The Volokh Conspiracy

The Cato Unbound website recently hosted an interesting debate over efforts by “Bleeding Heart Libertarians” to incorporate “social justice” into libertarian political theory. In the lead essay, “Bleeding Heart Libertarian” political philosophers Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi argue that libertarianism is best defended not on the basis of absolute rights to property and self-ownershp, but on the grounds that it benefits the poor and the “least well off” members of society. They argue that this approach is superior to the property rights absolutism they associate with libertarians like Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard.

As Zwolinski and Tomasi recognize, consequentialist considerations – including the impact of public policy on the poor – is far from a new idea in libertarian political thought. They note that 18th and 19th century libertarians repeatedly emphasized the negative effects of activist government on the poor as one of the justifications for restricting its power. In more recent times, such libertarians as Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and many of the public choice economists have made similar arguments. The same is true of some of my own work on property rights, federalism, and the War on Drugs, and co-blogger David Bernstein’s work on labor regulation. Many of the above writers – including Friedman and Hayek – also argued that libertarianism is, at least in theory, compatible with a minimal welfare state focused on providing support to those of the poor who are genuinely incapable of supporting themselves.

In his response to Zwolinski and Tomasi, economist David Friedman points out that much of what they argue for is better justified by utilitarian considerations. Many prominent libertarian scholars – including Friedman – are utilitarians and defend libertarian institutions on primarily utilitarian consequentialist grounds. On that basis, the interests of the poor surely count no less than that of other people.

Despite the above continuity with prior libertarian thought, there are two important distinctive aspects to the BHL project. The first is the philosophical rigor with which they lay out the case for a version of libertarianism that leaves room for (tightly constrained) positive rights for the poor. I can’t fully cover this aspect of BHL in a blog post. But interested readers should consult Tomasi’s excellent recent book Free Market Fairness and various posts at the Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog.

The second is the use of the term “social justice” itself, which is usually associated with the left. Previous libertarian thinkers – including those who willing to accept a limited welfare state – generally eschewed this terminology. Hayek famously denounced the concept. This, I think, is what draws the ire of some critics of BHL, such as Todd Seavey. He seems to be concerned that adopting the terminology of social justice is a political dead end for libertarians, or at least likely to cut off possible alliances with conservatives.

I think Seavey’s critique is overblown, for reasons well articulated by Bryan Caplan. Furthermore, I highly doubt that allowing for the possibility of a limited welfare state will somehow prevent libertarians from forming alliances with conservatives. After all, most conservatives support some form of limited welfare state too (often a much larger one than even the most moderate libertarians).

On the other hand, like David Friedman and Michael Rappoport, I’m not convinced that “social justice” does any useful analytical work that is not better done by utilitarianism. Like the BHLers, I am not a rights absolutist. Even very important rights must sometimes be sacrificed if the consequences of sticking to them are sufficiently dire. But I think that the utilitarian idea of concern for human happiness and well-being is a more compelling consequentialist ideal than social justice.

In addition, there is some ambiguity in the way BHLers use the term “social justice.” To many on the left, social justice goes far beyond merely providing a minimal standard of living for the poor. It includes a concern for promoting economic equality more generally. In a recent post, leading BHL advocate Jason Brennan suggests that the BHL definition of social justice is more limited than that, focusing only on the idea that “the moral justification of our institutions depends on how well these institutions serve the interests of the poor and least advantaged. The basic institutions of society must sufficiently benefit all, including the least advantaged and most vulnerable members of society.”

This definition is hard for anyone to object to. Virtually any political theory recognizes that political institutions must protect the interests of “the least advantaged” at least to some degree (e.g. – they cannot be enslaved). However, as Bryan Caplan notes, a lot depends on how much consideration those interests are entitled to:

Does “depends” mean “depends to some extent”? Almost every moral theory says the same – including, as David [Friedman] points out, old-school utilitarianism. Does “depends” mean “depends entirely”? That seems implausibly absolutist – especially since “serving the interests of the poor and least advantaged” is (a) arguably supererogatory in the first place, and (b) dependent on how deserving the poor and least advantaged are.

On balance, I too am not convinced that the idea of social justice adds anything useful to libertarian thought that isn’t better captured by other concepts, such as utility. It’s also worth noting that not all BHL advocates endorse the idea of social justice. Jacob Levy, for example, does not. And, as Jason Brennan points out, endorsing a limited theory of “social justice” doesn’t necessarily require BHLers to embrace a large welfare state – or perhaps even a small one (Brennan calls himself “more or less an anarchist”). A BHLer who is highly pessimistic about the real-world impact of the welfare state on the poor could logically reject the welfare state.

Despite the ambiguity of their approach to social justice, I think the BHLers have made many valuable contributions to political theory. They are right to remind libertarians that we cannot be indifferent to the consequences of rights. They are also right to focus attention on the many different ways in which government intervention harms the poor rather than benefits them. Even if you believe that state-sponsored redistribution to the poor is necessary, the vast majority of the modern state actually provides benefits to the wealthy, the middle class, and organized interest groups - often at the expense of the poor. Finally, BHLers have made several advances in discussions of specific issues in political philosophy, most notably Jason Brennan’s work on the ethics of voting.

Ultimately, I think libertarians should reject both rights absolutism and absolute utilitarian consequentialism. The difficult question is how to strike the right balance between them. BHL doesn’t give us a completely satisfying answer, but it is a valuable contribution to the debate.

UPDATE: Brian Doherty gives a good summary of the BHL/social justice debate here, and Jason Brennan responds further to Bryan Caplan and David Friedman here.

As part of his plan to address California’s fiscal crisis, liberal Democratic Governor Jerry Brown has proposed abolishing California’s 400 local “redevelopment agencies,” which would save the state some $1.7 billion per year, an important step towards closing the state’s $25 billion annual deficit. Unfortunately, his plan has so far been stymied by opposition from California Republicans, all but one of whom voted against it in the California Assembly. Under the California state constitution, passage of the bill requires a two thirds majority in the state Assembly, and Brown fell one vote short.

The GOP’s stance on this issue is extremely unfortunate, and at odds with the Party’s supposed devotion to free markets and property rights. As Steven Greenhut, an expert on California property rights issues points out in a recent Wall Street Journal op ed, the redevelopment agencies are notorious for their abuses of the power of eminent domain for the benefit of powerful private interest groups:

[I]n the last 60-some years, redevelopment agencies have become fiefdoms that run up enormous debt and abuse eminent domain by transferring private property to large developers promising to build tax-generating bonanzas. Today, there are 749 such projects. In the late 1950s, there were only nine. According to the state controller, redevelopment agencies consume about 12% of all state-wide property taxes—money that would otherwise go to critical public services....

