The formation of political coalitions

An excellent post by Timothy B. Lee on the institutional basis for the conservative-libertarian alliance. What I find most compelling is Lee's description of the basis for political coalitions:

"political alliances are built by concrete actions toward shared goals, not by abstract statements of philosophical agreement."

Given a shared set of goals, coalitions are necessarily exclusionary toward other political projects. In order to agree to do things you need to shut up about other things. I think Lee underestimates the importance of crafting articulation of philosophical agreement, but I see these, which are the staple of the political entrepreneur, as efforts to consolidate the earlier ties of cooperation that Lee highlights.

The articulation of philosophical principles that supposedly undergird the alliance does matter, in part by creating the sense of cohesion and almost natural-seeming alliance that Lee suggests many libertarians feel toward the conservative movement.

"After a couple of decades, you reach the point where a smart guy like Ilya Somin can claim that “liberals and libertarians have much in common in terms of ultimate values, but relatively little common ground in terms of practical policy agendas.” There are, in fact, lots of practical policy issues on which libertarians and liberals see eye to eye. The reason it doesn’t seem that way is that most libertarian organizations (with Cato an honorable exception) have made it a matter of policy to avoid writing about them."

I suspect its not just this avoidance of issues where the libertarians and conservatives diverge that leads smart guys such as Somin to discount the convergences between liberals and libertarians. Rather, it has been the success of the repeated articulation of a philosophical agreement on the desirability of small government that have made many in both of these camps believe their 'natural' allies are each other.*

All of this reminds me I need to re-read  Riker. 

* one thing Lee discounts is the possibility of conflict extension, the development of shared positions on other areas as the result of the alliance itself. Given that this is a fairly natural psychological process, if it is happening very little in this alliance might suggest the alliance is more fragile than its proponents believe. Or maybe not. It is an open empirical question as to whether libertarians are becoming more conservative and conservatives more libertarian as a result of their alliance. I think that the more it does happen, the stronger the coalition but the more it becomes divorced from its non-activist social base.