Bloggingheads with Jonah Goldberg about Liberaltarianism

The more I hear you talk about this, Will, the more I understand your inclinations. I don't mean to be simplistic, but a part of this whole thing seems to stem from the idea that conservatives are icky because they like church. You might need to meet a few more urban conservatives. Many of the urban conservatives I know are libertarian-leaning and very light on the church.

I'm still at a loss for how 'eww, church' is that different from 'eww, gays', but I guess claiming to be open-minded is a lot different from actually being open-minded.

Look... religion makes truth claims... asserting the right to be gay without facing discrimination does not. Hence, religion is legitimately open to rational criticism and debate.. gayness, like being black, white, male, or female, is not. To criticize religious people is to criticize their ideas; to criticize gay people is to criticize their... I don't know, right to exist?

There's quite a bit more empirical evidence (i.e. mass murder) for the contention that religion is bad than there is for the proposition that gayness is bad. So there's a difference. Also, choosing who and what to believe, while not exactly free of coercive social pressures, is a matter of choice in a way that sexual orientation is not. But, whatever. I'm surely just proving your point that atheism is a symptom of closed mindedness.

A discussion of the role of religion in politics was not fleshed out in this diavlog, but my impression is that Will's views on religion are deeper than "ew, church is icky". Straw men aren't exactly productive discussion.

There was a discussion of it. Specifically where Will mentioned his atheism and his antipathy for churchy conservatives.

I just think Will's liberaltarian project is influenced by stereo-types more than he might like to admit. He wants to hang around with liberals because he feels an affinity for them that he doesn't feel for conservatives. That's fine, but I think he might be surprised at the number of urban conservatives he would get along well with. There are a large number of liberal Republicans and conservatives who don't care about red-blooded social issues, but are focused on economics. I know more than a few people who voted for McCain (or rather against Obama) and did so solely for economic reasons.

Are you going to post a reply to Matt Welch's article at reason?

I've found all these liberaltarian discussions very convincing. By which I mean that they convinced me to become an an-cap. I think it was seeing the phrase "large government libertarian" on my monitor that did it.

I've been looking forward to this particular BH showdown for past week and a half, and it didn't disappoint...and frankly I was bracing for disappointment during the first half hour as Jonah tried to sandbox the debate into a contest of academic political labeling. I, for one, think personal predispositions (alluded to in the previous comment) take primacy over any academic label, as they more profoundly shape our values than any high level political treatise or even middlebrow political tribalism. Jonah's rebuttal regarding Conservatives having more babies, besides making your fiance's ears burn (http://www.reason.com/news/show/126855.html), is discredited in my case, as I was born into conservative, religious, military family...and yet I emerged liberal Democrat, agnostic, against the very military adventurism that paid my dad's wages, and frequently visiting your blog and finding myself refining and reconsidering my political notions.

But hey, maybe I'm just another wierd anomaly. I mean, there couldn't possibly be any people my age and younger who identify with liberals culturally and libertarians economically, right?

That's anecdotal evidence. The fact is that ideological disposition is significantly heritable, even if it isn't exactly duplicated from parents to children. The question is whether defections from conservative to liberal camps are outweighed by the fertility gap between conservatives and liberals supplemented by however many defections there are from liberal to conservative (which I imagine is less than it's converse, but still exists).

Will,

do you really think that your personal predispositions (more liberal vs. more conservative) should influence in any way how you should behave vis-a-vis larger societal phenomena?
What I mean is that Hayek famously warned that we must have two essentially unrelated outlooks (small-scale/large-scale), so it's possible that when talking about large-scale politics the traditional categories break-down and we don't even know what the right attitudes should actually be.