Palm Desert’s redevelopment agency proposed to eliminate so-called blight by spending nearly $17 million on revamping a municipal golf club that remains one of the nation’s premier golfing locales.

In the 12 years I’ve spent reporting on this issue, I’ve seen an agency attempt to bulldoze an entire residential neighborhood and transfer the land to a theme-park developer. I’ve witnessed agencies declare eminent domain against churches—which pay few taxes—in order to sell the property at a deep discount to big-box stores that promise to keep city coffers flush. Working-class people and ethnic minorities often are the victims of this process since they often live in the vulnerable neighborhoods, and they have less muscle than big business developers.

The trouble is that blight is an amorphous concept, easily abused by government officials and redevelopment agencies. Once “blight” is found, the agency creates a project area and can then begins selling bonds (incurring debt) without a public vote. In 1995, one area of the city of Diamond Bar, where I lived, was declared blighted because there was chipped paint on some buildings....

While economic development and local control are crucial issues, it’s hard to understand why any Republican would believe that a regime of government planning and subsidy is the best way to achieve those goals. They should be standing up against the abuses of property rights and the fiscal irresponsibility inherent in the redevelopment process and championing market-based alternatives to urban improvement—even if it means defending a proposal from a Democratic governor they often disagree with.

As I have often pointed out in previously, dubious “blight” condemnations are one of the most serious threats to property rights in the United States today. They are especially likely to be used to victimize the poor, ethnic minorities, and the politically weak.
For these reasons, among others, Jerry Brown’s proposal should be supported not only because it will save the state money, but because it will protect vulnerable property owners against abusive takings. It’s also worth noting that these kinds of blight condemnations not only cause great harm to their victims, but also generally fail to produce the economic growth that supposedly justified them in the first place.

Overall, I have been skeptical about the prospects for “liberaltarianism,” the proposed political coalition between liberals and libertarians. On this issue, however, the two groups have an obvious common interest. The libertarian goal of protecting property rights overlaps here with several liberal objectives, including helping ethnic minorities and supporting one of the nation’s most prominent liberal governors.

At the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, libertarian lawprof Fernando Teson writes that “The remarkable truth of this conversation between bleeding heart libertarians and progressives is that our disagreement is exclusively empirical. If we all agree that political institutions should be arranged to alleviate poverty, then the only remaining question is which policies actually do this. Why is it then that we cannot agree, or at least converge, by just looking at reliable data, studies, and empirical theories?”

Fernando suggests that disagreement between liberals and libertarians would largely disappear if the two sides could agree on empirical facts. I think there is a lot of truth to this, but it’s not the whole truth. Agreement on empirics would greatly narrow the range of disagreement between libertarians and liberals, but some important differences would remain.

As I explained in this post, some libertarians are actually utilitarians: they support libertarianism purely because they believe that libertarian policies maximize happiness. Some liberals are utilitarians as well. If a utilitarian liberal and a utilitarian libertarian came to a consensus on empirical issues, they could also come to agreement on policy as well. The only thing that separates them is a disagreement over how best to achieve a common goal: maximizing happiness (I set aside, for the moment, the fact that there are different schools of utilitarianism that disagree over the definition of happiness).

Most libertarians and most liberals are not pure utilitarians. Similarly, few if any care only about alleviating poverty, the issue Fernando focuses on in his post. Here are some issues that would continue to divide libertarians and liberals who aren’t pure utilitarians even if they overcame their empirical disagreements:

I. Economic Liberties.

Most libertarians assign at least some intrinsic value to economic freedom over and above its instrumental benefits. Thus, they would be willing to sacrifice at least some utilitarian gains in order to preserve it. For example, I would oppose mandatory national service even if I were convinced that it would create substantial utilitarian benefits. Economic freedom is valuable enough to sacrifice some happiness for. Obviously, there are limits to the tradeoffs I and most other libertarians would accept in this regard. If a draft were the only way to prevent the conquest of the United States by a totalitarian dictatorship, I would (reluctantly) support it. However, most liberals assign little or no intrinsic value to economic liberty, and therefore would be reluctant to sacrifice even small utilitarian benefits to preserve it.

II. Income Inequality.

Just as most libertarians assign intrinsic value to economic liberty, many liberals assign intrinsic value to restrictions on income inequality. And they are willing to sacrifice at least some utilitarian benefits to achieve it. If, for example, we could greatly reduce income inequality at the price of a 1% reduction in average income for the middle class, many liberals would take the deal. Virtually no libertarians would, since they assign no intrinsic value to income equality at all.

III. Dignitary Wrongs.

Much liberal opposition to libertarian ideas such as organ markets and abolition of the minimum wage and minimum housing standards is due to disagreement over empirics. But not all of it. In discussing such issues with liberals, I often hear arguments such as the following: “Even if organ markets would make the poor better off, I still oppose them because it’s morally wrong for anyone to have to sell parts of their body in order to avoid poverty. It’s wrong to exploit the poor in that way.” Or this: “Even if abolishing minimum housing standards would improve the situation of poor tenants by enabling them to rent cheaper apartments, we as a society shouldn’t do it because such inadequate housing is morally unacceptable.” Liberals who reason in this way believe that some mutually beneficial economic exchanges should be forbidden because they create some sort of dignitary harm that outweighs their utilitarian benefits. Libertarians either discount such considerations entirely or at least believe they aren’t important enough to justify restricting individual freedom.

IV. Multiculturalism and Group Solidarity.

On average, both libertarians and liberals are much less nationalistic than conservatives. This is one of the points that unites the two groups. Nonetheless, many liberals do believe that membership in an ethnic or racial group can create some moral obligations, especially if that group has been the victim of oppression or discrimination. Liberal political philosophers such as Will Kymlicka argue that government should subsidize and otherwise promote minority cultures. Not all liberals assign intrinsic value to such group membership, but many do. To the extent that this is true, it’s a point of disagreement with libertarians that would persist even if the two groups agreed on empirics.

In sum, a liberal who came to agree with libertarians on empirical issues would favor a major reduction in the role of government in society. But he would still probably support more taxation and redistribution than libertarians do. He might also still favor banning some mutually beneficial economic transactions that create dignitary wrongs and support some government subsidization of minority cultures.

