04 Aug 2017

If Libertarians Reject the “Left/Right Spectrum” Then Why Do We Use Those Terms?

Libertarianism 31 Comments

I’m genuinely asking the question. (And this isn’t just coming from me; I’ve seen other people in the last few months making this point.)

On the one hand, we libertarians like to roll our eyes at standard political surveys or classification schemes in which Adolf Hitler is the polar opposite of Josef Stalin. We like to point out that they are both socialists and that it makes much more sense to have a spectrum of degrees of State control over people’s lives. I totally agree with this standard libertarian view.

On the other hand, libertarians often self-sort into left/right, or at least distinguish themselves from other libertarians with such labels. And to be frank, I know exactly what they mean. (I don’t want this post to turn into a proxy war for the recent flare up, so let’s keep it on-topic in the comments.)

Does the reconciliation go something like this? I’m just throwing it out there:

“It’s not perfect, but we have to use words conventionally and so if someone is a ‘leftist’ we mean the person wants to focus on reducing income inequality, oppression of minorities, police brutality, and gender stereotypes in the workplace. If someone is coming from ‘the right’ we mean the person cares about maintaining the culture, tradition, family, church. However, most people just assume that the *way* to achieve these goals is through State power, and hence a ‘radical leftist’ is a Marxist, while a ‘radical right-winger’ is a Nazi. So a left-libertarian is someone who rejects the means of State power to achieve them, but endorses the typical leftist’s goals, and likewise for a right-libertarian.”

How’s that?

31 Responses to “If Libertarians Reject the “Left/Right Spectrum” Then Why Do We Use Those Terms?”

  1. Kyler Ward says:

         I wholeheartedly agree-libertarians end up using the left-right spectrum to fit their ideas into the modern political jargon being tossed around. Although, I would add the nuance that the political issues seen as important (as mentioned, say, the ruggedness of the family versus LGBT “rights”) are molded by one’s world view on the proper role of the state.
         I tend to think that the cultural conservatism and its counterpart of the social justice warrior-“diversity” fraught utopian vision stem from one’s conception of the proper limits of state power. That is, I think a reason for why many on the right value culture, the family, tradition etc. is because these social institutions are (to many) indispensable in a society sans a far-reaching state. On the left, where more are in favor of interventionist means, it seems that the particular ends involved are problems that result from seeing the state through a progressive lense. In other words, when the state is viewed as the great rectifier, problems such as reducing (not cronyism induced) income inequality, oppression of minorities, police brutality (where all police are brushed as ruthless killers based on the actions of a few) etc. enter as all curable by some policy (e.g. affirmative action, progressive taxation). Most who identify as conservative-leaning I believe would answer to these problems by describing them as being the result of the spontaneous order and voluntary choice- a sphere that ought to be outside of state meddling for moral/constitutional reasons.

  2. Keshav Srinivasan says:

    Bob, yes, I think that’s exactly the right way to think about things. That’s why political compasses are so useful in thinking about politics: http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/021/323/Political_chart.svg.png. There are two orthogonal axes, the left-right axis and the libertarian-authoritarian axis. If you really want to flesh things out there are three orthogonal left-right axes: economic issues, social/cultural issues, and foreign policy issues. And a person might have different views about how much state power should be there in each of these three domains. So in principle you could map a person’s political views In a six-dimensional chart.

    • Keshav Srinivasan says:

      Just for fun, let me analyze the four quadrants of each two-dimensional cross-section of my proposed six-dimensional space:

      1. Economic Issues
      Authoritarian Left: A socialist/communist state which redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor
      Authoritarian Right: A fascist/corporatist state which tries to take resources from the poor and protect corporations and the rich
      Libertarian Left: An anarcho-communist society where the institution of private property no longer exists
      Libertarian Right: A Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist society
      2. Social Issues
      Authoritarian Left: Affirmative action policies, government-enforced prohibitions of racist, misogynist, homophobic, etc. views.
      Authoritarian Right: A theocratic state, a white nationalist state, a patriarchy, etc.
      Libertarian Left: A society where abortion and marriage aren’t controlled by the government, racism, misogyny, etc. are frowned upon
      Libertarian Right: A society with gender roles for men and women, everyone goes to church, no premarital relationships, self-segregation of races, etc.
      3. Foreign Policy
      Authoritarian Left: U.N.-backed military intervention when necessary for humanitarian reasons
      Authoritarian Right: Imperialism to expand your nation’s territory
      Libertarian Left: Code Pink-style opposition to American military intervention out of concern for the inhabitants of countries we might invade.
      Libertarian Right: “America First”-style foreign policy where one refuses to engage in wars because it doesn’t benefit the national interest

      Note that the above is imperfect in a lot of ways. For one thing, in some cases I’m just laying out the most extreme position in a quadrant, rather than all the people who might belong to the quadrant. For another thing, social issues is a broad category and covers a lot of things. It might make more sense to create more dimensions for different social issues like abortion, marriage, race, gender, LGBT issues, nationalism, etc.

