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Check this post out, from one of the biggest Dem blogs on the net, Daily Kos:
Get the government out of marriage
Gee, Kos, that's a fine idea....
I agree. I have been impressed with the extraordinary number of liberals who, if they said the same things in 1964, would have been called Goldwater Conservatives. Think Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias for two prominant ones. Kevin Drum as well. They have definitley fallen out of love with the Progressive idea of benevolent nonpolitical experts making our decisions for us.
And unlike the Goldwater Conservatives, they are better on any uumber of moral issues.
A piece of mine arguing National Forests should be nationalized into democratic Forest Trusts will be appearing in Wild Earth, a pretty hard core environmental magazine. If the idea happened, a high percentage of land in the West would pass from Congressional and Presidential control to self-selected citizens who would be responsible for raising the funds needed to operate them.
Neither conservative nor liberal mean what they meant 40 or even 20 years ago.
I think it's very likely that the long-standing liberal/Democrat love affair with the federal government is at an end. It's hard for a Democrat to love the federal government when all three of its branches are in the hands of the Republicans. And the new deal / civil rights enforcement reasons for supporting the feds don't hold much water any more. Libertarians may have an opening here.