Tuned out: cultural libertarians are a growing force in America. But just how do you reach them?

If you're trying to divine the future of American politics from the 2008 presidential primary season, the absolute worst place to look is the winner's circle.

John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama: One of these characters will almost certainly be the next president of the United States. But don't confuse that grim inevitability with a more glorious future that almost certainly awaits us all, regardless of who takes control of the White House, the Congress or even the Supreme Court this fall.

The key to such optimism is recognizing that politics is a lagging indicator of American society, which has been moving with broadband-like speed into an era of Do It Yourself culture and not-so-rugged individualism. Think of what Americans have come to expect and insist upon in their social and economic lives: increasingly individualized service, culture and consumer products at every level ("You want soy with that decaf mocha frappuccino?"); more and more control over education, healthcare and retirement; and a nearly full-throttled embrace of lifestyle tolerance and pluralism that was unimaginable in a pre-Netflix, pre-"Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," pre-iPod America.

Decentralization, niche markets and choice are the coin of this new realm. The political future belongs to those leaders--and parties--that figure out how to transpose this insight into the legislative world.

Forgive us our apostasy: We write unabashedly as libertarians for a magazine and website that champion social tolerance and fiscal responsibility, or what our tag line calls, "Free Minds and Free Markets." When it comes to partisan politics, we write as independents who believe in open immigration, civil liberties, educational and reproductive choice, gun rights, pluralism, noninterventionist foreign policy, drug legalization, gay marriage, and most of all, a world far beyond politics in which people are generally free to pursue individual and communal happiness on something approaching their own terms. When we look at the two major parties, we feel as Saddam Hussein must have felt while gazing upon his sons Uday and Qusay: deeply disappointed, though for very different reasons in each case.

This year's primary survivors, Republican and Democrat, are channeling shopworn agendas and tired identities to a body politic desperate for a new political era. Sen. John McCain brims with Teddy Roosevelt's century-old ideas about national, and international, greatness--even as an interdependent world has grown weary of American exceptionalism. His signature legislative achievement, campaign-finance reform, is not only a spectacular affront to the First Amendment's guarantee of free political speech, but a spectacular failure in the face of the radical empowerment of the Internet.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is running almost exclusively on nostalgia for the pre-9/11 1990s, grafted onto a platform that looks more Great Society than New Democrat. Nominally Republican, former Gov. Mike Huckabee is in many important ways the second coming of Jimmy Carter, a holier-than-thou nanny-stater whose bold ideas include institutionalizing weight-loss regimens, clamping down on vulgar popular culture and arguing against the teaching of evolution in public schools that he would fund more lavishly. Sen. Barack Obama, though certainly charismatic, is a classic empty suit whose concept of "change" mostly involves repackaging old JFK lines while squeezing the maximum number of endorsements from the Kennedy clan.

Looking to Democrats and Republicans, two parties formed in the 19th century, for the Next Big Thing is a bit like asking General Motors and Ford circa 1975 to map out the future of the auto industry. Legacy market leaders are inevitably the last to notice that their top-down traditions are losing audience share in a world hurtling toward individualized, bottom-up business and culture. As Chris Anderson documented in his 2006 bestseller, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling More of Less, technological innovations, especially the rise of the World Wide Web, have geometrically increased consumer choice and placed a premium on personalization.

Anderson's title refers to the archetypal supply-and-demand curve, whose "tail" slopes down and toward the right. The thick "head" of the tail, which represents popular items, is getting shorter; the tail, which represents less popular items, is getting longer and more important in terms of total sales. Hence, the online bookseller Amazon stocks several million titles but more than half of its sales comes from books ranked lower than its top 130,000 titles. In terms of goods and services, Anderson argues, we are turning "from a mass market into a niche nation." The era of the blockbuster and the bestseller has been replaced with a world in which individuals are free to express themselves by tapping into millions of different book titles at Amazon, tens of thousands of different songs at Rhapsody and hundreds of different beers at a typical supermarket. Smart retailers realize that the key to the future is to give the customer more choices, not to act as a gatekeeper. In a similar way, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook do not structure interaction as much as provide a free space that facilitates it. Individual users tailor the experience to their own desires rather than submit to a central authority.

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Only one candidate this election cycle tapped into Long Tail politics, campaigning on ideas copasetic to the Internet generation while leveraging the traditional American values of decentralization and choice. That's Rep. Ron Paul, the 10-term congressman from Texas who is a punchline for many of this year's political jokes.

To be sure, by every conventional measure Paul's presidential bid has been an abject failure--not a single primary win and only 14 delegates as of press time. Yet Paul managed to raise more than $20 million, virtually all of it online, and inspire an army of hyper-devoted and mostly youthful followers using a pitch--and a style--that will have much more to do with 21st century politics than whatever models of Buick and Oldsmobile the Democrats and Republicans eventually crank out this year. That's how Paul pulled together over 67,000 people at the social networking site MeetUp (a total that was more than 20 times the number who signed up for the next most popular candidate, Barack Obama). That's why he won raves from quarters as disparate as conservative commentator George Will (who called Paul "my man" on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos"), punk icon Johnny Rotten (who gave Congress' "Dr. No" a celebratory shout-out during a "Tonight Show with Jay Leno" episode), plus a self-explanatory group called "Strippers for Paul."

