Why I'm not worried about the Libertarian/Conservative Divorce

I've thought about a response to the warnings of Ryan Sager that social conservatives and libertarians are going splitsville and scuttling the Republican Party in the process. This was, I thought, a ridiculous idea unless malcontents like Sager managed to talk us all into it, and I had formulated a two word response for him, the second word of which was "off".

But no need; just tour around the blogosphere and take a look at the reactions of different denizens to the death of Milton Friedman. Here's a diarist I saw at Daily Kos:

Milton Friedman, the champion of free markets, died. Friedman spent his career teaching in a private college that was supported by government grants to students.

His tenure didn't allow the free market to work. If some professor that was more talented wanted to work at the University of Chicago they couldn't hire him. Friedman had tenure and couldn't be fired. The tenure ensures that the free market will not work....He would talk the free market, but he was a hypocrit. [sic]

Whether that's really representative of the leftosphere I'll let you decide, but in my brief walk through Technorati it seemed to be.

Conversely, it's very hard to find anything bad being said about Friedman even among the social conservatives--of which I consider myself a strong one, and I admire Prof. Friedman's legacy and found him an eloquent spokesman for the necessity of human freedom. My primary policy disagreement with Friedman was on the issue of illegal drugs--and that's because drug addicts are not truly free men. But I don't dissent from an impressive mind like Friedman's lightly.

I'd invite you to take your own tour around the conservative blogs to see what they say about Friedman, but it would be hard to beat this tribute by social-con Mary Katharine Ham. There are plenty of others, all showing that Friedman's libertarian principles go deep across the Right--even when they're not embraced, they are at least establishing the vocabulary of the intraparty debate. The other day as I ran down info for this post, I saw an item on the Christian Coalition's issues page--among their markedly non-libertarian agenda items was "Making Permanent the 2001-2003 Federal Tax Cuts". Even the Christian Coalition--though they wouldn't approve of my "implied cursing" in the first paragraph--even they have a little dose of Friedman trickling through their veins.

And I wanted to mention another reason that social conservatives and libertarians will be sticking together--there are many, but this is a good one:

If you enjoy this blog, please buy me one of these.

Even if, as XRLQ argues--or does he?, the frontal assault on the Second Amendment is slacking off, there is still an entire United Nations that is extremely hostile to private ownership of "small arms". And the consistent direction of progressive thought and jurisprudence is toward a greater erosion of sovereignty and deference to foreign and international law.

Ultimately, though, as I argue again and again on this blog, the kinship between Christian conservatives and libertarians goes deeper than just issues, and into ideas:

One of the greatest things about Christianity—one of its most powerful, if most cynical and unappealing, insights—is the fallen nature of man. This is, I think, one of the reasons for its worldly success: most people can understand and acknowledge that there is an evil and selfish element in even the most saintly of us.

This is one reason Christianity and modern American-style conservatism are so closely related. Both reject the notion that humans may perfect themselves. The first sin in the Garden was committed on the false promise that “ye shall be as gods”; but likewise the false promise of Marxism was that we might pull ourselves by our own bootstraps out of misery and into a terrestrial paradise. Millions and millions of deaths later, we see that’s not the case and that it was hubris to think that we could ignore those realistic assessments of human nature offered by Christianity—and by Chesterton, and by public-choice economics. The safest bet is that people will do what is in their interest. Anything else, any act of kindness or virtue, is a mitzvah, but it’s nothing to bet the farm on, or build a society on.

If you have always depended on the kindness of strangers, you have probably lived a miserable life.

So everybody calm down about this big messy breakup--it's not like either of us have anywhere to go anyway.