{"id":33496,"date":"2017-09-24T01:00:25","date_gmt":"2017-09-24T05:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33496"},"modified":"2017-09-13T10:12:25","modified_gmt":"2017-09-13T14:12:25","slug":"qotd-libertarians-and-conservatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/09\/24\/qotd-libertarians-and-conservatives\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Libertarians and Conservatives"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>\u2018Who lost the libertarians?\u201d It\u2019s a question you hear a lot from conservatives of late. The reason should be obvious to anyone who has followed the conservative movement\u2019s internecine intellectual frictions over the last decade \u2014 or decades. Self-described libertarians are a minority, even among the ranks of people one could properly describe as libertarian. On many, or even most, contentious public-policy issues \u2014 economics, gun rights, health care, free speech, regulation, constitutional interpretation \u2014 most support for the libertarian position actually comes from people who describe themselves as conservatives. In other words, conservatives tend to be libertarian, but libertarians tend not to be conservative.<\/p>\n<p>And self-described libertarians are very keen on emphasizing that distinction. They justifiably point to the areas, many of them quite significant, where the bulk of libertarians depart from the conservative consensus: foreign policy, drugs, gay rights, etc. Of course, the demarcations between these different camps are not hard and clearly defined. Many conservatives now \u2014 and even more in the past \u2014 hold the same convictions as libertarians on foreign policy and drugs and, to a lesser extent, on issues such as gay rights. But as a generalization, libertarians want to have their own identity, separate and distinct from that of conservatism. They\u2019re a bit like the Canadians you meet abroad who go to almost obsessive lengths to show everyone that they aren\u2019t American.<\/p>\n<p>Jonah Goldberg, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/426606\/fusionism-conservatives-libertarians-success-national-review\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Fusionism, Sixty Years Later&#8221;, <em>National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2015-11-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2018Who lost the libertarians?\u201d It\u2019s a question you hear a lot from conservatives of late. The reason should be obvious to anyone who has followed the conservative movement\u2019s internecine intellectual frictions over the last decade \u2014 or decades. Self-described libertarians are a minority, even among the ranks of people one could properly describe as libertarian. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,53,41,13],"tags":[431,550],"class_list":["post-33496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-conservatism","tag-libertarianism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Ig","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33497,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33496\/revisions\/33497"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}