      • Anonymous says:

        “Authoritarian Right: A fascist/corporatist state which tries to take resources from the poor and protect corporations and the rich
        Libertarian-left: an Anarcho-communist society where private property no longer exists”

        I think you should take another look at these two.

        The latter works as a political goal, but we all recognize this is impossible in any anarchic society, right? So the outcome can’t match the goal.

        The former seems like a left-wing straw man version of what fascism is or does in both goals and ends. The goal is not to screw the poor explicitly. No government can hold up under this open agenda. In reality, it’s specifically the crony-elements that lead to this outcome, but these are present across the left- right spectrum as state power grows, and shouldn’t be attributed to the right only.

  3. R K Kirchoff says:

    I bought into the standard libertarian line about rejecting left-right until I read Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. That book made me understand why libertarians tend to throw their lot in with the right while mostly cooperating with the left on an issue by issue basis. It also sheds some light indirectly I think on why the liberalism of the 19th century slowly morphed into the progressivism and socialism of the 20th.

    That later development makes me wonder about the long-term viability of left-libertarianism.

  4. Ty Fyter says:

    First time commenting, because this is something that’s been on my mind for a long time.

    I think Left/Right is useless. I don’t use it.

    For instance people have different ways to define what it means to be Left or Right. For instance, in comparison to your definiton, Steven Crowder considers the Left end to be more gov’t control, and the Right end to be less gov’t control (e.g. Socialism/Communism is at the end of the Left side of the Spectrum, while Anarchism is at the end of the Right side of the spectrum, even further so than Conservatism)…and another example is Tom Woods (given that I’ve interpreted him correctly) if that a “Leftist” conceives that you can alter Man’s nature and engineer a New World, where as a “Rightist” understands that Man is fallible, and a lot of our vital institutions could not be created, but emerged and evolved over time (kinda like Unconstrained and Constrained Visions that Thomas Sowell talks about).

    Last example, here in Australia where I live, what constitutes “freedom” flips depending whether you’re talking about “social freedoms” or “economic freedoms” (obvy I agree with Mises, that there is no such sharp, narrow distinction…and understand what he means too)…but to clarify with an example: if you want more freedom (less State interference) in ability to trade [cutting tarrifs, subsidies etc.), that moves you towards “the Right”; but if you want more freedom (less State interference) in things like who you can marry, or what you can put in your body then that apparently moves you towards “the Left”. I have no idea why this ideology of freedom inadvertently flips like that such that a consistent person would average out being a “Centrist” (whatever that means). And further on this nebulous Centrist point: you could have two people (here in Australia) with exactly opposite views on a number of issues, but they both average out to “the Centre”. That makes no sense haha

    Anyways no clear definition of that they mean, so I don’t bother using them.

    • Harold says:

      ” if you want more freedom (less State interference)…”

      This suggests that freedom is synonymous with less state control, but there are surely other ways to restrict freedom which have nothing to do with Government. Religion is very good at restricting freedom, for example, but there are many others.

      “but they both average out to “the Centre”. That makes no sense haha”
      I agree with this. The use of “left” and “right” suggests that would be such a thing as “the center”, but this does not in fact exist. The terms are at best vague indicators. They can be useful, but can easily be misleading too.

      • Ty Fyter says:

        @Harold, it was a general response within the context of the question lawl

  5. Dan says:

    That’s how I see things for the most part.

  6. Fred says:

    It is two issues: (1) mental effort and (2) threat-ranking.

    (1) Libertarians, like all humans, tend to prefer simpler analytical models to complicated analytical models. Given the choice between a multi-variable mental function and a single-variable function, humans tend to pick the latter. Exceptions will depend on time preference.

    (2) Threat-ranking is a more complicated matter. Essentially, humans, like any mammal, seek to figure out where a threat might come from. Humans happen to use a great many abstract heuristics to rank other people in terms of potential threats. However, this is not a constant process; a person constantly on edge will surely starve. Instead, humans simplify their ranking process. I think people who are interested in politics intuitively recognize how dangerous the State can be, so they don’t bother ranking people who don’t talk about politics. Instead, only those who do talk about politics are ranked and in terms of how they will push for changes in State policy.

