I don’t how I missed Ramesh’s excellent post from earlier this morning. I would just chime in on one point that he speaks to only indirectly. There is a notion much championed by libertarians that if you believe in small government you are automatically a libertarian and not a conservative. This would be news to many Goldwaterites, Buckleyites and Reaganites. There’s a related claim that Sager implies when he complains about all the whining about Will & Grace. Depending on the policy prescription that comes with such complaints, it’s fairly absurd to suggest that libertarians cannot actually be very socially conservative when it comes to values.

Moreover, to expect normal Americans to accept philosophical denominations whole is entirely unreasonable. Heck, we can’t even get most of NRO’s readers to agree on what’s conservative and what isn’t, never mind the writers. Ramesh demonstrates this in the aggregate by discussing issues as net gains and net losses. But it’s important to remember that individual voters are also deeply schizophrenic. I know lots of small government types who love government funded scientific research or even farm subsidies. And there are more than a few pro-life libertarians. Lots of people call themselves libertarian about sex and drugs, but would be horrified by privatizing the schools. The number of actual, honest-to-goodness, Cato-style libertarians in this country is very, very small. And, whatever the actual number of Christian Conservatives who want to make the Bible the platform of the GOP may be, I can guarantee it’s much, much, much, much smaller than the number of self-described Christian Conservatives who would like a smaller government.