A libertarian who accepted the liberal view on empirical questions would come to endorse a lot more taxation and regulation. But he or she still would not support as much regulation as liberals do because of the countervailing intrinsic value of economic freedom. He also would still oppose government intervention in cases where the goal is purely to alleviate dignitary wrongs or subsidize some ethnic group’s culture for its own sake.

We could probably add a few other items to the above list. But I doubt that there would be many more that are of great importance. If so, this suggests that empirical disagreements are by far the most important points of dispute between liberals and libertarians, even if not the only ones. I would be thrilled to form a political coalition with the hypothetical liberal who retained his left-wing values but came to agree with libertarians on empirics. And I bet most liberals would be happy to ally with his libertarian analogue (the libertarian who adopts liberal positions on empirical questions while retaining his or her libertarian values). Empirical disputes, not values, are the main obstacle to a liberaltarianism.

That, however, does not mean that a liberaltarian alliance will be easy to forge. The empirical disagreements in question are extensive and deeply held. Moreover, most people don’t evaluate evidence on political issues with anything approaching unbiased objectivity. Worse, many have a tendency to believe that those who oppose them on empirical issues are actually motivated by abhorrent values or narrow self-interest. That makes agreement even more difficult to achieve than it would be otherwise.

UPDATE: Some of what I say about economic liberties in Point I above also applies to property rights. However, as I noted in this essay, many liberals do attach at least some intrinsic value to property rights, so the disagreement here is more focused on empirical questions than that over economic liberties. Liberals support more restrictions on property rights than libertarians do in large part because they disagree over the empirical effects of such restrictions.

[Note to "The ExileD" readers: George Mason University is a state university, funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia. My paycheck comes from the Commonwealth [which in turn gets the money to fund the university from our students' tuition dollars, as law school tuition is over 35K for the majority of our students], and that is my employer. I don’t receive any money from the Koch Brothers. I don’t know anything about this website, but if this is illustrative of its reliability, you’re wasting your time reading it. FURTHER: “The ExileD” falsely stated that the Koch brothers are my “employers.” Any halfway respectable media site would just admit its mistake and move on, instead of trying to obscure its errors with juvenile insults.]

Responding to a post of mine regarding “progressive” demonization of the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers, TNR’s Chait expresses bafflement at libertarians’ “hypersensitivity” regarding criticism of the Kochs’ “great deal of influence over the political system.”

The problem, dear Jonathan, is that while you and others consistently assert that the Kochs have such influence, you don’t ever demonstrate it. Let’s review: It seems undisputed that the Kochs total spending on political and ideological causes is somewhere around 10-15 million dollars per year. How big a role does this money play in the American political system?

Let’s start with ideological/intellectual causes. The liberal Ford Foundation spends over $400 million a year. The liberal MacArthur Foundation spends about $140 million a year. Liberal billionaire George Soros spends about $150 million a year. Liberals control the vast majority of academic positions in almost every humanities and social science department in every major university in the country, with total budges in the tens of billions.

Even in the libertarians’ tiny corner of the ideological universe, 10 million dollars would only keep the Cato Institute running from January to April this year, and leave nothing left for any other libertarian cause or organization. So the idea that the Kochs are having some huge influence on American politics through their ideological philanthropy is grossly exaggerated, at best.

Even more absurd is the notion that the Kochs’ political contributions are distorting American politics. The Obama campaign spent hundreds of million of dollars on the 2008 election. The 2010 midterm elections cost about $4 billion. The Koch’s relative spending is like pissing in an ocean. Such spending, of course, can under the right conditions win an interest group some narrow favors, but that’s a far cry from suggesting that it can buy “a great deal of influence over the political system” in general.

No, the reason that some liberals have latched on to the Kochs as their bogeymen is that this is what demagogic political propagandists due to win support from their base. They find a mysterious, ominous-sounding (billionaires! who sell oil!–what could raise greater suspicions on the Left?) villain on whom to blame their troubles, and rouse the passions of the partisans of their sides. As these things go, the Kochs are a more innocuous villain than, say, the “Likudnik” bogeymen of the mid-2000s, or Pat Robertson’s “secular humanists who support a New World Order” of the 1990s, but it’s all the same phenomenon.

Regardless, it’s not the sort of thing serious intellectuals take seriously, except as studies in the effectiveness of playing on the traditional paranoid streak in American politics. But if Chait wants to abjure seriousness, and instead be the number one propogandist on behalf of the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration in the blogosphere, he’s welcome to the title.

Bonus foolishness from Chait: He defines liberaltarianism, the now almost defunct attempt to establish an intellectual coalition between liberals and libertarians, as an agreement “to emphasize social issues and foreign policy over economics, and to define economics as evidence based and less hostile to redistribution and the possibility of market failure.” That sounds to me an awful lot like standard college town liberalism.

In fact, during the Bush II administration, many liberal blogosphere voices could be heard swearing that having seen the administration’s abuses of power, they now understood the importance of decentralization and refusing to lodge too much power in Washington, D.C. In most cases, this realization lasted precisely one millisecond after the bloggers in question realized that the Democrats were likely to win a sweeping victory in the 2008 elections, to the extent that folks like Chait seem to have forgotten that a key to liberaltarianism was supposed to be a newfound liberal skepticism of Big Government.

As I’ve pointed out before, the attack on the Kochs, who are rather consistent libertarians of the left-libertarian stripe (e.g., are quite pacifistic on foreign policy issues) is a sign of the abject failure of liberaltarianism.

Several prominent libertarian political philosophers have recently joined together to form the Bleeding Heart Libertarians Blog. Participants include former VCer Jacob Levy, Jason Brennan of Brown University, and well-known law professor and former VC guest-blogger Fernando Teson. I am a big fan of several of the BHL bloggers’ work, including Brennan’s analysis of the ethics of voting (which I discussed here), and Teson’s work on deliberative democracy with Guido Pincione.

The main focus of the blog is the development of a version of libertarianism that combines broad economic and personal freedom with a small but nonzero welfare state (or at least the absence of any categorical opposition to such a state). This post by Jason Brennan explains in greater detail.

