Shea, as usual, has it half-correct.

Shea, as usual, has it half-correct. ~80% of the libertarians I know are certifiable misanthropes.

Guess what, though? So are the vast majority of Paleocons I've known--Shea's "traditionalist conservatives" and libertarians share more personal qualities than I think either would care to admit, and one quality in particular:

Poliphobia. It is one of the great practical fallacies of both libertarianism and even religiously tinged Paleoconservatism. Both are philosophies that tend to attract disproportionate numbers of people who have no real public spirit whatsoever, no poliphilia.

For all their talk of "little platoons" or "subsidiarity" or "small is beautiful", I've never yet met a bow-tied, suspendered paleocon ready with his book of Anti-Federalist quotes who'd ever worked as, say

* a suicide hotline volunteer, or
* a member of a local professional organization, or
* even as a Little League coach.

I'm sure there are some out there, (probably the types of organic farmers that Rod profiled in his book, who live that kind of involved life but who wouldn't recognize names like Chesterton or Sobran if they bit them) but a clear majority of hardcore paleos are virtually indistinguishable from libertarians: folks who feel that the rest of humanity is, well, stupid, and sort of worthless, and who vaguely wish that we'd just go away and stop bothering them. The libertarians feel this way because they intellectually superior, while the paleo adds the additional gloss that God Is With Him as opposed to those great unwashed.

Quick: name the recognizable paleocon writer, journalist, blogger, what have you who has ever held public office, been appointed to a board or commission, been an active party organizer, or worked on the steering committee of a political campaign. Or has regularly attended town meetings, organized petition drives, marched in rallies or protests.

Nothing wrong with not doing those things... but to then turn around and tell the rest of us how we should be organizing our political lives are like virgins telling the rest of us how to have sex. It's literally idiotic, in the original sense of the world.

Politics, like sex, is a subject in which no amount of reading can compensate for a complete lack of practical experience. A pox on both their houses.

Context.