to be conservative, whereas in blue states more upscale people tend to be

either moderate or quite liberal.

But moderate are quite liberal for perhaps libertarian reasons that is they may be very

scared by the religious right or they may be very opposed to the war which would be

classified as liberal in the conservative liberal dichotomy, but more

libertarian in our sense of the word.

So I think that of course upscale voters are not necessarily libertarian in their policy

preferences or policy positions but what I'm talking about is a more general

sense of basic political values and I think you tend to see a general

economically conservative socially liberal kind of attitude of supporting market, supporting

economic change, also supporting cultural change and cultural openness that I think those are

the values that libertarian policies are the best at promoting.

In his podcast David Brooks essentially declared the Reagan era over.

He was actually very clear on his belief that the problems of today are fundamentally

different having to do with security, decentralized threats, and issues that

governments not individuals must grapple with. Thoughts? Well certainly the air is different. We don't have 70

...