The Answer is "No"

With due respect to the amount of server space that Ezra, Ezra, Ezra, etc. have dedicated to this discussion of the possibility of an alliance between liberals and libertarians, or in other iterations of how libertarians and liberals can be friends, I really, really don't understand why people waste their time on this question. The answer is no.

1. There is no electoral payoff. The vast over-representation of libertarians in the blogosphere sometimes fools us into thinking that there's some libertarian constituency out there, but, as a commenter at Tapped aptly put it, "this is all fun mental masturbation, but at the end of the day, 98% of the people who call themselves 'libertarians' only care about their taxes going down. Deficits don't matter, liberties don't matter, only taxes." An "alliance" with libertarians buys the Democratic Party like, six votes. Promising to lower taxes gets us more, but that's hardly a cutting insight, and brings us to the second problem...

2. Libertarian policies are stupid, and anathema to responsible government. It's great and all to incorporate "libertarian insights" into social and economic policy, but the term for that isn't "libertarian"; it's responsible, well thought out governance. Of course it's a good idea to keep deficits down and take account of how incentives help structure behavior, but libertarians don't have a monopoly on the good thinking on those kinds of questions. They do have a lot of really bad ideas, though, ideas that are fundamentally hostile to any notion of the government having a positive impact on the lives of human beings. Taking the best ideas from libertarianism doesn't require "engaging the movement", such that it is. This leads us to the third problem...

3. Libertarianism is, fundamentally, an ideology for thirteen year olds. It's popular in the blogosphere because people who believe they have no need for a regulatory or redistributionist government (relatively wealthy white dudes) are heavily over-represented on the internet. It's a philosophy largely empty of meaningful policy content, as its tenets fail to describe any system of governance that exists today or that, in fact, has ever existed. As Matt pointed out once and as Rick Perlstein depicted at length in Before the Storm, libertarian ideas are at their most fantastic when compared with the record of governance in the region where libertarianism is most popular. Life in the interior West is utterly dependent on the government, not only for financial assisstance but also for security, infrastructure, property rights maintenance, etc. This is the reason I've never seen an upside in "claiming the mantle of Goldwater"; Goldwater's career and political identity was built on a fantasy.

So, again, I wonder why should waste our time listening to these people. They don't represent a constituency, their ideas are antithetical to progressive government, and they don't make any bloody sense even on their own terms. Moreover, for every libertarian who's been smart enough to figure out that the Republican Party doesn't support any of their principles, there's another who remains committed to tax deferments and brutal state coercion.