I’ll start out with two yells from the left.

First, there’s Matt Yglesias, whose blog I’ve been enjoying for a few months now (despite many disagreements). Matt’s argument (borrowed he says, in part, from Jonah Goldberg) boils down to this:

some folks on the right are motivated primarily by a distrust of the state while others are motivated more by a distrust of leftwingers.

And people like the folks at National Review, he says, fall more into the latter category.

Says Matt:

The National Review hasn’t gone in for Weekly Standard-style ideological revisionism and “big government conservatism.” They still offer a sort of token opposition to things like the Medicare bill or farm subsidies. But they don’t get nearly as agitated about this stuff as they do about the alleged evils of the universities, hollywood, the media, or the governments of western Europe. From an anti-left perspective, this is natural enough.

I think there’s a grain of truth to this. But I wouldn’t want to take it too far. National Review remains the most credible small-government magazine in the country (outside of Reason, perhaps, which beats NR with the pure consistency of its small-government commitment).

The problem, as I see it, is less that NRers don’t want small-government (with the usual caveats about gay marriage and a few other cultural issues where they seem happy to expand federal power). The problem is there is no plan to get to small-government conservatism.

Here Republicans are with all three branches of government — but the government’s not getting smaller, it’s getting radically bigger!

This is not a detail that we in the small-government-libertarian-and-related-other community can work out later. Conservatism, at least small-government conservatism, has veered wildly off course.

Anyway, back to the lefties. I also wanted to give a pointer to Chris Nolan, who was blogging CPAC with me and the rest of the CPAC-blogger crew (represent).

Chris sees my views on the libertarian-conservative divide as being of a piece with what she dubs “Progressive libertarians”:

they really are tired of the rhetoric from the left and from the right and they are looking for new ways to do things. I am not sure which party will end up claiming this group. In California, where it’s easiest to spot them among the self-made movie stars, the self-made small business guys and the self-made tech millionaires, their political leadership crosses party lines.

I’m definitely not taking up the mantle of “Progressive,” but there’s something to the idea.