I'm not the best person to comment on the results of the special election in New York's 26th Congressional District, which Democrats are touting as a rejection of Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to privatize Medicare. I will say, though, if Americans really were proto-Randians then Republicans wouldn't be on the defensive in trying to argue that Ryan's plan "preserves" Medicare when it actually eviscerates it, since the electorate would agree with them that people who get help from the government are a bunch of parasitic freeloaders. I wouldn't describe America as particularly liberal either, but to the extent that the electorate has genuine conservative tendencies that's reflected in a strong status-quo bias that applies to efforts to expand government intervention as much as attempts to limit government programs that already exist. And in that sense, Newt Gingrich's remarks about "right-wing social engineering" being as undesirable as "left-wing social engineering" probably reflect many Americans' political instincts.
