Fusionism

Interesting piece at Reason.com today by A. Barton Hinkle. The article is about how the Catholic Church, while it infuriates the Right and Left at different turns, marches to the beat of its own first principles and is not particularly motivated by partisan concerns. But what jumped out at me was this one specific passage, which I think gets to the heart of why the conservative--libertarian alliance stubbornly persists, much to the chagrin of lefties who can't fathom what freak-flag-flying libertarians are doing still hanging around with fundamentalist bible thumpers. After comparing the Left and Right's political reactions to 1) the Church's frustration with the HHS contraceptive mandate (delighted Right, horrified Left); and 2) the "Nuns on the bus" shaming of Romney for his alleged lack of empathy for poor people (delighted Left, horrified Right), Hinkle makes the following observation:

This is all the more odd when you look at what each group of Catholics was trying to achieve. Catholic institutions that did not want to underwrite contraception for their employees were not forbidding those employees to use birth control. They clearly were not constricting the activity of non-employees. They were not trying to overturn the mandate for anyone else—and they certainly were not trying to outlaw the sale of contraception at the corner pharmacy. By contrast, the Nuns on the Bus and the bishops who objected to Ryan's budget proposals want the federal government's coercive taxing power to achieve their social-justice ends. They want the government to make other people underwrite programs that reflect their particular interpretation of the Gospel. That seems a far greater imposition of religious values on non-believers than a request simply to be left alone.

This, to me, gets to the heart of why liberals continue to miss the reason for the vibrancy of the de facto libertarian-conservative coalition. It's easy for libertarians to make common cause with--and empathize with--conservatives who want government to leave them alone. It's not so easy for them to to empathize with liberals who want to use the power of the state to coerce behavior. I'll admit that social conservatives often (wrongly in my view) try to use the power of the state to achieve ends that would be better pursued by civil society. However, when you go issue by issue, it's almost always the liberals that want leviathan to take up more and more of the oxygen that used to sustain our free society.