Jonah’s initial post on liberaltarianism Wednesday has generated some interesting chatter. I’m sure he’ll chime in soon. In the meantime, I ask unanimous consent to revise and extend my remarks.

Before I get to the meat of the matter, a little garnish: I respect the work of Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson, and truly wish them well. In the cause of libertarianism, it would be spectacular if there was a true “liberty caucus” within both of America’s major political parties. Given our constitutional structure, third-party politics is unlikely to accomplish anything (no offense, my Libertarian friends, but let’s be real). Thus it would be ideal if the Rs and Ds felt they had to compete for liberty-minded voters, just as it has long been clear that effective Republican competition for minority voters and effective Democratic competition for social conservatives would be better for both groups than being taken for granted by their respective base parties.

But here’s my problem, again. While there are plenty of libertarian-leaning politicians and activists within the GOP, albeit with varying levels of consistency and success, their ranks within the Democratic Party are scant, at best. This should be an unsurprising state of affairs. I understand there have been some serious efforts by libertarians in Washington to engage liberals intellectually and Democrats politically. I can’t comment on what I haven’t seen personally, but I can talk about my two decades of experience engaging liberals and Democrats in a state capital (Raleigh) where Dems have been in power virtually the whole time.

There are thoughtful, open-minded Democratic politicians who will listen to new ideas and are flexible enough to endorse market-oriented policies in certain favorable circumstances. You can get a Democratic mayor to try an asset sale, a Democratic governor to try toll roads, or a Democratic lawmaker to endorse a particular regulatory or tax reform. Sometimes you can even get Dems to challenge a powerful constituency in their base, as has happened in many states on issues such as charter schools. But on fundamental principle, there’s just not much overlap. They can’t get past their conflation of government with society, their vision of government as parent, and their belief that only big government has the knowledge and resources to fix social problems, keep selfish businessmen in line, and “run” the economy.

Perhaps my experience and those of most libertarian activists and think tankers I know shouldn’t be considered illustrative. Fine, let’s look at the evidence. While I enjoyed reading Will Wilkinson’s posts and reader polls (insert your favorite caveats here), I really don’t consider my previous observation about the political priorities of libertarian voters to be conjecture. Opinion polls and voter studies show that the libertarian-leaning bloc of American voters–as distinguished from the tiny number of professional libertarians or partisan Libertarians–were a strongly Republican voting bloc during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Because the GOP during this period was clearly paternalistic, not libertarian, on social issues such as drug laws and gay rights, libertarians obviously considered it more important to vote for the party closer to their positions on economics, health care, and education and to their general principles on the size and scope of government.

Beginning in 2004, some libertarian voters began to defect to Democratic candidates or stay home, enough to hurt GOP candidates in close races but not enough to represent a large-scale realignment. I doubt it will be a permanent realignment for most of the defectors, anyway, though Republicans had better nominate candidates with more than a rhetorical commitment to fiscal discipline and constitutional principle if they want to reestablish their donor and voter bases.

Why did these libertarian voters abandon the GOP? I think there were several wedge issues involved. None is likely to persist. Obama and the congressional Democrats have just made Bush and the previous GOP majority look like pikers on federal spending. Expect something similar on regulation and federalism. The Obama administration will, I predict, wave their arms energetically for a while, but they’ll seek to retain most of the anti-terrorism tools of the Bush era, and will end up keeping the Guantanamo detainees locked up somewhere, quite possibly in other countries where the definition of torture is, well, not exactly the stuff of sincere political or legal debate. As for the war, the U.S. military is going to be in both Iraq and Afghanistan for many years to come, in the latter case without much success, I fear. The situation wouldn’t have been substantially different with a President McCain.

By the way, Republicans probably couldn’t have picked a presidential nominee more likely than McCain to bug libertarians.

I’ll admit it–libertarians who look to Canada, Scandinavia, or the Low Countries as models for a liberaltarian politics puzzle me. Family and personal considerations aside, would they truly rather live there than here? Do they believe that a significant number of actual libertarian voters would make such a trade? No way.

I’m not a registered Republican. By no means do I believe slavish partisanship is in the interest of libertarians (or any other group). Philosophically, I believe in the fusionist project. Politically, I think libertarians should organize caucuses, PACs, and 527s. They should endorse and oppose candidates based on principle and performance. But just like labor, the NRA, and groups on each side of the abortion debate, they shouldn’t expect their endorsements to distribute evenly across the parties. Libertarian votes won’t, either.