I find popular appellations of political positions extremely crude, even when people make attempts to disambiguate them (e.g. "libertarian conservative" versus "values conservative"), so when I say I am a Libertarian Democrat, this really refers specifically to my party allegiance (Democrat, for reasons I'll give in another post) and distaste with many positions in that party (Johnson era welfare, identity politics, nanny state dysfunctionalism, and ignorant and destructive anti-capitalism).
In any case, here are those of my views that are not liberal either in the traditional British libertarian sense or the post 1960's American "new left" sense.
(1) While there is much innate good in people, there is also innate evil. Hobbes is closer to being correct than Rousseau. For whatever reason almost all people derive pleasure from amoral excercise of power/control over other people. Often this pleasure is the feeling of psychic revenge for real and imagined slights on whichthe perpetrator dwells. For example, torturers are almost always people of no real accomplishment who feel oppressed and get ecstatic enjoyment in feeling that the shoe is on the other foot.
(2) One of (if not the) main tasks of civilization is to get people to repress, sublimate, and transcend their innate evil. The institutions of civilization are mostly the result of arduous societal evolution that in the long run selects for the best ways to do this. As a result, overly utopian schemes to radically reorganize society are false and if implemented extraordinarily destructive to those living in the civilizations that must suffer them.
(3) The purpose of liberal arts education is to learn what the best of humanity has thought and created, and to learn to contribute to that tradition. 60s era changes in the college curricula that have watered this down are destructive to students and society.
(4) Multiculturalism is important insofar as it promotes study of human civilization irrespective of ethnicity (what humanity's best and brightest have accomplished everywhere, not just in Europe and the United States), and horrific to the extent that (as it has in many universities) it replaces study of civilization with "culture" (in the anthropologist's sense), fails to admit of the objectivity of many value statements, and prevents students from getting a true liberal arts education.
(5) A non-corrupt and strong police force and military are just as essential to a free society as having a functioning press (arguably more so, since freedom of expression is nonexistence without basic security). Intellectuals should be just as excised about the status and treatment of members of our police force and military as they (rightfully) are about the status of journalists.
(6) Government policies that encourage one parent households and unemployment are murderously destructive (while I love France, one learns much from examining the now multigenerational ghettos in England and France, where life is torturously nasty, brutish, and short, albeit such that the ever growing number of unwed and unemployed parents are well paid by the government). With the exception of people who are so injured or ill that they cannot work, all government welfare should be tied to work. For that matter the primary redistributive task of government should be to mitigate poverty among people who work (and the government should do this), not support people who do not work.
(7) The radical empiricist doctrine of the human mind as a "blank slate" at birth is just false. People are built with different propensities to do different things better than others. One of the tasks of civilization is to help people to develop the things they do best into something socially productive and also to confer dignity and worth on such labor.
(8) One of the reasons the United States has vastly less crime than England and France is that criminals are vastly more likely to be sent to prison for long periods of time in the United States. While France does many things much better than United States (e.g. postal system, transportation system, food, etc.), we are better at taking predatorial people off the street. This is today largely the result of the Reagans and Guilianis among us stopping the 1960's era tendency to not hold criminals responsible for their behavior. Statistics on assault and robbery comparing Western Europe to the United States verify this view (e.g. Britain has well over twice the per capita incident of violent assault as the United States).
(9) Affirmative Action in academia often functions mainly to make white liberals feel better about themselves, often with disastrous results for those it is supposed to help. For example, the value of "diversity" is the main justification for these programs. This is always presented as a value to the white students, that their education will be better if surrounded by minorities. However, when the affirmative action involves having systematically lower requirements for minority students (predictably) a whole host of problems arise, not least of which is that the graduation rate disparity between the white students and minority students is huge. Since California abolished affirmative action in college admissions, the number of minority students graduating in their system has increased dramatically. So it is clear that many white liberals would rather feel better about themselves by having a system that hurts minorities. [note- I think the educational disparities would disappear within a short time by: (a) fixing public education, whose current state of inequality fifty years after Brown versus Board can only fairly still be described as racist (among other overwhelmingly destructive properties), (b) stopping government welfare programs that discourage labor and marriage, (c) increasing the earned income tax credits and minimum wage, and (d) radically increasing need based scholarships in colleges. In these regards my positions (a, c, and d) are much more "liberal" than academics for whom orthodox affirmative action has religious status. Moreover, one of the greatest things about teaching at L.S.U. is that we have affirmative action programs that are not of the kind that Californian had, and that I think should be models for the country. For example, we graduate more African American PhDs in chemistry than any university in the world. This is not achieved by lowering entrance standards. Rather we have a fantastic outreach program, fantastic mentoring program, and programs that help prodominantly African American high schools train the next generation of engineers. Moreover, our need-based scholarship programs are so good that as of this next year, all students whose family makes 50% or less over the poverty level will get a complete free ride, including room and board. These are the kinds of programs I think that make the American dream available to all and that begin to seriously remediate the horrific longterm effects of slavery and Jim Crow.