This kind of minimal welfare state libertarianism is not a new idea. It is in fact similar to the view held by great libertarian thinkers such as Milton Friedman (inventor of the negative income tax), F.A. Hayek, James Buchanan, and others. It is, however, unfamiliar to most nonlibertarian political philosophers, who tend to know only the version of libertarianism propounded by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, under which (as Brennan puts it) “justice requires that we respect property rights, period, even if that means a large percentage of people will starve, lead poor and desperate lives, or have no stake in their society.” The BHL bloggers are performing a valuable service in making other versions of libertarianism better known to their fellow philosophers, and even more so by developing the analytical foundations of those views in their scholarship.

Some of the BHL writers, such as Jacob Levy, hope that this version of libertarianism can revive the idea of a “liberaltarian” alliance between libertarians and liberals. I am skeptical of the political prospects for liberaltarianism for reasons that I elaborated here and here.

Levy emphasizes that most government economic intervention doesn’t benefit the poor, and much of it actually harms them:

So libertarianism as a doctrine in political philosophy had this distinctive contribution to make: it rejected state activity to increase the material well-being of the poor. I think by gradual drift, that came to seem like all libertarianism was concerned with.......

But in the real world, state action to improve the material lot of the poor is not a very large portion of state action. This is politically predictable, almost trivially so. But that means that the focus on libertarianism’s apparent philosophical difference with Rawlsian liberalism gives us a very distorted sense of the work libertarians could do politically in the world. We don’t live in a Rawlsian world, separated from Nozick’s by the existence of poverty-alleviation programs. We live in a world characterized by massive state action of all sorts, most of which does nothing to alleviate poverty and a great deal of which is actively regressive or harmful to the worst-off.

Hence, a rhetorical justification for B-HL or liberaltarianism. Let us not talk as if the set of policies endorsed by Rawls and not by Nozick somehow makes up most of the action of a state we’re supposed to be in the business of trying to limit.

David Stockman’s stated goal of targeting budget cuts on “weak claims, not weak clients” was in a sense obviously politically doomed. But that doesn’t alter the imperative to try to do as he said he wanted to do.

Levy therefore argues that libertarians and liberals can find common ground in opposing a variety of government interventions that restrict liberty in order to benefit the non-poor, often at the expense of the disadvantaged. I am sympathetic to Levy’s argument and have made similar points myself (e.g. – here and here).

The problem is that the vast majority of liberals do not agree; most of them support a wide range of government interventions that are intended to benefit groups other than the poor, sometimes even at the expense of the latter. That’s one of the reasons why Brink Lindsey’s original 2006 proposal for a liberaltarian alliance found few if any takers on the left, even though it was based on much the same premises as Levy’s (libertarians agreeing to accept a welfare state that benefits the poor in exchange for liberals joining libertarians in opposing a wide range of other interventionist policies). This state of affairs could change if liberal thought moves in a more pro-market direction (as it did in the 1980s and 90s), or if liberals suffer severe political reverses that make them desperate for new political allies (though libertarians are not the only possible allies they could try to court). For the moment, however, I doubt that either BHL or any other platform is likely to lead to a liberaltarian alliance any time soon.

The real value of BHL thought, however, resides not in building a political coalition but in its intrinsic intellectual merit. With some reservations, I accept the the BHLers’ claim that a version of libertarianism that doesn’t categorically rule out all positive welfare rights is more defensible than one that does. I also think that they have valuable contributions to make a on a variety of other issues as well. BHL is unlikely to become the foundation for a new liberaltarian political coalition. But I’m confident that it will make a valuable contribution to public discourse, which is ultimately all you can ask of a blog.

[Response to Jonathan Chait here.]
The ongoing twenty minutes of hate against the billionaire libertarian Koch brothers for being, well, billionaire libertarians is yet another nail in the already well-sealed coffin of “liberaltarianism”–the attempt of some libertarians to ally with the progressive left.

The underlying premise of liberaltarianism was that libertarians could emphasize their policy positions that appeal to liberals but not conservatives–drug legalization, hostility to war and military spending, support for civil liberties and for gay marriage–while liberals, chastened by the Bush years, would tone down their support for big government in other areas.

The Kochs would appear to be the perfect liberaltarians–they support gay marriage, drug legalization, opposed the Iraq War, want to substantially cut military spending, and gave $20 million to the ACLU to oppose the Patriot Act (compared to a relatively piddling $43,000 to Scott Walker’s election campaign).

It’s not surprising that some demagogic “Progressives” would nevertheless choose to try to demonize the Kochs to defend the Democratic money machine that public employee unions represent (update: though note that the attack on the Kochs began last Summer). What is, if not surprising, at least a bit depressing, is how few prominent liberal commentators have spoken out against the ongoing attempted Emmanuel Goldsteinization of the Kochs.

Indeed, Hans Bader points out that even the ACLU, as noted a major Koch beneficiary, has helped organize anti-Koch rallies, though the Kochs involvement in small government economic issues seems rather far removed from what is supposed to be the ACLU’s core agenda. So much for liberaltarianism.

Ilya has a series of posts expressing skepticism of liberaltarianism here. I pointed out here that the Kochs spend about a tenth as much annually on political/intellectual causes as does left-wing billionaire George Soros–which doesn’t stop shameless Soros grantees from suggesting that the Kochs are somehow doing something evil by using their money to support causes they believe in.

UPDATE: I’m told it was the Southern California branch of the ACLU that protested the Kochs, whereas their gift was to the national ACLU. Local branches set their own policies.

A recent Politico article reports that the Democratic Leadership Council is about to “suspend operations” for lack of funds. The DLC was a group founded in 1985 to try to move the Democratic Party to the center. Among its founders was then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who became the most successful of the DLC-affiliated New Democrats. DLC-supported ideas were one of the sources of the Clinton Administration’s relatively pro-market policies on various issues, including welfare reform, free trade, and spending restraint.

Today, the DLC and its ideas are out of favor in liberal Democratic circles. It is telling that the organization is failing for lack of funds at a time when most of the issues it used to emphasize are as important as ever. Certainly, we have a much more serious spending problem today than in the 1980s and 90s. The Politico article indicates that the DLC’s role will now be filled by the Progressive Policy Institute, the think thank which was affiliated with the DLC until a recent split. But the article also notes that PPI has only two fellows and eleven paid staff – a very small size for a major DC think tank. Evidently, there is very little donor support available for centrist Democratic organizations. The article also refers to a more recently established group called “Third Way” as a possible successor to the DLC. But Third Way is not clearly a centrist group, and its “board includes old –line liberals like Reps. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and John Dingell (D-Mich.).”

