Lindsey on Liberaltarians

Brink Lindsey's article suggesting that liberals and libertarians may be able to join forces is provocative and interesting. I see a fundamental problem with it, though. Lindsey tries to identify areas of agreement on which libertarians and liberals can work together, and that's fine as far as it goes. The difficulty is that libertarians simply have more in common with conservatives. As a rough estimate, I would say that libertarians are with conservatives 70% of the time and with liberals 30% of the time. (That's just off the top of my head, of course -- I haven't tried to quantify it.) So, while it's certainly true that there is room to work together on the 30%, that 70% is still out there, and makes it difficult for libertarians and liberals to forge a deep and long-term alliance.

Will Libertarians Support the Democrats?

Dan Drezner quotes and comments on Brink Lindsey's article arguing that the Democrats should court libertarians. One part of the article struck me as a bit of an overstatement:

Conservative fusionism, the defining ideology of the American right for a half-century, was premised on the idea that libertarian policies and traditional values are complementary goods. That idea still retains at least an intermittent plausibility--for example, in the case for school choice as providing a refuge for socially conservative families. But an honest survey of the past half-century shows a much better match between libertarian means and progressive ends. Most obviously, many of the great libertarian breakthroughs of the era--the fall of Jim Crow, the end of censorship, the legalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce laws, the increased protection of the rights of the accused, the reopening of immigration--were championed by the political left.

I suppose it's likely that some libertarians supported "the fall of Jim Crow, the end of censorship, the legalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce laws, the increased protection of the rights of the accused, the reopening of immigration." But many probably did not support some or all of those. I certainly would not call them "great libertarian breakthroughs" anyway. You can be pro-life and libertarian, for example. It's just a question of when you think life begins.