Oh, I always demurred about that because libertarians are a slightly different philosophical strain than I. I could explain it, but it would get really abstract and I'm not sure how much people would dig it or have read the stuff I would be talking about. Basically, this: It comes down to a theory of history and how history moves. It depends whether or not you believe, like Friedrich Hayek, that one is not a conservative but a libertarian because one is moving toward a new end point of history heretofore unbeknownst to us where the state is truly minimized to an afterthought, or that one is a conservative because they believe in a more Burkean concept of history, that of received wisdom, synthesis, and empiricism. Hayek would do often what our left does, which is proceed from deductively logical priniciples whereas the conservative in me would look at traditional wisdom, however illogical, and give it weight when performing the typical antithesis/thesis/synthesis progression. But yeah, I am indeed an American libertarian in most strains, but classical liberal or believer in individualism suits my views probably a bit better than either libertarian or civil libertarian. I'm a classical liberal who is very circumspect about the power and efficacy of state action.