The fall of the DLC and the lack of a strong successor organization has important implications for “liberaltarianism,” the idea of a political alliance between liberals and libertarians. Although the New Democrats were far from being libertarians themselves, there was important common ground between the two groups. The weakness of the DLC and other similar organizations today is an indication of the extent to which liberal Democratic thinking has moved left over the last decade. This movement makes it much harder to achieve any viable liberaltarian coalition, a point I previously emphasized here.

This state of affairs need not last forever. The initial rise of the DLC and New Democrats was stimulated by the political defeats Democrats suffered in the early 1980s and the the intellectual success of free market economics during that era. A similar combination of political defeat and favorable intellectual trends could resuscitate these ideas in the future. For the moment, however, liberals and libertarians are farther apart than at any time since the pre-Clinton, pre-DLC era.

Of course the DLC was not all good from a libertarian perspective. For example, some of its leaders advocated mandatory “national service.” At this February 2009 Hudson Institute panel, I debated both mandatory and voluntary national service with then-DLC President Bruce Reed, among others (unfortunately, the transcript has some misprints and other minor errors). Reed had previously advocated mandatory national service in a book coauthored with soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. On that issue, at least, libertarians should be happy that the Obama administration didn’t follow the advice of the DLC leadership.

I have generally been pessimistic about the prospects of the “liberaltarian” project of forging an alliance between libertarians and liberals (e.g. here and here). Economist Scott Sumner, however, makes a good case that this effort has achieved a lot if you look at it from a longterm perspective. Ultimately, the difference between Sumner’s view and mine is less stark than it seems. As I explained in this post, there is a difference between “liberaltarianism” conceived as a wide-ranging political coalition, and liberaltarianism as an intellectual dialogue between the two groups, in which libertarians seek to understand liberalism and try to persuade liberals to become more libertarian. I am pessimistic about the former, but I think the latter has achieved considerable good in the past and may achieve more in the future. Sumner defines liberaltarianism as “basically libertarians attempting to knock some sense into liberals on economic issues.” This dialogic approach is very different from Brink Lindsey’s famous 2006 proposal for a political alliance which first coined the term.

Here are some of Sumner’s specific points, with my comments:

Let’s review what liberals used to believe, before libertarians knocked some sense into them:

1. In the US, they believed the prices of goods and services should be set by the government. Ditto for wages. This took the form of the NIRA in the 1930s. It took the form of multiple industry regulatory agencies like the ICC and CAB. By the late 1960s and early 1970s they favored “incomes policies” which were essentially across the board wage and price controls. Today they generally favor letting the market set wages and prices. Very liberal Massachusetts recently abolished all rent controls.

This is real progress and some of it was indeed due to efforts at persuasion by libertarian scholars such as Milton Friedman (who persuaded most of the economics profession and many policymakers that price controls were not the right way to fight inflation). At the same time, it’s worth noting that many liberals still favor price controls in a variety of industries, most notably health care. Despite Massachusetts’ action, most liberals also still favor rent control.

2. In the US, they believed the government should control entry to new industries. They have abandoned that belief in many industries, and based on recent posts by people like Matt Yglesias, are becoming increasingly disillusioned with remaining occupational restrictions.

I don’t see as much change here as Sumner suggests. Most liberals still favor most of the occupational licensing regimes that we have. And a great many want to make some of them even more restrictive. Yglesias’ views are commendable, but unusual. In my own field of law, many liberals want to increase barriers to entry in order to combat the supposed oversupply of lawyers (despite the fact that reducing that supply would lead to even higher prices for legal services to the poor). It’s possible that, overall, liberals are modestly less supportive of occupational entry restrictions today than they were 30-40 years ago. But I want to see more evidence before I endorse that conclusion.

3. They favored 90% tax rates on the rich. Today they favor rates closer to 50% on the rich.

Like point 1 above, this is genuine progress. I do wonder how much of this change was caused by libertarian efforts at persuasion and how much by growing political resistance to extremely high tax rates. The “tax revolt” of the late 1970s, coupled with Reagan’s political success on a tax-cutting platform, surely persuaded many liberals that 90% tax rates were politically unsustainable.

4. In most countries liberals thought government should own large corporations. Today most liberals around the world think large enterprises should be privatized. Over the next few decades there will be trillions of dollars in new privatizations, and very few nationalizations.

Here, I think Sumner conflates liberals with socialists. The latter did indeed favor nationalization of all or most large corporations. Liberals generally did not. Still, the decline of this socialist worldview was a major step forward, and the work of libertarian economists surely had a lot to do with it. At the same time, the fall of the Soviet Union and (to a lesser degree) the failures of government-owned enterprises in Western Europe also had a major impact, probably an even greater one.

Finally, it’s worth noting that, even conceived as a dialogue rather than an alliance, liberaltarianism involves more than just economic issues. It also covers the “social” issues where liberals and libertarians supposedly agree more. Here, I think the two groups have drifted apart over the last several decades more than they have come together. On average, today’s liberals are more likely to support a wide range of restrictions on “noneconomic” freedom than those of forty years ago. Consider such issues as government-imposed regulation of smoking and diet, expansion of antidiscrimination laws to cover various new groups, campaign finance restrictions, and anti-”hate speech” laws. Liberals today are more supportive of all of these than they were back in the 1970s. The decline of the 1960s “counterculture” has also reduced left-wing enthusiasm for ending the War on Drugs (though an important minority of liberals still want to do that, or at least cut back on it). Perhaps libertarians made less effort to persuade the left on these issues than on economic ones; or maybe their efforts were badly conceived and ineffective. Regardless, this part of the liberaltarian dialogue has not gone well for the libertarian side.

In sum, I think Sumner somewhat overstates the amount of progress here, and attributes too much of it to libertarian persuasion and not enough to other factors. That said, his central point has a lot of validity. The gap between liberals and libertarians on economic issues has indeed declined over the last forty years (notwithstanding some backsliding during the current recession), and it may be possible to reduce it further in the future.

At Slate, David Weigel claims that the libertarian Cato Institute may have purged its “liberaltarians” – scholars who advocate an alliance between libertarians and the political left:

The libertarian Cato Institute is parting with two of its most prominent scholars. Brink Lindsey, the institute’s vice president of research and the author of the successful book The Age of Abundance, is departing to take a position at the Kauffman Foundation. Will Wilkinson, a Cato scholar, collaborator with Lindsey, and editor of the online Cato Unbound, is leaving on September 15; he just began blogging politics for the Economist.

