I watched Romney's speech and was insulted. I'm agnostic, and his speech was utter crap. He totally miscontrued the "freedom to perform an act of praying" with the act itself as the basis of liberty. Freedom requires religious liberty not coercive acceptance of any religion itself. It was an anti-libertarian speech and asserted his belief that "no religious test" only extends to "no denomination test" but not to belief/non belief itself. Clearly, he stated he would apply a relgious test of "non belief" to government and his administration. He tried to recast himself as Jack kennedy giving some historic speech. Bullshit. Praying to nonexistent gods does nothing to secure the blessings of liberty. The american experiment is rooted in the enlightment and Reason, not Faith. And that's the Ayn Rand in me exerting coming out.

And Ron Paul(and you will never find another politician who will name his children after Ayn Rand) was the only candidate to give the historical and proper American Experiment response to this chirade:

The recent attacks and insinuations, both direct and subtle, that Gov. Romney may be less fit to serve as president of our United States because of his faith fly in the face of everything America stands for. Gov. Romney should be judged fairly, on his record and his character, not on the church he attends.”

And it should be no surprise that on the same day, Ron Paul was the only one(along with Paul Broun) to vote against this innane, Authortarian SAFE Act. I watched John Walsh the day before on MSNBC basically say no child should go online unsupervised, and if the parents can't supervise, it's up to the STATE.

Not a single democrat voted against this. NOT ONE. The only other politician to vote against was the guy who recently won an upset special election in Georgia running as a Ron Paul republican.

I think it might be helpful to decide what modernism means first, because looking at that thread on Open Left it could mean any of several things. I believe Brad Carson's analysis was basically on the mark, but what he is talking about that people in the red states reject isn't really modernism. It is, in part, trends such as post-modernism, multiculturalism, and nihilism. And in part, a growing divide between Christian and post-Christian elements in society.

Another possible meaning comes up in the comments, where one person points to a perceived divide within progressivism between secular humanists and rationalists on the one hand, and an anti-modernist left coming out of the 1960s typified by "deep ecologists and sprightly Tolkien-readers"; New Agers would be a more concise term. They perceive the rationalist, secular humanist left being in control of progressiveism right now and driving New Agers away. I don't see it for the most part, although this has become a problem in the past few years since the rise of 'netroots' blogs; the bizarre attacks on Dennis Kucinich launched from such sources as Kos seem to be rooted in this (he's a "kook" because he believes in reincarnation, or has seen a UFO, or whatever). That being as it is, it seems to me the big divide is still mostly between both rationalists/humanists and New Agers on one side, and evangelical Christians on the other.

It is this last divide that I think Brad Carson is really talking about, but not Chris Bowers. He gives away where he is coming from here: "Even if Carson was correct about what Democrats should do in order to win, a notion refuted by election results ever since 2004"

Refuted?? No, following Carson's advice and making clear that Democrats do embrace the values of small town and rural America, do find things from the past to inspire and build upon, and do not uncritically embrace cultural nihilism and post-modernism, is precisely why we had the victories we did in 2006. Every single significant victory we had can be correlated with this - from Heath Schuler to Zach Space, Jim Webb to Jon Tester to Claire McCaskill to Bob Casey. It extends even to the most progressive-left Democrats like Sherrod Brown (who ran on opposing job losses in Ohio and reversing the collapse of the Rust Belt economy), and to the upset defeats nobody saw coming, e.g., of Jim Leach and J.D. Hayworth (driven in large part by anger over the ban on Internet gambling, a constituency which organized on their own to defeat these incumbents and for the most part completely off the radar of the netroots left).

And in the comments, Chris Bowers again: "I don't embrace the past. I don't like the past."

That, in a nutshell, is his problem. Does a blanket rejection of the past mean, for example, rejecting labor unions? Rejecting the notion that wilderness should be preserved from development? Rejecting the legacy of the New Deal and Great Society (referring to the progressive-left here and leaving aside, for the moment, that most libertarians do reject the latter)? Rejecting the legacy of the 1960s? What about the classical liberal tradition and the Enlightenment itself?

You can't reject the past. You have to embrace what came from it, improve on it, and build on it. And you need a sense of continuity and connection with the past. Like it or not, as unhip as it is these days to talk about it, we do have a common culture, set of values, and national folk mythologies and archetypes in this country (found in everything from the American Revolution to the writings of Mark Twain, all the way to the blue collar culture of the recent past). Reject those and what you wind up with isn't progressivism (regardless of whether said rejection is based on the trendy postmodern academic notion that those things are inherently "racist" and "sexist"), nor libertarianism for that matter (which is inherently rooted in the classical liberal tradition and, in part, a longing for a return to a freer era with fewer entangling regulations), but nihilism. And nihilism is a recipe for both electoral and public policy disaster.

is aside from the main point of your post about Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. "Freedom requires religion", "Freedom is about authority"...neither of those views are what I would exactly call views befitting somebody aspiring to be the Chief Executive of this country. Freedom requires just enough authority to ensure a stable society in which personal freedom is otherwise maximized, and no more. This is an established legal doctrine - I don't recall the legal term for it offhand but any laws restricting freedom in one way or the other have to be justified as meeting a narrowly defined scope and a narrowly defined public need. The emphasis is on "narrowly defined". We have a government which is frequently overstepping those bounds in too many areas right now. I fear a Giuliani presidency more than probably any other candidate because he doesn't seem to understand this. As for religion, we have the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment for a good reason.