    Combining the above two issues and you get a dual-sided political spectrum. You are on one side with many people; many other people are on the other side.

    As an aside, I would bet that the prevalence of this view point is proportional to the amount of affect people have on State policy.

  7. Caleb says:

    Bob, I think you are correct.

    I also think Dr. Jordan Peterson’s perspective helps shine some light on the issue. People on the left tend to be low in conscientious, low in disgust sensitivity, radical, fluid, creative, entrepreneurial, careless, chaotic, unsanitary, promiscuous.

    People on the right are low in openness and more conscientious. They tend to be conventional, orderly, traditional, hierarchical, diligent, dutiful, hygienic, puritanical, narrow, predictable.

    Peterson said he hasn’t seen enough data on libertarians to figure out where we sit psychologically speaking, but he speculates that we are high openness and high in conscientious, but not highly agreeable.

    Libertarians are probably all over the left-right spectrum, but what binds us together is some core “libertarian gene” keeping us high in openness, conscientious, and disagreeableness.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne5VbOMsQJc&t=118s — Video where I pulled the Jordan Peterson stuff from. Terrible audio.

  8. Darien says:

    For my part, I suppose I tend to think of them rather classically — the “right” tends toward nationalism, and the “left” toward internationalism. This distinction is most severe in the war rhetoric; right-wing wars tend to be about “keeping America safe” — from terrorism, or communism, or whatever — whereas left-wing wars are about “making the world safe” — for democracy, or feminism, or whatever.

  9. Levi Russell says:

    I don’t have much of a problem with your analysis of the left-right spectrum as it applies to libertarians.

    However, Kling’s “Three Languages of Politics” is a better way of thinking about the issue:

    http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/06/kling_on_the_th.html

  10. Khodge says:

    In the end, you get to choose only one person (per office) to represent you. Should I pass on my vote then someone very much unlike me will represent me. Since there is no one person who thinks 100% like I do, I am forced to choose along a spectrum. In Colorado the “conservative” portion of that spectrum tends towards libertarian. Were I from Kansas where one party has a lock on the state politics, the spectrum can expand to include a more expansive view of government.

    The bottom line is that we use shorthand to identify like-minded cohorts while relying on no-true-Scotsman to justify one’s own position on that spectrum.

    Incidently, I get to truly enjoy Trump wreaking havoc on a portion of the spectrum that I detest even though I would only have supported him if he had a ghost of a chance to win here while you have had to preface many, many of your statements condemning the left with a no-true-Scotsman “I do not support Trump” defence.

  11. Brent says:

    Seems right to me. Some libertarians think trying to work out the left/right libertarian difference is a vain task. I disagree. I think it’s a useful distinction, though I’ll grant at times there is some ambiguity in what they mean. But I think your definitions are quite adequate and capture the essence of is meant by those who actually use them.

  12. Kyler Ward says:

         I wholeheartedly agree-libertarians end up using the left-right spectrum to fit their ideas into the modern political jargon being tossed around. Although, I would add the nuance that the political issues seen as important (as mentioned, say, the ruggedness of the family versus LGBT “rights”) are molded by one’s world view on the proper role of the state.
         I tend to think that the cultural conservatism and its counterpart of the social justice warrior-“diversity” fraught utopian vision stem from one’s conception of the proper limits of state power. That is, I think a reason for why many on the right value culture, the family, tradition etc. is because these social institutions are (to many) indispensable in a society sans a far-reaching state. On the left, where more are in favor of interventionist means, it seems that the particular ends involved are problems that result from seeing the state through a progressive lense. In other words, when the state is viewed as the great rectifier, problems such as reducing (not cronyism induced) income inequality, oppression of minorities, police brutality (where all police are brushed as ruthless killers based on the actions of a few) etc. enter as all curable by some policy (e.g. affirmative action, progressive taxation, national takeover of local police). Most who identify as conservative-leaning I believe would answer to these problems by describing them as being the result of the spontaneous order and in some sense inevitable-a sphere that ought to be outside of state meddling for moral/constitutional reasons.

  13. scott says:

    I think libertarians tend to be introverted, and therefore thing-oriented and system-oriented in their thinking. So they focus on things like procedures and rules and power, etc. and less on social touchy-feelys.

