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Ribbonfarm likes to talk about\xa0refactoring, a conceptual change in how you see the world. I\u2019m not totally sure I understand it, but I think it means things like memetics \u2013 where you go from the usual model of people deciding what ideas they want, to a weird and inside-out (but not objectively wrong) model of ideas competing to colonize people.

Here is a refactoring I think about a lot: imagine a world where people considered culture the fourth branch of government. Imagine that civics textbook writers taught high school students that the US government had four branches: executive, legislative, judicial, and cultural.

I think about this because I have a bias to ignore anything that isn\u2019t nailed down and explicit. Culture isn\u2019t nailed down. But if it were in the Constitution in nice calligraphy right beside the Presidency and the Supreme Court, why,\xa0then\xa0it would be as explicit as it gets.

Like many other people, I was hopeful that nation-building Iraq (or Afghanistan, or\u2026) would quickly turn it into a liberal democracy (in my defense, I was eighteen at the time). Like many other people, I was disappointed and confused when it didn\u2019t. The people in the world that considers culture the fourth branch of government weren\u2019t confused. Bush forgot to nation-build an entire branch of government. If he\u2019d given Iraq a western-style Supreme Court, marble facade and all, but left their executive and legislature exactly how they were before, that would be a recipe for conflict, confusion, and eventually nothing getting done. So why should westernizing their executive, legislature, and courts \u2013 but not their culture \u2013 work any better?

The world that considers culture the fourth branch of government doesn\u2019t get all confused calling hunter-gatherers or peasant villagers \u201cprimitive communism\u201d or \u201canarchism\u201d or \u201cruled by elders\u201d or things like that. Those people\u2019s governments have a cultural branch but not much else. Why should we be surprised? Medieval Iceland\xa0had onlylegislative and judicial branches; medieval Somalia only had a judiciary; some dictatorships run off just an executive.

Each branch of government enforces rules in its own way. The legislature passes laws. The executive makes executive orders. The judiciary rules on cases. And the culture sets norms. In our hypothetical world, true libertarians are people who want less of all of these. There are people who want less of the first three branches but want to keep strong cultural norms about what is or isn\u2019t acceptable \u2013 think Lew Rockwell and other paleoconservatives who hope that the retreat of central government will create strong church-based communities of virtuous citizens. These people aren\u2019t considered libertarians. They might be considered principled constitutionalists, the same way as people who worry about the \u201cimperial presidency\u201d and its use of executive orders. But in the end, what they want to strengthen some branches of government at the expense of others. The real libertarians also believe that cultural norms enforced by shame and ostracism are impositions on freedom, and fight to make these as circumscribed as possible.