What explained the ability of this odd politician, with his inept campaign management team, to attract gobs of money, if not actual votes? Because it was only Ron Paul who said something truly distinct this campaign about the very nature of power. Namely, that government should have less of it on all levels and in every instance. "I don't want to run your life," Paul says. "I don't want to run the economy.... I don't want to run the world." Such sentiment is simultaneously radical and fully in the Jeffersonian tradition of governing best while governing least. The right to be left alone, as Justice Louis Brandeis once put it, is at the very center of the American experiment because it allows individuals and the communities they form to pursue happiness in competing, peaceful ways. This is especially true in Long Tail America, where people are not only increasingly tolerant of alternative lifestyles but are constantly on the hunt for ways to individualize and personalize their own lives.

In the modern era, such individualism was articulated most fully by the Republican Party. Barry Goldwater located the ideology of libertarian freedom in his best-selling 1960 classic Conscience of a Conservative, which propelled him to the 1964 GOP nomination. Ronald Reagan called libertarianism the "very heart and soul of conservatism," and famously declared in his Second Inaugural that government is the "problem, not the solution." The radical Newt Gingrich class that finally gained a House majority in 1994 did so on a fire-breathing platform of cutting entire federal agencies so individuals could run their own lives.

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But the past 14 years have largely been a disaster for those who look for libertarianism in all the wrong places--i.e., from the political party that runs Washington. Quickly after gaining power, Republicans learned to love the bureaucracies they'd spent decades trashing. Instead of abolishing the Department of Education, President George W. Bush gave it a brand new set of marching orders in the No Child Left Behind Act, and increased federal spending on education by 39 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. Instead of reforming a Medicare entitlement that threatens to bankrupt the Treasury, Bush tacked a prescription drug benefit on top of it. Instead of reducing government, he grew it at a faster rate than Lyndon Johnson--mostly with the aid of a GOP Congress.

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So Ron Paul could be seen as a last gasp of the GOP's Goldwater wing, a haunting reminder of an ideological tradition now nearly abandoned on the governing Right. But judging by the hostility with which he was treated by party loyalists, and the cross-over appeal of his anti-war message to voters not normally inclined to support Republicans, there's an alternate interpretation of what came to be dubbed "The Ron Paul Revolution": It's the beginning of a new niche era of politics, unmoored from party affiliation, attracted by both authentic politicians and limited-government platforms, and able to activate election-tipping swarms of voters at the touch of a keystroke.

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Much of this new activity will be explicitly libertarian, since the decentralization of control and individual empowerment is so deeply embedded in Internet technology and culture. Observers as varied as the liberal Michael Kinsley (who sighed in Time magazine that libertarians "are going to be an increasingly powerful force in politics") and the conservative Washington Times (which reluctantly dubbed libertarians the "new 'It' faction" in American politics) agree that such folks are a growing force to be reckoned with. As David Boaz of the Cato Institute and David Kirby of America's Future Foundation have noted in a study of public opinion polls, roughly 15 percent of the electorate can more or less be considered libertarian. But these voters are not likely to be your father's ward-heeling partisans of old.

First and foremost, they are energized by pre-political cultural phenomena such as the "South Park" animated series, which for a decade now has taught Americans--especially younger Americans--two vital lessons. First, that we should have a healthy and thorough skepticism of power. And second, as an infamous "South Park" episode detailing a school council election put it, politics is about making a choice between a "giant douche and a turd sandwich." The rising visibility of self-described libertarians--ranging from "Price Is Right" host Drew Carey to magicians and TV hosts Penn & Teller to HBO's Bill Maher to British playwright Tom Stoppard--is ultimately a statement about how politics is a weaker attachment in today's America than culture broadly defined.

Washington myopia and megalomania notwithstanding, the bitter pill for politicians to swallow is that culture comes first and politics a distant second at best, whether the topic is war (as Hillary Clinton might remind us, the American public soured on Iraq long before reigning Democrats and Republicans did); integration (which local, state and even the federal government routinely resisted even while businesses and communities tried to move beyond odious patterns of racial separatism); or acceptance of gay marriage (corporations ranging from IBM to Levi's to Disney were paying same-sex partner benefits years before Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1998). As legal scholar Mark Tushnet has said of the Supreme Court: "The Court can have some influence on the margins, pushing things a little further in the direction that they're already moving or sometimes retarding the direction. But 10 years down the line, the society's going to be pretty much where it would've been even if the courts hadn't said a word about it."

So it is with politics more broadly, and in ways that should make tribalist liberals and conservatives shudder, whether or not their favored candidate wins. The major political trend of the past 40 years is the inability of the two parties to grow, much less maintain, market share.

In 1970, the Harris Poll asked Americans, "Regardless of how you may vote, what do you usually consider yourself--a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent or some other party?" Fully 49 percent of respondents chose Democrat, and 31 percent called themselves Republicans. In 2006, the latest year for which data is available, those figures were 36 percent for Democrats and 27 percent for Republicans.

