A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

The new new fusionism?

There’s been a fair bit of blogospheric discussion of this piece by Brink Lindsey in the New Republic calling for a liberal-libertarian alliance (the link I provided is to the publicly accessible version at the Cato Institute website).

The problem with proposals like these, it seems to me, is that they inevitably overestimate the number of libertarian voters out there, and thus their desirability as a partner in some grand coalition. Even polls that seem to show that there is a significant group of libertarian-leaning voters usually rely on generic questions about government in general. When it comes to abolishing particular programs libertarian sentiment appears to be much thinner on the ground. The economies of the much vaunted “libertarian” west and southwest, for instance, turn out on inspection to be heavily dependent on government land programs, infrastructure subsidies, and government-sponsored industries like aerospace and defense contractors. How likely do you think those voters are to embrace thoroughgoing laissez-faire?

Part of the reason this idea has gotten so much attention, no doubt, is that libertarians are vastly overrepresented on the internet in comparison to their presence in the population at large. I’m willing to guess that there are many more red-state economic populists that the Democrats could potentially pick up than there are libertarians.

4 responses to “The new new fusionism?”

  1. Gaius

    Your permalinks went missing. Boooo. And this beta baloney is really irksome.

    So, Democrats can permanently attract libertarian support if they adopt Wall Street’s fiscal and immigration policies, abandon fair trade for free trade (don’t even think about economic nationalism – protecting the home market for products made by American workers), and abandon both social security and medicare/medicaid.

    Hey. Wouldn’t that be great?

    The new and shiny plan for your retirment? The same one they had before 1935. Ya better save up!

    What a surprise to see this piece offering to re-define “progressive” to mean the same thing as “19th Century Manchester liberal” in the New Republic.

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  2. Lee

    (Clicking on the title of the post should give you a permalink.)

    Also interesting is that there is virtually no mention of foreign policy in Lindsey’s piece. I assume that any libertarianism acceptable to TNR would have to be one that was ok with big government abroad. If anything, a lot of libertarians would seem to have more in common with the left on that score than TNR-style Clintonian centrists. Though, granted, libertarians do seem to be somewhat divided on foreign policy questions.

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  3. Thuloid

    I’d be all in favor of every bit of that, Gaius, but as you suggest, none of it will happen.

    The reason foreign policy isn’t mentioned, I think, is probably that it’s just bad politics for the Democrats to be that non-interventionist. In effect, they’d be exchanging the libertarian vote (massive as it is) for the Wilsonian or other internationalist–if done at the same time as a move toward pure liberal economics, this would give the Republicans perfect opportunity to capture a permanent majority simply by way of offering a whiff of economic populism.

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  4. The new new new fusionism? « A Thinking Reed

    […] was supposed to be an alliance of pro-lifers and foreign policy hawks. And then there was “liberaltarianism.” Now it’s an alliance between “neo-Benedictines” and “libertarians.” […]

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