Anthony Gregory has an interesting article on LewRockwell.com that goes well with The Conscience of Abe’s Turn (both the site and the novel). He points out that—contrary to popular mythology—conservatives are not more libertarian than liberals, because the conservative agencies of the military and the police are the instruments of power that enables statism.
To dedicate Abe’s Turn, I chose the famous quote by Lord Acton: “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.” In other words, even a good man, when allowed to use the police power as he sees fit, is likely to act out the evil within him.
For this reason, liberals of strong civil-rights values are even more likely to be libertarian than their economic-conservative counterparts. That’s why libertarians should enthusiastically and unapologetically reach out to liberals, as much as to conservatives. Or as Anthony Gregory puts it:
[A] left-liberal who is radically anti-war and anti-police state will often be receptive to libertarian ideas, since he already distrusts the establishment and recognizes that statism can cause very real and significant harm to human beings. The best, and somewhat rare, combination is in a liberal who is much more antiwar and anti-police state than anti-capitalism. This is somewhat rare because, unfortunately, many leftists are more radically anti-authority the more anti-market they are, whereas the ones who are more moderate in their condemnations of free enterprise are often also more tolerant toward empire and the establishment.
When talking to the Left, the best approach, regardless, is to stick to principle. Often leftists are used to deconstructing the hypocrisy of the Right, which claims to be for smaller government but defends Big Brother and gigantic military bureaucracies. By maintaining radicalism and principle, a libertarian can distance himself from such right-wing hypocrisy and prove that his positions come from serious, principled thought and a genuine sympathy for the human victims of state aggression.