Again, we're not naive. The near future, and the White House, surely belongs to a president with a familiar name from a familiar party, espousing familiar ideas. But the Long Tail future of politics just as surely belongs to the president and party that figures out the secret to success is giving away power by letting the voter decide more of what matters. And when that future arrives--and it will, sooner or later--we'll all look back at the failed campaign of a guy who said he didn't want to run our lives, the economy, or the world, and wonder what took us so long.

Nick Gillespie is editor of reason.tv and reason.com. Matt Welch is editor of Reason magazine.

RELATED ARTICLE: 7 Ways to Win Our Vote

Since the 1970s, the Democrats and Republicans have been leaking market share like oil from a Chevy Nova. If either party truly wants to stop the slide by appealing to libertarianized Americans, here are some smart--and popular--policies they ought to push.

1. Legalize online gambling. The Internet is popular precisely because it allows people to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else. And at least since the '70s, when virtually every state in the union began to legalize state lotteries, betting has been something Americans love to do. Yet the feds are waging an unwinnable war on online gambling--even incurring a WTO sanction for imprisoning the head of a Britain-based operation while he changed planes in Dallas. A 2006 poll found that fully 78 percent of Americans think the government should not "restrict what adults do on the Internet in the privacy of their own homes."

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2. Make the Internet tax moratorium permanent. Speaking of online freedom, the Internet Tax Fairness Act of 1998 banned state and local governments from passing sales and access taxes in cyberspace. That was back in the days before the 'Net, telecommuting and various other adjunct activities had become not just huge in terms of revenues but a fully mass phenomenon. Over 75 percent of Americans are connected to the Internet, with more signing up every day, creating possibilities for experimentation that were unimaginable 15 years ago. Yet every couple of years, the moratorium comes up for renewal. The party of the future--hell, the party of today--will be the first one to make certain that there are no gratuitous, traffic-slowing tolls on what Al Gore once called the Information Superhighway.

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3. Ban the use of eminent domain for private gain. A 2005 Supreme Court decision, Kelo v. City of New London, has become a poster child of government gone wild. The case, in which the court basically said it is always okay for a city to take private property and give it to a private developer, touched off a true grassroots rebellion, with dozens of states and municipalities passing laws to protect against eminent domain abuse.

Polls consistently show that 70 percent to 90 percent of Americans are appalled at the idea of public officials pushing homeowners off their property to aid big developers. Which party at the national level will be first to stand up to the Supreme Court and to petty tyranny?

4. Bring the troops home, already. For the past year alone, about two-thirds of Americans have opposed the war in Iraq. Even the relative (and relatively modest) success of the surge--a tactical issue, not a strategic one--hasn't diverted American attention away from the fact that this was an elective, undeclared war that leaders in both parties enthusiastically endorsed.

The American people aren't pacifists. But historically, they've been uncomfortable with displays of military power that aren't seen as essential to national defense or as the result of a widely shared foreign-policy consensus. The smart party will bring the troops home from Iraq (and places like South Korea, while we're at it) and benefit from a globalized, free-trading world that takes responsibility for its own affairs.

5. Grant amnesty--er, citizenship--to illegal immigrants. The Dems are nervous that unskilled arrivals drive down union wages; GOPers fret about assimilation. Neither of those fears are borne out by the facts regarding illegal immigrants. Most of the new arrivals go to places with hot economies, and Spanish-speaking households end up going English-only within three generations-exactly the same pace evidenced by previous waves of Jewish, Italian and Polish immigrants.

More to the point, a 2007 USA Today/Gallup Poll found that 59 percent of Americans think illegals should be allowed to stay and work and become citizens if they meet minimal requirements. With Hispanics making up about 55 percent of all immigrants and an ever-increasing percentage of the voting public, just say no mas to nativism.

6. Let patients smoke dope. In the mid-1990s, a number of states, including bellwether California, passed ballot initiatives and legislation legalizing medical marijuana. The federal response, first under Bill Clinton, later under George W. Bush and legitimized by the 2005 Supreme Court decision, Gonzales v. Raich: Send armed feds to raid dispensaries that are legal under state law, and harass octogenarian glaucoma patients with zero criminal record. The first party to denounce this buzz-kill will find itself on the right side of a 72 percent approval rating from Americans who, according to an AARP poll, say medical marijuana makes sense.

7. Decouple health insurance from employment. At a time when every business trend is hurtling toward flexible working conditions, constant job-shopping and project-based assemblages of freelancing humans, both parties appear intent on doubling down on an employer-based healthcare system ripped right out of a 1950s Sears Wishbook. The Company Man is gone, thanks at least in some part to the crushing pension and health-insurance obligations incurred by industrial behemoths back when Harry Truman didn't allow them to give their employees raises. Yet we retain an expensive, regulatory-choked system that assumes Company Town-style job security from cradle to grave.

Give consumers more control over their health coverage, give health providers more leeway to provide flexible products and give employers the option--not the duty--to offer coverage as a perk, and you'll be acknowledging that we indeed live in the 21st century. Last one through the door gets stuck with the $100 co-pay.

--NICK GILLESPIE AND MATT WELCH