Cato Unbound tackles the issue (trend? contradiction in terms? phenomenon? hoax?) with a series of essays by Markos “Daily Kos” Moulitsas, Harold Meyerson, Nick Gillespie, and Bruce Reed.

Frankly, I think Matt Yglesias has the most realistic take on all of this, which is that it’s mostly folly. We can’t even get the left to be libertarian on the issues where they’re supposed to be libertarian. So it seems a bit fanciful to start talking about compromises.

I’m convinced that libertarianism has now officially seceded from the “right” (whatever the “right” is these days), but I really don’t foresee any long-term alignment with the left, either. My take on this has always been that barring some miraculous development (a rich, charismatic, uncrazy libertarian decides to run for president, for example), any progress we make is going to be incremental, and will come about by forming alliances on an issue-by-issue basis. Even that will be difficult, given that most people in Washington and the chattering class can’t comprehend a policy discussion unless it’s laid out in hues of red and blue.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 10:56 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.