Freedom has two sides

This opinion piece in the New York Times by Kurt Andersen makes an obvious point that I somehow missed.

People on the political right have blamed the late ’60s for what they loathe about contemporary life — anything-goes sexuality, cultural coarseness, multiculturalism. And people on the left buy into that, seeing only the ’60s legacies of freedom that they define as progress. But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967. Thanks to the ’60s, we are all shamelessly selfish.

To be blunt, libertarians make for a lousy country. A country requires its citizens to have some minimum sense of neighborly obligation. Otherwise, what makes it a country? What unifies it? What makes it more than an arbitrary set of geographical boundaries?

Happy 4th of July.