More responses

I said:

Conservativism:  Protect especially against threats to the status quo (which is good).
Progressivism: Protect especially against threats to the poor.
Libertarianism: Protection is the wrong approach.  Let's create instead.

Andrew partially disagreed, in a different post:

Every political arguer is in roughly guardian mode while advocating, even if he's arguing for pure trade liberty!

And I wanted to answer that. I don't think Andrew and I disagree massively, here, so there must be some communication difficulty.

The business of politics is, at its core, guardianism.  The thing that distinguishes libertarians from other participants in the political process is that they are fundamentally opposed to guardianism in all/most of its flavors.  It is as if the libertarians are pacifist arguing to two warring nations that they should stop the war.  From the libertarian POV, it is the war that is the problem.  However, both sides have reasons why they think it is worthwhile to continue the fight.  Not surprising, then, that the libertarians were among the founders of antiwar.com. 

It also explains why the libertarians are unable to win, and why libertarians are disillusioned with politics.  If libertarians want (primary goal) less political action, and in order to get elected, one needs to do lots of political acting...it's not going to work out that well.  Libertarians are shifting into the Romer/Friedman/Anarchist camp rather rapidly now as well...also because of the (now seemingly-) obvious position that doing politics won't reduce the amount of politics that gets done.  The liberals have been saying for years: you can't stop violence with more violence.  The anti-voting libertarian argues: you can't stop political violence with more political violence.

I think that this is where Andrew and I agree, but perhaps it wasn't called out previously.