Kirk: "Come home chirping sectaries"Brink Lindsey's essay "Liberaltarians" has been the talk of the right wing blogs lately. See, for instance John Tabin's discussion of it in the American Spectator. I agree with Daniel Larison when he says the following:

Instead of setting himself up for the usual knocks on libertarians for deficient understandings of community or excessive approval of individual desires, Mr. Lindsey offers up an abundance of reasons for traditional conservatives to be only too willing to help him out the door.  For example, he does this when he describes as “libertarian breakthroughs” things that seem to traditional conservatives to be unmitigated disasters.  He reminds us why traditional conservatives have long been skeptical of the virtues of capitalism when he correctly points out how capitalism has led to many of the social changes that strike the traditional conservative either as deeply worrisome (greater sexual openness) or downright horrifying (secularisation, decline in reverence for authority).  - Daniel Larison

One is tempted to say to Libertarians: please leave. But not so fast. There are several types of libertarians. There are the type of libertarians who believe liberty is not about individualism and the market - but about self-reliance and property.  perhaps we would call these people, paleo-libertarians. Then there are the memorably named, Dupont Circle Libertarians. They no longer see what conservatives consider moral decline as the result of liberal social policies but rather as the natural progression of things - the loosening of religion's power over society. I'd like to discuss Dupont circle libertarians at length soon. But one notices from the 2005 AFF debate that Nick Gillespie considers the decrease in social stigma against gays to be an increase in freedom.  One also sees in Dupont Circle libertarians an aversion to guns. Whereas our paleo-libertarians were staunch defenders of the second amendment, Dupont Circle libertarians don't care much for weapons - those are the concerns of idiot backwards-Christians in the hinterlands. Dupont Circle Libertarians exult in the defeat of Rick Santorum - not because of his reckless and statist foreign policy but because he is identifiably a Christian, a fetishist of the family and maybe because he wants to raise the minimum wage. So yes, libertarians enjoy Senator Casey, a pro-life democratic socialist. In short, Dupont Circle libertarians are (of late) blinded by their irrational prejudices against conservative Christians, because conservative Christians are skeptical of modernity and occasionally critical of the latest in reproductive technology, two things that Dupont Circle Libertarians prize more than, say fidelity to the Constitution.

So, about this article. Lindsey's list of issues on which libertarians and liberals can work together is problematic. He mentions ending farm subsidies and corporate welfare; creating a zero-subsidy energy policy, and shifting the tax burden from labor to consumption. No conservative I know opposes these things. Farm subsidies often go to agribusiness which is killing the family farm. Corporate welfare isn't a part of conservatism and we don't have it because Republicans get elected - we have it because corporations swing a heavy bat in this game. You can't say that corporate types support Republicans as an accusation, then brag when Wall Street starts putting money behind you.

He then argues that some kind of entitlement reform compromise is inevitable as if this were a reason for changing alliances or has any implications for a new liberal-libertarian fusionism.  The rest is just a mish mosh.

The glaring error in all of this is that there are large conservative constituencies demanding fiscal policies with which libertarians disagree. But it doesn't add up. Even if you say conservatives wanted faith-based pork, there are dozens of federal regulatory bureaucracies that liberals want to see expanded. Each proposal that Lindsey makes for uniting libertarians to the left seem to work fine in the current coalition of libertarians and traditionalists.

 Can libertarians swallow the pill of nationalizing the health care industry? I don't think so. Can libertarians resign themselves to left-wing managed capitalism? Is this easier than putting up with people who want to overturn Roe v. Wade? I don't think so.

 The only reason we are really talking about this is that there is an elite core of libertarians, located in urban areas who find more in common culturally with liberals than they do with conservatives. Politics are often driven by the irrational and in fact we may see more of a certain type of libertarians trying to align with certain pro-market liberals. But intellectually, the fusionism of Frank Meyer has coheres more than the new fusionism of Brink Lindsey. There are problems with the old fusionism for sure but it isn't over yet. Frankly I think its unseemly how much attentions libertarians are getting these days.