Conservatives seem to be perpetually stuck in an identity crisis and seem to perpetually mis-understand and mis-characterize libertarians in the same old ways, regardless of years of patient explanations.
This phenomena is analogous to the larger cultural identity crisis of the conservative West -- is the West Christian? Or, is it Judeo-Christian? Or, is it rather founded on the "great" Greco-Roman civilization of classical antiquity? Or, somehow, all of those?
Cultural conservatives, Christian or otherwise, who seek to want to preserve “our heritage”, “our traditions”, “our values”, etc. often allude to these amorphous notions in all those ways. They sometimes say that the West is Christian (or it is or at least was Christendom, a bastion of truth against the heathen nations out there). Other times, it is explained as “Judeo-Christian” — to make reference to the what they view to be the distinctive moral code of the Jewish and Christian faiths. And lastly, as is evident within the resurgent homeschooling movement, there is a renewed nostalgia to recognize and re-establish the “classical” Greco-Roman foundations of “our civilization”.
Now, it is not a stretch to say that Christianity shares some ideas or principles with both Judaism and with the philosophical and scientific ideas and principles that flourished in Hellenistic classical antiquity of the Roman world. This is not merely owing to the fact that Christianity was born in the Hellenistic-Judaic meeting ground, both geographically and culturally, of 1st century Roman Palestinian Syria. Almost all long-lasting human civilizations and cultures and traditions share at least some core aspects, owing to the fact that they are human. For example, one can find similarities between American Mormonism and Theravada Buddhism, despite the fact that continents and centuries and ethnic distance separate the two. However, this similarity does not enable us to coherently blend the two and create a new identity -- rather, it is their differences that are more stark and significant and defining.
The most remarkable aspect about the Christian faith is the fact that it represented a surprising, counter-intuitive and essentially complete break from the most important aspects of the extant cultural-religious milieu, both with the first adherents among the Jews and then also with the Hellenistic Gentiles. The aspects that it shares with its forebears in time and cultural-religious context, whether with the Judaic moral code or ecclesial organization or liturgical practices, or with Greco-Roman philosophical or anthropological and sociological scholarship, are relatively less significant when compared to the essence of its breathtaking departure from both of those, in its understanding of God, in the person of Jesus Christ, and man, and the cosmos.
This is why the attempted amalgamation of Christianity with Judaism and with classical antiquity remains awkward and inconsistent. The differences, being stark, are far more significant than the similarities.
Coming back to the somewhat related subject of the political ideology of conservatism and libertarianism (more properly, we ought to speak of libertarian anarchism here), the first important point to note is that libertarianism represents a complete break from classical liberalism, which is more or less completely coincident with what is known as conservatism today. Classical Western liberalism of the 18th, 17th and prior centuries was and is the chief political project of the post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment West. As we move into the 19th and 20th centuries, two things happen.
First, many classical liberals, in law, economics and philosophy, like Spooner, Herbert, Spencer, Tucker, Bastiat and Mises begin to re-discover and newly discover timeless truths regarding the nature of man, the nature of human action and motivation, the nature of conflict between men, and the nature of justice. Ultimately, these threads of thought systematized into various overlapping bodies of thought — known variously, depending on context and emphasis, as voluntaryism, anarchism, libertarian anarchism, anarcho-capitalism or simply libertarianism. Libertarianism represented a complete departure from the fundamental assumptions and premises of the Enlightenment project, including especially those that regard the ontological nature and function of the State (and this is akin to how Christianity is starkly different from Judaism and Greco-Roman classical culture, as discussed earlier).
Second, classical liberalism itself metastasized into 20th century Marxist progressive liberalism (New Deal, Great Society, etc.) and such a development is now clearly seen to be logically necessary given liberalism’s foundational premises. This resulted in the Western electoral political theater morphing into a contest between the old-school classical liberals (or, conservatives) and the new-school progressive liberals (or, simply, liberals). The ruling elite found it useful to the perpetuation of their power to foment cultural revolution through the liberals and the leftists, while keeping the conservative electorate always interested and hopeful by not decimating them entirely. This playbook has played out successfully for the ruling elites in the West for more than a century now.
So, ironically, it turns out that it is conservatism that is and will always be the intellectual forebear of liberalism, its political enemy — and this is already a source of a crisis of identity for conservatism. Secondly, a little study shows that libertarianism and classical liberalism are incompatible, regardless of the former historically originating out of the latter. This only further exacerbates the conservatives’ identity crisis — “if libertarianism is the anti-thesis of liberalism, and if we are simply the classical version of modern-day liberalism, then, who really are we, in substance?…” is a question that would cause consternation for any honest but still confused conservative who asked it.