For those who have not yet updated their feed subscriptions and bookmarks as I slowly wind this site down, I wanted to point to my latest two posts at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen (subscribe here), which go into a lot of depth about what I view as the recent setbacks for the idea of a left-libertarian alliance, and also about why I nonetheless continue to view the liber-al-tarian project as nonetheless an important idea that should represent the future of politically involved libertarianism.
From the first post, pertaining to the impact of recent events on the possibilities for a left-libertarian coalition:
Rather than consider ways of achieving liberal ends (which are usually shared by
liberals and libertarians alike) that may have incorporated libertarian thinking or were at the very least highly targeted, progressive politicians have been choosing extraordinarily broad and intrusive means of achieving those ends. This is not to say that those politicians ever really cared what libertarians thought; only that this route of action has undermined any possibility of a significant percentage of libertarians (again broadly defined as fiscally conservative and socially liberal) becoming
intermediate-to-long-term members of the Dem coaltion.
All that said, Will Wilkinson is no doubt correct that all this talk of a left-libertarian
political coalition misses the entire point of “liberaltarianism,” which is not properly understood as being about coalition-building...
And from the second, on why liber-al-tarianism remains important:
The promise of this derivation of modern libertarianism is not that
it attempts to paint libertarianism in a light that is palatable to modern
liberals/Progressives, which our friend Kip rightly fears; instead, its promise is that it can help to rescue the fundamental worldview of libertarianism from the prejudices instilled in it by such a lengthy alliance with the Right. Simply put, the promise of liberaltarianism is that it can help to build a libertarianism that is more true to its classically liberal roots. In so doing, it is possible that it will become a libertarianism that modern liberals are willing to take seriously, and even learn from.
I'm particularly proud of the second post, but if you have a few minutes, please go read all of both posts, where comments are open.