    Most other people tend to be socially-oriented in their thinking. They are absorbed in the social touchy-feelys and just take ‘the system’ for granted.

    I think libertarians tend to (bizarrely) get called totalitarians (i.e, Nazis) primarily because the people whose hackles are most severely raised by the notion of libertarianism are — naturally — totalitarians. Regular conservatives and liberals are just not going to care all that much.

    And totalitarians are generally psychologically stunted individuals whose theory of mind is so primitive that the only thing they can do is project their own psyche onto others. So, they tend to assume that regardless of what anyone else says, what they really are is a totalitarian, and they wind up looking to normal people like they are either ‘dishonest’ or have severe reading comprehension problems because they simply can’t conceive of a non-totalitarian psychology. Conservatives and liberals can look at least reasonable to them, but libertarians simply *must* be out to blow up the world or something.

    So, I would just modify what you said with the idea that the touchy-feelys really do matter (so you shouldn’t ‘roll your eyes’), and so do the ‘methods’. This is politics — what people feel matters *is* what matters, and the fact that most people give them higher priority than the issue of ‘methods’ just has to be an objective reality that you have to deal with.

    And that the kinds of people who cast libertarianism as ‘wrap-around totalitarianism’ or whatever should be taken…well…for what they are.

    (Sorry if that didn’t land quite squarely on-topic…)

  14. Stephen Dedalus says:

    Why not just acknowledge that, like most “spectrums” and dichotomies, left-right is useful in some situations and not so useful in others?

    Also, you might ask whether left/right doesn’t apply to libertarians? Mises Institute = right libertarian / Cato = left libertarian.

  15. Transformer says:

    ‘So a left-libertarian is someone who rejects the means of State power to achieve them, but endorses the typical leftist’s goals, and likewise for a right-libertarian.”’

    Perhaps I’m misreading it , but this implies that just as statists may see the state as a means to achieve their (left or right) end goals, so anarchists see statelessness as a means to achieve their (left or right) end goals.

    I think this is possibly why left-libertarians get a bit freaked out by all this “blood and soil” and alt-right stuff. If right-libertarians see opposition to the state as merely the best way of preserving “culture, tradition, family, church”, what is to stop them changing tactics and using direct force to achieve the same ends ?

    • JR says:

      I suppose that’s possible from the right but history has shown that it is the left that would tend to do that. The French Revolution went on a crusade against the traditional institutions like Church, family, etc and they got a State that went on a killing rampage. Burke made the case that the more these smaller institutions of society go away the more arbitrary and tyrannical the rulers get. That’s because without those traditional hierarchal bodies then the State will have equalizing tendencies that require force and power to achieve that social equalization.

      So if it’s possible for right libertarians to reverse course then the tendency is just as much if not more so with left libertarians.

    • Dan says:

      “I think this is possibly why left-libertarians get a bit freaked out by all this “blood and soil” and alt-right stuff. If right-libertarians see opposition to the state as merely the best way of preserving “culture, tradition, family, church”, what is to stop them changing tactics and using direct force to achieve the same ends ?”

      No, they oppose the state on principle. Maybe some people become libertarians merely for utilitarian reasons, but not many. It’s more like both oppose the state on principle, but have different values and see a stateless society being adept at producing their desired results. Personally, my view is that a stateless society would produce many different pockets of differing values. Some places would be more culturally conservative and some more socially liberal.

      The area I think you’re mostly right though is that left-libertarians fear that right libertarians will abandon principle and vice versa.

      • Transformer says:

        ‘Personally, my view is that a stateless society would produce many different pockets of differing values. Some places would be more culturally conservative and some more socially liberal..

        Yes, my view precisely.

        However I will probably steer clear of ones that have ‘blood and soil and God and nation ‘ as their theme!

  16. RPLong says:

    Good post.

    As I see it, left and right within libertarianism work the same way they work outside of libertarianism. That is, the left cares mainly about social issues and the right cares mainly about economic issues.

    You can see it on the blogs. The right-libertarians are all talking about economics; the left-libertarians are all talking about social justice and political theory.

    • Stephen Dedalus says:

      Hmm, how about the Marxist / socialist left? The Christian right?

      • RPLong says:

        If you read old speeches from Lenin and Stalin, you’ll discover that they were early advocates of social justice, especially for women. That’s what the whole “Red Sonja” thing was about. Even for Marx, the crux of his writing was about correcting class divisions, not about conducting astute economic analysis. He explicitly rejected that kind of thing, and then the German Historical School doubled-down.

