Some follow-up thoughts on the American cultural divide revealed by Tuesday’s elections:

An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal summarized the situation nicely:

And while Mr. Obama has campaigned on the robust role government can play in people’s lives, a majority of Tuesday’s voters said government was doing too many things.

And this is from political writer George Will’s syndicated column yesterday:

In 2008, Democrats ran as Not George Bush. In 2010, they ran as Democrats. Hence, inescapably, as liberals, or at least as obedient to liberal leaders. Hence Democrats’ difficulties.

Responding to [a complaint by Newsweek’s Jonathan] Alter [that the Democrats’ problem was a failure to market their ideas well], George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux agreed that interest-group liberalism has indeed been leavened by idea-driven liberalism. Which is the problem.

“These ideas,” Boudreaux says, “are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else’s contracts, social relations, diets, habits and even moral sentiments.” Liberalism’s ideas are “about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of ‘Big Ideas’ that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people.”

This was the serious concern that percolated beneath the normal froth and nonsense of the elections: Is political power—are government commands and controls—superseding and suffocating the creativity of a market society’s spontaneous order? On Tuesday, a rational and alarmed American majority said “yes.”

This election, as these comments indicate, manifested a big disagreement within the nation on authority and personal responsibility.

The progressive vision has been in the ascendancy for the past few years. It holds that authority must be ceded to an elite in order to ensure that the nation is run according to the latest scientific principles and equality of conditions is imposed on the public, because inequality of conditions is generally the result of exploitation.

The classical liberal vision made a comeback on Tuesday. This worldview holds that social, economic, and cultural conditions should be allowed to evolve in an organic manner and order is generated spontaneously (as is natural in human societies, according to this vision).

These two visions of society, as should be evident, are incompatible and are based on fundamental ideas about personal responsibility and authority. As such, the ascendancy of one or the other in a society will have immense consequences, as the political events of the past few years vividly demonstrate.