MICHAEL BARONE: A libertarian turn on social issues. With a warning:

[A]t the bottom of the social scale we have seen an unraveling, with out-of-wedlock births, continuing joblessness, lack of social connectedness and civic involvement.

In conformist America the old prohibitions [marijuana, gay rights, abortion, gun control, among others] provided these people with guardrails, as the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger has written. In today's more libertarian America the guardrails may be gone.

Liberty requires a modicum of personal responsibility, the one thing that is an anathema to the liberal social welfare vision.