Monday, October 11, 2010

Fiscal Conservative + Anti-War + Gay = Libertarian

In reflecting on his ten years as a blogger, Andrew Sullivans tells of his evolution as an 'anti-war conservative':
Watching the national security state achieve more and more power and less and less accountability, observing the sheer horror of counter-insurgencies in places we could never understand or master, seeing how the absolute evil of torture could not just enter the heart of American government, but be defended by so many, enabled by the media's cowardice and entrenched by a refusal to prosecute it or even call it by its proper name ... well, these events have indeed radicalized me. I have become an instinctually anti-war conservative, rather than an instinctually pro-war one. I do not understand how anyone who has lived and breathed this last decade could not reach a similar conclusion.
Earlier, Andrew refers to himself as a 'Whiggish Tory'. But anyone who is both fiscally conservative, very skeptical of the ability of government to better human life, and anti-war is almost by definition more a 'libertarian' of the Murry Rothbard variety than anything else.

I'm beginning to find myself at that place as well.

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