Monday, December 04, 2006

On The Brink of Madness   [Jonah Goldberg]

Brink Lindsey — a very sharp guy — has a provocative proposal in the latest New Republic proposing a new alliance between liberals and libertarians (it's behind a firewall, but Sebastian Mallaby summarizes here ).

"Liberaltarians," if you ask me, starts  unpersuasively analytically but slowly works up a head of steam toward crazy-enough-to-work territory. Lindsey argues that fusionism is dead and that liberals and libertarians can — or should — find common ground on all sorts of economic issues. I'm going to write about the attempt to put the Libertarians in the Democratic camp in the next issue of NR, but color me unconvinced. At the most basic level, what Lindsey is really asking is for liberals to give up the psychological and political impulses that make them liberals in the first place. I don't think that's possible, no matter how "exhausted" the ideological categories may or may not be. But, such a project could succeed at the margins. If libertarians and environmentalists want to join forces against idiotic ag policies, great! Indeed, as a fusionist conservative, I must say what may not be obvious to proponents and opponents of a new liberal-libertarian fusionism: We should all hope that Lindsey's project succeeds. Who among us unapologetic conservatives wouldn't like to see the two parties get in a bidding war over who is more libertarian on economic issues? I know I'd be ecstatic over such a struggle for the new — currently mythological — "libertarian center."

12/04 10:33 AMShare