I asked for comment on this and was told that the institute does not typically comment on personnel matters. But you have to struggle not to see a political context to this. Lindsey and Wilkinson are among the Cato scholars who most often find common cause with liberals. In 2006, after the GOP lost Congress, Lindsey coined the term “Liberaltarians” to suggest that Libertarians and liberals could work together outside of the conservative movement. Shortly after this, he launched a dinner series where liberals and Libertarians met to discuss big ideas.... In 2009 and 2010, as the libertarian movement moved back into the right’s fold, Lindsey remained iconoclastic....

There are two big problems with Weigel’s insinuation. First, Cato has not changed or even deemphasized any of its positions on those issues where they have long differed with conservatives including the war on drugs, immigration, foreign policy, and others. If they were trying to move “back into the right’s fold,” one would think they would pulled back on these positions at least to some noticeable extent. Yet a quick glance at Cato’s website reveals recent attacks on standard conservative policies on Afghanistan, and the “Ground Zero mosque,” among other issues.

Second, it is strange to claim that Cato got rid of Lindsey for promoting a political alliance with the left at the very time when Lindsey himself recently disavowed that very idea, stating that “it’s clear enough that for now and the foreseeable future, the left is no more viable a home for libertarians than is the right.” If Cato objected to Lindsey’s advocacy of an alliance with the left, one would think they would have purged him back when he was actually advocating it, not after he has repudiated it. Wilkinson does still favor liberaltarianism, but apparently only as a philosophical dialogue. He holds out little if any prospect of an actual political coalition between the two groups.

Both Lindsey and Wilkinson have done much important and valuable work, and Cato is the poorer for losing them. At this point, however, there is no evidence that their departure was caused by a “purge” of liberaltarians intended to bring Cato “back into the right’s fold.”

CONFLICT OF INTEREST WATCH: I am a Cato adjunct scholar (an unpaid position). However, I am not an employee of Cato’s, and have no role in any Cato personnel decisions. In this particular case, I didn’t even know it was going to happen until it became public.

UPDATE: I should add that Lindsey’s most recent position on libertarian political strategy is that they should seek out the “center” and act as a kind of swing vote, cooperating with either liberals or conservatives depending on the issues at stake in any given political moment. This “libertarian centrist” strategy is very similar to ideas that Cato Institute Vice President David Boaz (one of the two most senior leaders at Cato) has advocated for many years (see e.g. here and his latest book, for recent examples). To put it mildly, it would be strange if Cato “purged” Lindsey for being a liberaltarian at the very time that he has shifted away from that view to the sort of approach that the Institute’s most senior writer on political strategy has long advocated.

Tim Lee has written an interesting response to to my most recent post on liberaltarianism. He addresses my argument that liberaltarianism is problematic because most liberals don’t in fact agree with libertarians on “social issues” as much as he assumes:

As Somin acknowledges, there are lots of right-wingers, “compassionate conservatives” included, that aren’t interested in any part of the libertarian policy agenda. I can’t remember the last time the Family Research Council published something I agreed with, even on “economic issues.” I think Pat Buchanan’s views on “economic issues” are appalling.

Fusionist organizations deal with these elements of the conservative movement by mostly ignoring them. They don’t write about their work. They don’t hire their employees or publish their scholars’ work. And instead, they work with people in the more free-market-friendly corners of the conservative world....

The distribution of opinions on the liberal side is similar. Common Cause doesn’t see eye-to-eye with libertarians on First Amendment issues. The ACLU largely does. And so a liberaltarian organization would hire ACLU-style liberals rather than Common-Cause-style liberals to work on First Amendment issues. And on the margin, this would raise the prominence of ACLU-style First Amendment advocacy relative to Common-Cause-style First Amendment advocacy within the liberal movement. You can tell a similar story on gay rights, the drug war, immigration, and other issues.

There are two problems with this parallel. Libertarian-leaning liberals are a small minority on the left on most issues. As you can see from the liberal reaction to the Citizens United decision, the Common Cause view of the First Amendment has many more liberal adherents than the ACLU version. And even the ACLU has retreated from strong advocacy of free speech when it seems to clash with antidiscrimination law, as co-blogger David Bernstein documented in his book You Can’t Say That. By contrast, the FRC’s and Pat Buchanan’s views on economic issues are relatively marginal among conservatives; they are in fact a big part of the reason why most mainstream conservatives have broken with Buchanan and his followers. Support for free markets remains the dominant economic view among conservative intellectuals and activists, though some conservative politicians (notably George W. Bush) choose the big government approach when in power.

The other problem is perhaps more serious. Even those liberals who do take the libertarian view on one or two social issues rarely do so across the board. The ACLU is fairly libertarian when it comes to free speech, but not on a wide range of other social issues. Thus, it would be hard to find many liberals who are willing to ally with libertarians across a broad range of social policies, as opposed to single issues. That’s no problem if limited single-issue cooperation is all you seek. But it is a big obstacle if you want to establish a broader “liberaltarian movement,” as Lee does.

Despite this disagreement, I still think Lee’s idea of a “Liberaltarian Institute” (my name for it, not Lee’s) is worth trying, and endorse Lee as a possible president for this organization.

UPDATE: In theory, it might be possible for a liberaltarian organization to hire liberals to work on just the one or two issues where those individuals largely agree with libertarians, even though they have substantial disagreements on almost everything else. In practice, however, I doubt very many liberals would want to work for a group with an agenda that they oppose on most issues.

Cato Institute scholar Brink Lindsey, a major originator of “liberaltarianism,” may have given up on the idea. But not all libertarians have. Julian Sanchez and Tim Lee have both written interesting responses to my recent post criticizing it. Sanchez argues that libertarians and liberals can cooperate with each other an issue-by-issue basis when they happen to agree, and also engage in a philosophical dialogue. Lee has a broader vision of potential left-libertarian collaboration.

I. Issue by Issue Cooperation.

In Sanchez’s view, “Libertarian individuals and institutions should make whatever tactical alliances on specific issues that best suit their dispositions and concerns.” On issues where we happen to agree with liberals, we should make tactical alliances with them. I don’t disagree with that. Indeed, I myself have noted areas of agreement with liberals such as Hillary Clinton and Dennis Kucinich. To my knowledge, hardly any libertarian thinker disagrees with the idea of making whatever tactical alliances are likely to be effective in a given situation. Liberaltarianism, however, is more than that. At the very least, it calls for a strategic political alliance that cuts across a wide range of issues. In Lindsey’s original formulation, it entails a broad philosophical fusion of the the two ideologies, a “new progressive fusionism.”