(10) While I think elementary public education is unfunded in this country, conservatives are absolutely right in their critiques of the public education bureaucracy. We need to go to a system of school choice like they have in Belgium. In Belgium every school is privately run but publicly funded. Moreover, parents decide where to send their children and the school's money is a function of how many students they can attract. Unfortunately, "school choice" (like what Jeb Bush haltingly accomplished for Florida) in the United States usually means just subsidies for private schools that are still such that only rich or upper middle class parents can send their children to. This ends up hurting the poor and lower middle class for whom "choice" is meaningless in such circumstances. Nonetheless, Belgium shows that it is possible to let the magic of the market select for the best schools while still having poor children get just as much of a right to a good education as richer kids.
(11) Excessive taxation and regulation really do strangle societies, leading to unemployment, corruption, criminality, and spiritual deprivation. To really see this, one only needs to study in depth many of the post-colonial countries in which the governments continued the paternalistic practices of the colonial powers. Don't offer the economic miracle of China as a refutation of this. First, under Deng Xiaopeng's policies, China's tax rate is actually much less than that of the United States. Moreover, it is not at all clear that the coercion that is still practiced by the Chinese government won't end up leading (as it tragically has throughout Chinese history) to famine, murderous anarchy, warlordism, and then feudalism (and what was Mao if not King?) yet again. Optimistically, one might argue that to the extent that it hasn't and won't because Xiaopeng's policies will continue and grow as China does. Moreover, I noted at the outset of this post, these things are very complicated and not such that we in the United States (most of us shamefully ignorant of Chinese history and contributions to world civilization) can blithely lecture them. Finally, China's periodic decent into hell is probably more of a function of just how old the civilization is. It is a sad fact of history that any old enough civilization will have descended into barbarism at times.
Assuming all of the above are true, why be a Democrat rather than a Republican? I'll post on that soon.
One last note though. I try very hard not to push political views on my students. First, I have students from all over the political spectrums that learn from me and that I learn from. Second, as of yet my research has little or no bearing on political issues.
Eltahaway's claim in the previous post is actually almost certainly false. The cybaritic, corrupt Saudi elite spend as much time as possible in other countries where women have equal rights, as do their wives. They are not pushing their morality down the throat of the country. Rather, like demagogues everywhere they are exploiting what is worst in human nature. That they can get away with this says nothing about the morality of the Saudi people either; the only reason the scam works is because of vast Western support (we put these jerks in charge, pay enormous sums of money to them, and fight their wars) combined with oil wealth.
This made sense, we defeated their Sunni enemies in Afghanistan and were about to in Iraq. Iran is a representative Republic where women vote (yes they are theocratic, but so is Saudi Arabia, and the Iranian theocrats don't fund sexist, anti-American, wahabbi Islam all over the world, unlike our Saudi allies), one that has historically been a United States ally (albeit one we have historically treated shamefully, such as by Eisenhower having their democratically elected president assassinated), and one with a raucous freedom-loving people culturally similiar to Americans (yes, there is oppression, but there is also the strongest democracy movement on the planet, one that is actually moving the state towards more constitutional protections, and one that would be vastly more successful if we actually treated Iran decently). 
It is neither naive nor conspiratorial to suspect that having an executive branch full of members in financial in thrall to the oil industry is partially responsible for this, what is already the greatest and most perverse foreign policy debacle of our lifetime (just like Northern Alliance support was the only way to take down the Taliban, Iranian support would have been the only way to take down the Baathists, who (unless we do ally with Iran) I predict will again have their boots on the Iraq's Shiite majority's neck within the next decade). It is not conspiratorial to suspect that oil money corruption is more than anything else responsible for the execrable fact that Saudi Arabia is not treated like the Apartheid state it is. Nor since September 11 is it even remotely McCarthyist to call the actions of Bush Republicans what they so manifestly are, treason.
