Big government conservatism wasn't the problem

Yglesias flays this argument. But I understand why libertarians would say this. When all you have is a hammer, pretty much everything looks like a nail. The fact that the fundamental tenets of libertarianism have been pretty definitively disproven, at least in economic terms, they persist. Basically, this is the sort of thing that you would expect self-interested partisans to say. But they should be careful that they don't buy into their own spin.