        You have a point about the Christian right, but I’ve always considered them authoritarians on the four-pole scale, not rightists.

  17. Kris says:

    Bob-
    I think it depends on who we are talking to. When we talk to other libertarians, people are either statists or libertarians. When we talk to liberals, conservatives, etc. then we use that framework because it’s what they are accustomed to. Very rarely is the topic of discussion what the political spectrum ought to look like, and the rhetoric is different enough between the two groups to use the left/right framework and communicate ideas… I don’t have any raw data, but i feel most libertarians were statists first, so we understand how the left/right paradigm is viewed. If we stop all our conversations and start talking about how it is flawed and needs amended, we will wind up in endless debates that will end with no real reaolution and miss out on the chance to talk about principles and other things that really do matter. Updating the spectrum… do we have time for that when we’re so far behind?

  18. John says:

    Dear Bob,

    I would like to expand on the excellent post by Caleb. Praxeologically speaking, we have two orthogonal axes of means and ends. The means axis is the usual authoritarian-libertarian axis of the degree and scope of violence one is willing to use (or have the state do on your behalf) to achieve your ends. I would posit an ends axis with a spectrum of neophile-traditionalist.

    Driven by temperamental openness, leftists tend to be neophiles: they are driven to experience newness and novelty as much as possible in all areas.

    For example, culturally neophiles value diversity and hence multiculturalism, in art novelty is the highest virtue (hence modern architecture, conceptual art, atonal music), in sexual terms promiscuity and kink are the order of the day. This can expand to seemingly trivial stuff: consider the Jacobite hatred of traditional weights, measures and calendar and their replacement in the French Revolution with metric and base ten weeks and months respectively. The left wing predilection for psychotropic drugs fits this pattern as well.

    Conversely, traditionalists (the ‘right’ in this spectrum) value continuity and cohesiveness (per their temperaments) within a culture, being at least sympathetic to religion, classical virtue ethics, traditional aesthetics in art and architecture, family, in-group loyalty and patriotism.

    I think this drives to the heart of the irrationalism of the left: in true Rousseauian fashion, neophiles chafe at anything that they deem restricts them to new experiences: if the laws or reason, nature, economics, morality and man point to ultimate limits (e.g. scarcity) too bad for them (post-modernism awaits). I think this also explains the left’s egalitarianism: hierarchy of any kind represents limitation.

    Hopefully food for thought!

    PS I think this explains a lot in terms of the otherwise strange correlation in views on seemingly unconnected subjects, the alignment of views on art and architecture on the left and rights has always struck me as needing explanation.

    PPS Given the neophile’s focus on personal experience, I think this may also link to the rampant egotism of the typical hard left winger: it’s all about them and their internal pleasures and thrills, whereas the traditionalists think in external terms of duty, loyalty and conforming themselves to the laws of the nature and the divine (for want of a better word).

  19. Simon says:

    I look at ‘the right’ as ancaps and ‘the left’ as the non ancaps.That being said I look both at Hoppe and Tucker as right. This might b just me tho. cheers

  20. Andrew_FL says:

    This bares almost no resemblance to the manner in which I use the terms “left” and “right” or “left libertarian”/”right libertarian”

  21. Andrew Keen says:

    Most societies tend to have two dominant ideologies (or political factions) of differing size and shape. Whichever ideology leans more heavily on traditions of the past gets called “the right” and whichever leans toward disruptive creativity gets called “the left.” The specifics of the left and right political platforms change over time and are different for every society. The left-right “spectrum,” to the extent that it exists, is a straight line drawn from one pole to the other. This straight line is what Tom Woods calls “the index card of allowable opinion.”

    Libertarianism is a fringe ideology that does not find itself in the orbit of either US pole as they are currently configured. It is a product of the left, but the left has moved on, ideologically orphaning the libertarians.

    “Left” and “right” are powerful labels because they always describe the two dominant political factions of the current society. By definition, they speak to the great majority of politically aware adults. If you wish to make persuasive arguments, it is sensible to use labels that these people recognize. This is why libertarians use these terms even while acknowledging that they are squishy and sub-optimal labels for classifying political thought.

  22. Tel says:

    Progressives believe in “absolute truth” but the details change fairly rapidly as they come up with new victim groups, each needing their own back story.

    Conservatives also believe in “absolute truth” and they only change their absoluteness on a slow basis, from generation to generation as they finally give in and adopt the Progressive ideas.

    I think that pretty much covers the main political groups.

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