Cato Unbound has a response to the idea of libertarian Democrats from Jane Galt. The article helps put into perspective why so many libertarians can get fired up by economic issues but not civil liberties.

As I said at the debate I was in last night: who does the average American fear more--the FBI or the IRS? The local zoning board, or the NSA? What does he fear more: the ten commandments on the wall of his child's school, or having the new addition to the house disallowed by the zoning board, the EPA, or the Americans with Disabilities act? On what does he spend more time: preparing his taxes, earning the money to pay for them, and arguing with the various tax authorities about what he owes . . . or checking for roving wiretaps?

Let's face it: one of the biggest problems civil libertarians are battling in the war against warrantless wiretaps, and so forth, is that 99% of the citizenry (correctly) believes that the government is not planning to use such measures against them. I'm on the side of the civil libertarians, mind you, but I recognize that this is why all the cries about America descending into a dark night of fascism, and Bush being the worst president ever on civil liberties (which even a light perusal of history reveals as silly), are falling on deaf ears.

The article is strong and makes a lot of sense. It doesn't say that libertarians only care about taxation, which is the common knee-jerk Democratic response to the idea of appealing to libertarian voters. They care about a host of economic issues which the Republicans at least still make promises on, even if they don't live up to them.

And yet as I've said many times, Democrat John Kerry was still able to appeal to a large portion of libertarian-leaning voters with a campaign that largely ignored them. If Kerry can win 40% of the libertarian vote, who is to say what the limit is if the Democrats actually tried to pick up on some libertarian issues in the economic sphere?