They love big government and all FDRs works.
Here is a bigger view of the Political System's Box:
http://www.moral-politics.com/xPolitics.aspx?menu=Political_Ideologies&action=Draw&choice=PoliticalIdeologies.All&fullsize=y
(According to the test at the same site, I fall into the Fundamentalist Category, so you all know where I am coming from.)
Does that help?
Why should you take the socialist George Lakoff's word for it?
I am a libertarian who believes, like Frank Chodorov and Albert Jay Nock, that moral rectitude is necessary for people to be free.
THe ACLU is a thoroughly libertarian outfit. The ACLU routinely stifles free speech in its attempts to force everyone to drink libertarian koolaid.
It is a political philosophy which advocates individual rights and a limited government.
Libertarian Capitalists believe individuals should be free to do anything they want, so long as they do not infringe upon the equal rights of others.
They further believe that the only legitimate use of force, whether public or private, is to protect those rights.
For libertarians, there are no positive rights (such as to food or shelter or health care), only negative rights (such as to not be assaulted, abused, robbed or censored).
What is wrong with this, and how is it "Liberalism"? Someone seems to confuse legality with morality.
You are flat out wrong. You also don't have a clue what libertarianism is.
Libertarians aren't conservatives, except on economic issues, but because of economic issues they aren't liberals either.
Bad as their views are, I'd rather live in a Libertarian-run country than one run by either of the major parties at this point.
Libertarians are fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
They most certainly are not Liberals.
It might be easier to have a discussion about it if we know exactly who or what it is we're discussing.
Actually, the people commonly referred to as "liberals" in this country are not liberals; they are leftists.
Libertarians are not "liberals" per the common American usage; they are, though, liberals in the historical sense.
I once flirted with joining the Libertarian Party, but when I discovered that the only thing their rank and file really care about is decriminalizing drugs and prostitution, I passed.
Libertarian: A person with faith in the natural wisdom and restraint of pro wrestling fans.
Terms like "liberal", "conservative", "reactionary", and "revolutionary" are politically relative. Terms like "libertarian" and "socialist" are politically absolute. When you start throwing them in together you get a bunch of meaningless drivel, which is exactly what you have here.
All they are doing is taking votes away from the GOP and increasing the dems chances.
Case in point was Perot. Thanks to morons who voted for Perot....... we had the Beverly Hillbillies for 8 years.
(and yes I know Perot was no libertarian)
Equally, both terms, with liberal added as well, have meant quite varied things in different countries and periods of history.
The person who sees his conservatism as chiefly liberty guided and adheres to original founders restraints often self-styles themselves as libertarian. Reagan used the term in that sense and I think Sowell does as well.
Hayek best defined himself as "an old whig" a term that even Russell Kirk found appealing.
The Libertarian Party member is something that varies with the candidates endorsed.
The sort of libertarianism that I find as ill suited to conservatism's big umbrella is the ideological libertarian. I use "ideological" in the sense explain by Kirk in The Politics of Prudence where he begins by quoting Minogue:
“to denote any doctrine which presents the hidden and saving truth about the world in the form of social analysis. It is a feature of all such doctrines to incorporate a general theory of the mistakes of everybody else.”That “hidden and saving truth” is a fraud—a complex of contrived falsifying“myths”, disguised as history, about the society we have inherited.There are those that in the sixties would have been labeled Randian Objectivists that take the J. S. Mill non-agression principle and see it a single and saving truth that all society can be built upon. While holding individuals of that group in general regard, I can't buy that koolaid.Raymond Aron, in The Opium of the Intellectuals, analyzes the three myths that have seduced Parisian intellectuals: the myths of the Left, of the Revolution, of the Proletariat.
To summarize the analysis of ideology undertaken by such scholars as Minogue, Aron, J. L. Talmon, Thomas Molnar, Lewis Feuer, and Hans Barth, this word ideology, since the Second World War, usually has signified a dogmatic political theory which is an endeavor to substitute secular goals and doctrines for religious goals and doctrines; and which promises to overthrow present dominations so that the oppressed may be liberated. Ideology’s promises are what Talmon calls “political messianism”.
The ideologue promises salvation in this world, hotly declaring that there exists no other realm of being.
Eric Voegelin, Gerhart Niemeyer, and other writers have emphasized that ideologues “immanentize the symbols of transcendence”—that is, corrupt the vision of salvation through grace in death into false promises of complete happiness inthis mundane realm. Ideology, in short, is a political formula that promises mankind an earthly paradise; but in cruel fact what ideology has created is a series of terrestrial hells.
I set down below some of the vices of ideology.
1) Ideology is inverted religion, denying the Christian doctrine of salvation through grace in death, and substituting collective salvation here on earth through violent revolution. Ideology inherits the fanaticism that sometimes has afflicted religious faith, and applies that intolerant belief to concerns secular.
2) Ideology makes political compromise impossible: the ideologue will accept no deviation from the Absolute Truth of his secular revelation. This narrow vision brings about civil war, extirpation of “reactionaries”, and the destruction of beneficial functioning social institutions.
3) Ideologues vie one with another in fancied fidelity to their Absolute Truth;and they are quick to denounce deviationists or defectors from their partyorthodoxy. Thus fierce factions are raised up among the ideologues themselves, and they war mercilessly and endlessly upon one another, as did Trotskyites and Stalinists. The evidence of ideological ruin lies all about us. How then can it be that theallurements of ideology retain great power in much of the world? The answer to that question is given in part by this observation from Raymond Aron: “When the intellectual feels no longer attached either to the community orthe religion of his forebears, he looks to progressive ideology to fill the vacuum. The main difference between the progressivism of the disciple of Harold Laski or Bertrand Russell and the Communism of the disciple of Lenin concerns not so much the content as the style of the ideologies and the allegiance they demand. ”Ideology provides sham religion and sham philosophy, comforting in its way to those who have lost or never have known genuine religious faith, and to those not sufficiently intelligent to apprehend real philosophy. The fundamental reason why we must set our faces against ideology—so wrote the wise Swiss editor Hans Barth—is that ideology is opposed to truth: it denies the possibility of truth in politics or in anything else, substituting economic motive and class interest for abiding norms. Ideology even denies human consciousness and power of choice. In Barth’s words, “The disastrous effect of ideological thinking in its radical form is not only to cast doubt on the quality and structure of the mind that constitute man’s distinguishing characteristic but also to undermine the foundation of his social life.” --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think Walter Williams (*swoon*) would disagree with your assessment. And I have great respect for Walter.