Via Julian, boy is Kevin Drum’s reaction to Brink Lindsey’s excellent piece on “liberaltarians” disappointing.

Lindsey’s piece is a pretty clear-eyed look at whether liberals and libertarians can get along. He avoids pretending that there’s a huge pool of libertarians just waiting to be tapped (though he makes a nod in that direction by claiming that 13% of the population is “libertarian-leaning”). He doesn’t pretend that anyone who believes in individual rights is automatically a libertarian, even admitting that most of the social policies favored by libertarians were originally “championed by the political left.” And he forthrightly admits that social policies don’t matter that much anyway: it’s in the economic sphere where the libertarian rubber meets the liberal road. Of course, that’s also where the “liberaltarian” dream dies a nasty and horrible death

Drum seems to be going out of his way to misread Lindsey here. Here’s what Lindsey actually said:

Liberals and libertarians already share considerable common ground, if they could just see past their differences to recognize it. Both generally support a more open immigration policy. Both reject the religious right’s homophobia and blastocystophilia. Both are open to rethinking the country’s draconian drug policies. Both seek to protect the United States from terrorism without gratuitous encroachments on civil liberties or extensions of executive power. And underlying all these policy positions is a shared philosophical commitment to individual autonomy as a core political value. The central challenge in cementing a new fusionist alliance–and, make no mistake, it is a daunting one–is to elaborate a vision of economic policy, and policy reform, that both liberals and libertarians can support.

I don’t understand how you get “social policies don’t matter that much anyway” from that paragraph. In fact, Lindsey’s point is precisely the opposite: things do matter, and they could therefore serve as a strong foundation for an alliance.

When Lindsey says that the central challenge is hammering out disagreements on economic policy, he’s not saying that those are the issues that matter more. He’s just pointing out that those are the areas where disagreements exist.

I think Drum’s post–and even more so Drum’s commenters–illustrate the real obstacle to a liberal-libertarian alliance: the coalitional psychology of America’s left-right divide is so deeply entrenched that it’s almost impossible to overcome. Americans see the political world as divided into two warring camps, one on the left and one on the right. And for historical reasons, libertarians are perceived as being in the right-hand camp.

And the dynamics of the political process make these groupings self-reinforcing. Someone might initially become a liberal because of her views on abortion or gay rights. But once she makes liberal friends and reads liberal blogs, she comes to regard people who like tax cuts as being in the same category as people who bash gay people and oppose abortion rights. After a while, hearing someone advocate tax cuts gives her the same visceral negative reaction as hearing someone bash gay people.

As a result, you get the kinds of absurd caricatures you find in Drums comments: “Libertarians: Liberals who want to be racist, and conservatives who want to smoke pot.” “As a practical matter Libertarianism is basicly selfishness on stilts.”

There are enough people who think this way that a liberal-libertarian fusionist movement is likely to be doomed before it gets off the ground. No matter how much libertarians and liberals have in common, most of them are going to have trouble getting over their reflexive dislike of one another–dislike that was reinforced during a half-century of conservatarian fusionism.

Which isn’t to say that this will be the case forever. If the GOP continues to be the part of warmongering and intolerance, at some point liberals and libertarians will become accustomed to thinking of each other as allies rather than adversaries. But it will take years to overcome the groupthink that currently reinforces the perception that libertarianism is a movement of the right.