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There’s an awful lot of talk here Alex. Maybe its all relevant to someone. To me, it comes down to these points:

“...conservatives have failed to devote the proper amount of energy to developing an alternative cultural world-view opposed to the dominant leftist one.”

“Being conservative has come to mean nothing more nuanced than holding the belief that every man has the inalienable right to make as much money as he possibly can.”

“New Traditionalists reject the materialism, hedonism, consumerism, egoism, and the cult of self-actualization which permeate modern life.”

Look familiar, my friend? :)

it is exceedingly and progressively more difficult to exert political influence when the cultural assumptions underlying those political goals are being steadily eroded by the popular culture, if no serious attempt to retard or reverse that erosion is ever made.

Bingo.

We've been fighting a war of ideas in the legislature, while our opponents have been going after the infrastructure and control of the battlefields upon which the war of ideas are fought.

Lose the war of ideas, and it doesn't much matter what laws you manage to cobble together, they won't mean anything anyway. Win the war of ideas, and the laws will follow. Inevitably.

What is the "infrastructure" of the war of ideas? It is the information industry in its various forms:

1. Schools and universities.
2. News media.
3. Entertainment media

We have abdicated all three. All three are almost completely in the hands of people who hold us in contempt. We let them educate ourselves and our kids, we let them inform us, they get to decide what we need to know and what we don't need to know, they get to shape the argument, and they get to define who we are even to ourselves. Let your enemy define you and you've lost already.

We have to continue the political fight, there is no alternative to it. But to fight politically while letting your enemy educate each wave of new Americans, and letting them control what information is available, and what ideas are allowed and which ones are forbidden is a lost enterprise. You are finished before you start. You may win a few battles but the tide is against you and at some point even you will give up. When you've lost your kids, you've lost. You're just a crank ranting at the coffee shop and no one wants to hear it anymore.

The ontological libertarians make their arguments in terms that the perfectly happy life is a life free from all restraint. The use of these arguments has been a convenient way to achieve some of the short-term goals of conservatives, because this argument is presented in ontological terms acceptable to the Left--but it has been disastrous to American society. It was an alluring temptation that should have been resisted. It has reaffirmed the world-view of the leftist, which holds the unbridled ego at its center. We have undermined the foundation of any resistance to the Left based on the promotion of a fundamentally different world-view. This devil's bargain has therefore helped to perpetuate the decimation of traditional American culture, with its accumulated wisdom and mores and traditions of self-restraint, which is the basis for any hope of a truly workable political freedom.

Libertarians must make their arguments in terms of the moral benefits of freedom, and not in terms of the glories of nihilism, if we can consider them allies and not opponents. As cultural activism becomes more important to our movement, and political activism less so, we may find that we have less and less in common with many libertarians whose philosophical foundations are not sound.

It has become more and more clear to me in the past few years that libertarians are often even more destructive to conservatism than liberals are.

I for one WILL NOT ally with groups which supports fiscal responsibility and low taxes when the price is the continued murder of 3500 infants a day.

I like this. I have a much simplier approach though: Let the parasites each eat other. Atlas needs to Shrug. Let's face it, if the "New Traditionalists" quit adding to the pot, the game would fold immediately. How much wealth can a professor of African-American Women's Studies actually generate? How many evening nooz broadcasts would be sponsored by hemp T-shirt manufacturers?

I think the Occam's Razor approach to our problem is much easier: Let the stupid and evil die of their own ineptitude. We'll be the only ones left. Just make sure you have enough food and guns to stay out of the way as the giant collapses.