Sanchez also points to instances of issue-specific cooperation between liberals and libertarians and suggests that they refute my claim that there is little liberal interest in liberaltarianism. My claim, however, was not that liberals are opposed to any and all cooperation with libertarians, but rather that most have little or no interest in the sort of broader political alliance or philosophical fusion that liberaltarianism requires.

I also agree with Sanchez’s call for a dialogue between the two groups. However, that dialogue has already been taking place for many years. Libertarian scholars and intellectuals have been in constant dialogue with liberals and leftists since at least the days of Hayek’s debates with Keynes in the 1930s. Libertarians have devoted far more effort to understanding and analyzing left-wing ideas than conservative ones. That dialogue has produced many interesting arguments and ideas, and will no doubt produce more in the future. But it is unlikely to produce a political or philosophical coalition any time soon.

II. The “Liberaltarian Institute”: A Possible Program for Broader Cooperation?

In contrast to Sanchez, Tim Lee has a potential program for much broader liberaltarian cooperation. One might call it “the Liberaltarian Institute”:

In 2005, I was a founding employee of the Show-Me Institute, a “free market” think tank. What we meant by “free market” is that the organization devoted itself exclusively to those issues where conservatives and libertarians agreed. We wrote about taxes, school choice, property rights, health care policy, and so forth. We had an explicit policy that we didn’t do work on “social issues,” which in practice meant any issue where libertarians sided with liberals....

And the Show-Me Institute is hardly unique. There’s a nationwide network of think tanks called the State Policy Network, with member organizations in almost every state, that are built on this same premise....

Crucially, the basis of the alliance isn’t that libertarians and conservatives agreed on some kind of compromise position on “social issues,” we just didn’t talk about them on the job. And this works remarkably well. When you work at a “free-market think tank,” you pretty quickly get used to the fact that tax policy is on the agenda and gay rights are not....

So conceptually speaking, it wouldn’t be hard to create a liberaltarian movement. All you’d have to do is create a mirror image of the “free market” think tanks. Hire people like Radley Balko and Glenn Greenwald. Pay them to write about all the issues that “free market” think tanks don’t: foreign policy, civil liberties, gay rights, the drug war, immigration, torture, the death penalty, and so forth. Don’t hire anyone to write about taxes, school choice, guns, or other topics where libertarians and liberals have strong disagreements.

If you build a Liberaltarian Institute, Lee suggests, they will come!

There are at least two major problems with Lee’s idea. First, many libertarian organizations do in fact devote a lot of time and effort to issues such as drug legalization, immigration, and criminal justice where we agree more with liberals than conservatives. The Cato Institute – the most prominent libertarian think tank, and Reason, the most prominent libertarian publication – are excellent examples.

Even some of the organizations Lee lists as focusing exclusively on on libertarian-conservative issues are more complex than he thinks. To take just one case that I happen to be familiar with, Lee claims that the Institute for Justice is “is a libertarian law firm that focuses almost entirely on issues where libertarians and the ACLU disagree.” In reality, many of IJ’s clients are poor and minorities who have been victimized by various government regulations and property rights violations. Kelo v. City of New London, IJ’s most famous case, attracted a great deal of liberal support. When I wrote IJ’s amicus brief in a previous major property rights case, we successfully solicited one from the ACLU on the same side. IJ also advocates many legal theories (e.g. – reviving the Privileges and Immunities Clause) that annoy judicial conservatives, and deliberately avoids the issue of affirmative action so as not to alienate potential liberal and minority supporters.

These and other libertarian efforts at outreach to the left have produced some useful cooperation on individual issues. But it is significant that they haven’t produced anything approaching a broad alliance.

Second, the range of issues where libertarians and liberals genuinely agree is narrower than Lee assumes. Most liberals do not in fact agree with libertarians on civil liberties, the war on drugs, and gay rights. Certainly, both groups decry many conservative policies on these issues. But they don’t really agree on the alternatives to them. On civil liberties, for example, many liberals favor hate speech laws, restrictions on political speech by corporations, wide-ranging sexual harrassment laws that infringe on freedom of speech, and so forth. On gay rights, libertarians favor laissez-faire, while liberals tend to favor antidiscrimination laws that restrict the freedom of private organizations. On the War on Drugs, only a minority of liberals favor anything close to the full-blown legalization advocated by libertarians. Foreign policy, of course, is an issue that divides both liberals and libertarians among themselves.

The conservative-libertarian free market think tanks Lee points to succeed because the conservatives and libertarians there agree not only on rejecting liberal economic policies but also on an affirmative agenda of severely restricting government’s role in the economy. It would be much more difficult to run an economic policy think tank that brought together libertarians with “compassionate conservatives” who want to replace liberal economic interventions with conservative ones.

None of this precludes tactical alliances between liberals and libertarians on particular issues. But it does make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to create the sort of broader “liberaltarian movement” that Lee advocates.

Nonetheless, it would be wrong to reject Lee’s idea for a liberaltarian think tank out of hand. Let’s try it and see. If you’re a left-leaning libertarian or libertarian-leaning liberal with a lot of money on your hands, I urge you to fund Lee’s suggestion. Establish the Liberaltarian Institute and hire someone like Lee as its president. I fear that the project won’t work because of the sorts of problems discussed above. But if it did succeed, it could potentially make a valuable contribution to public debate.

Reason has an interesting debate on the question of libertarian political strategy. Should libertarians seek to forge an alliance with conservatives or liberals or neither? Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg and Tea Party leader Matt Kibbe argue for reconsituting the libertarian-conservative coalition that was badly frayed if not completely severed during the Bush years. Cato Institute scholar Brink Lindsey argues against that view. Although I am much closer to Lindsey’s political views than Goldberg’s, I find myself agreeing somewhat more with Goldberg’s position in this particular debate.

I. Brink Lindsey’s Retreat from Liberaltarianism.

Lindsey seems to have stepped back from his much-discussed 2006 argument for a “liberaltarian” coalition between libertarians and liberals.

