As we homeless conservatives contemplate such things as forming a new Party and who should be asked to join it, I would like to reprint part of a post I did three years ago on the difference between ‘Libertarians’ and ‘libertarians’ — a philosophical differential between Evil and Good, respectively…
There are two types of libertarians: Libertarians and libertarians.
-The former are ideologues who follow a system of ideas designed in the sterile laboratories of their own minds. Like all Ideologies, theirs cannot allow for any deviation from the belief system because the whole thing will collapse if any part is proven defective. And they have so much psychologically invested in their Ideology that it’s collapse would bring about a breakdown. Jacob Burckhardt called them ‘the terrible simplifiers’.
-As for the latter, small ‘l’ type, I think Russell Kirk provided a spot-on definition of them:
First, a number of the men and women who accept the label “libertarian” are not actually ideological libertarians at all, but simply conservatives under another name. These are people who perceive in the growth of the monolithic state, especially during the past half century, a grim menace to ordered liberty; and of course they are quite right. They wish to emphasize their attachment to personal and civic freedom by employing this 20th century word derived from liberty. With them I have little quarrel — except that by so denominating themselves, they seem to countenance a crowd of political fantastics who “license they mean, when they cry liberty.”
So, while I agree…that we should try and make common cause with some of them — the libertarians — I think it futile to attempt to do so with the Libertarians. They’re lost in Ideology. And you can never have a productive argument with an Ideologue.
To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