Today, Lindsey argues that libertarians should instead try to occupy “the center,” because an alliance with the left is no more viable than one with the right:

Does that mean I think that libertarians should ally with the left instead? No, that’s equally unappealing. I do believe that libertarian ideas are better expressed in the language of liberalism rather than that of conservatism. But it’s clear enough that for now and the foreseeable future, the left is no more viable a home for libertarians than is the right.

It would be interesting to know what led to Lindsey’s change of heart about liberaltarianism. I suspect that the vast expansion of government promoted by the Obama administration and the decline of relatively pro-market views among liberal intellectuals were both contributing factors. Lindsey’s new view of liberaltarianism is now remarkably similar to the one I expressed back when he made his original proposal: that liberals and libertarians have much in common in terms of ultimate values, but relatively little common ground in terms of practical policy agendas.

II. What Would Libertarian Centrism Look Like?

I would also be interested to learn more about what Lindsey means when he urges libertarians to seek out the center. Lindsey does advise this:

Declaring independence from the right would require big changes. Cooperation with the right on free-market causes would need to be supplemented by an equivalent level of cooperation with the left on personal freedom, civil liberties, and foreign policy issues. Funding for political candidates should be reserved for politicians whose commitment to individual freedom goes beyond economic issues. In the resources they deploy, the causes they support, the language they use, and the politicians they back, libertarians should be making the point that their differences with the right are every bit as important as their differences with the left.

It’s not clear to me, however, that Lindsey’s program is much different from what many libertarian organizations are already doing. Many of them have long championed such causes as drug legalization (a signature libertarian issue, if there is one), removing restrictions on immigration, and curtailing law enforcement powers, for example. Defense policy is an issue that divides libertarians among themselves, as Lindsey himself has reason to know. Still, more isolationist libertarians have not been shy about expressing their differences with conservatives in this field. Lindsey’s own employer, the Cato Institute, is a good example. Overall, it’s hard to name any prominent libertarian organization or think tank that hasn’t been involved in major causes that put them at odds with conservatives. At the level of the mass public, libertarian-leaning voters have in fact tended to be “swing voters” in recent elections, with a relatively weak sense of partisan loyalty.

To the extent that this hasn’t resulted in “an equivalent level” of cooperation with the left as that with the right on economic policy, it may be because few liberals have been willing to reciprocate. It’s striking that Lindsey’s own highly publicized efforts at forging liberaltarian cooperation met with little or no positive response among liberals. The same goes for similar attempts by other prominent libertarian intellectuals. Another factor is that the the left’s commitment to “noneconomic” freedom has eroded over the last several decades. Many on the left now favor such policies as paternalistic regulation, censorship of “hate speech,” government-mandated “diversity,” and so on. There are still important social issues where libertarians and the left see eye to eye. But there are also many where left-wing liberals favor not laissez-faire but a different kind of government intervention from that supported by the social right.

A successful libertarian centrism – if possible at all – would require a much stronger foundation that Lindsey lays out here. Among other things, it would have to overcome the difficulties associated with operating outside the two major parties in a political system like ours. The longtime failures of the Libertarian Party are relevant here. It would also have to reckon with the reality emphasized by Goldberg: many libertarian positions simply are not centrist in the important sense that they are far from those of the median voter.

Even if a strong centrist libertarian movement were created, that still would not eliminate the need for political coalitions with either the left or the right. So long as libertarians are not a political majority (and they are in fact about 10-15% of the electorate), they cannot succeed without cooperation from other political movements.

III. The Libertarian-Conservative Alternative.

In the short run, I think there is no alternative to some sort of political coalition with conservatives, a position I argued for back in 2008, soon after Obama’s election. As I expected, Obama and the Democrats have heavily emphasized expanded government spending and economic regulation – precisely those issues that divide libertarians from liberals while uniting them with conservatives. Moreover, the conservative backlash against Obama has to a large extent taken a libertarian small-government form rather than the nativist or right-wing populist forms that could easily have happened. It’s noteworthy that the Tea Party movement has overwhelmingly focused on libertarian themes, to the point where some social conservatives have attacked it for failing to emphasize social issues.

Most important, libertarians have a strong interest in restoring divided government, which would make it much harder for the Democrats to enact more massive expansions of government power. Historically, divided government has been a great boon to the small-government cause. For the moment, the only way to restore divided government is to cooperate with conservative Republicans. I hope for a Republican victory in 2010 for much the same reasons as I wanted a Democratic one back in 2006.

I also think that some of Lindsey’s arguments against a libertarian-conservative alliance are overblown. For example, he argues that the conservative movement is no longer a fit ally for libertarians because it has been taken over by “a raving, anti-intellectual populism, as expressed by (among many, many others) Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.” I’m no fan of either Palin or Beck. Still, just about any major political movement has its share of crude demagogues. As Lindsey admits, libertarians and conservatives were able to productively cooperate on many issues from the 1970s to the 90s. It’s not clear to me that Palin and Beck are any more objectionable than Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, and Jesse Helms were. The typical conservative activist of thirty years ago was likely more anti-intellectual, populist, and xenophobic than, say, today’s Tea Party activists, who are on average more educated than the general population and often cite high-brow writers like Hayek.

Finally, it seems to me that the political right is now in flux. Having suffered painful defeats in 2006 and 2008, and witnessed the failure of Bush’s efforts to establish Republican dominance through “compassionate conservatism,” many conservative Republicans may be open to moving in a more small-government oriented direction. The newfound prominence of libertarian-leaning Republicans like Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan is some evidence of that. Libertarians might help influence the GOP in that direction. By contrast, there seems little chance of our being able to effectively influence the course of liberal Democrats at this particular point in time, when most of them seem more committed than ever to expanding the power of government and less willing than a decade ago to consider reducing it. Political defeat might change that, as it did in the 1980s and 90s. But the defeat will probably have to come first.

That said, I also think that there is a lot to Lindsey’s critique of the right for its major streaks of nationalism, illiberalism, intolerance, and xenophobia. On these points, Lindsey is often more persuasive than Jonah Goldberg’s rebuttal. Hayek’s classic critique of conservatism remains relevant here. For these reasons, I don’t propose any full-blown “fusionism” of the kind once advocated by Frank Meyer. I have too many deep disagreements with conservatives to want that (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Short-term or even medium-term political cooperation is not the same thing as a deep affinity. I also don’t propose that we ignore the many flaws of the right or forget about the wrongs of the Bush era. Political allies don’t have to be soulmates. But we can and should recognize that right now we have an important common interest.