Yeah, I totally feel that. Our values are contextual. I believe that the “right way” to pound a nail is with a hammer, but only because of the surrounding circumstances. Obviously I would abandon that conviction if a nail gun was available. This applies to more abstract values also, it’s just that the context is also broader and more abstract.
But it seems like you’re implying that some convictions are platonic, and transcend context. I don’t agree, but this is perhaps because of my own cosmic nihilism. I think that even our ostensibly universal value of preserving life is arbitrary and rooted in a provincial context. I think that I would abandon that value just like I would abandon my conviction about the right nail-tool if the nature of “life” and the phenomena associated with it shifted significantly. But I don’t think that means I don’t “truly” value life.
So I guess in that sense, I don’t care what your core values are, I’m just glad that you see liberty as an expedient approach in this modern world
It’s not designed to place most people in libertarian quadrants, though it could be that you consider somewhat libertarian people more reasonable than somewhat authoritarian people.
But most mainstream politicians tend to be in the authoritarian-right corner. Even politicians of supposedly social-democratic European parties are in reality often more authoritarian-right than their voters want them to be.
Case in point:
Where else should she be? (Edit: I do agree that she’s put too far to the right, and Mao is far more authoritarian than this chart suggests.) She’s not particularly left-wing or libertarian, she’s just not as extremely right-wing or authoritarian as many other US politicians. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are really the exception in the US. They’re the only ones I’m aware of who are solidly left-libertarian. Rand Paul is probably right-libertarian, but likely a lot more right than libertarian.
I suspect that holding power tends to turn many people more authoritarian. I’ve noticed in Dutch politics that parties that tend to be a bit on the libertarian side, once they become part of the government coalition, they often support more authoritarian measures they used to oppose. D66 is a good example of that. Obama is also a good example of that, by the way; he campaigned on closing Guantanamo Bay and protecting whistleblowers, but Guantanamo is still open, and he prosecuted more whistleblowers than anyone before him. He too is in the authoritarian right corner, though I would have put him in the libertarian-left corner based on his first campaign. His one left-leaning accomplishment is a healthcare plan that’s still thoroughly privatised and one of the most right-wing healthcare plans in the western world.
The reality of one party states at least as far as say the USSR and East Germany were concerned was (and as far as I understand chinese politics, still is there) that instead of having several political parties duking it out, you had different strands of the Communist Party negotiating with each other with the occasional spill-over into purges, etc.
There’s just as much arguing, it just happens in a different way. Instead of billboard campaigns and elections, you have carefully worded articles in Pravda or the journal of Military Thought, and lots of bureaucratic infighting.
I get what you’re saying, but I think that an attempt to reclaim “libertarian” from the ancap-lite is a doomed cause. It’s too solidly ingrained in the American idiom, and the counterargument is too complicated and nuanced to get easy traction.
“Left = Liberal” is similarly entrenched, but the counterargument is a lot easier to muster.
Libertarian Communism (and Democratic Communalism) has a lot going for it, but you’re probably stuck with the longer terminology for now.
BoingBoing is definitely a left-libertarian bubble. I’d be really surprised if anyone was surprised by that. The site is really consistent in its left-libertarianism.
I don’t think the test is broken, but the famous politicians they put on that chart did not fill in the test, but were interpreted by the creators of the test. There are different ways you can interpret their position. I certainly agree they got Clinton and Mao wrong. Mao was extremely authoritarian, and caused a famine because he wouldn’t accept even the slightest criticism on his agricultural ideas.
I also don’t see how Clinton is that far to the right. I do agree she belongs in the blue corner, but not that far. And Trump is too far to the left. Sure, he talks about helping workers in the Mid-West, but he hasn’t actually done anything; he’s mostly about helping the rich.
I also expected Pinochet much more to the right, Churchill slightly more authoritarian, and Merkel a bit more to the right.
And of course the questions themselves are always going to be a selection that represents an opinion on which positions are more important to each axis. It’s not a hard science, but I wouldn’t call it broken.
True, but that doesn’t mean we should let them have it. On Quora, I labelled myself a Libertarian Socialist on political topics, and that has lead to a lot of questions, which I use as an opportunity to expand people’s views on political options. I also quote Bakunin a lot. I do the same in ESR’s discussions on Google+, which often features a lot of surprisingly authoritarian “libertarians”.
No you don’t. Just like you can be against the death penalty, you can also be against inhumane prisons. Life in a Norwegian-style prison wouldn’t be so bad. Not free, still keeping criminals off the streets, but not treating them as subhuman and turning them into worse criminals either.
It’s still twice as good as having only one axis. But feel free to make a graph with more axes. (Axises? What is the plural of that?)
If you support taking freedom away from people, you don’t really support freedom, though, do you? It’s not just about what you want, it’s about what you want for others. Liberty is slavery sounds like something out of 1984.
Someone is the blue quadrant after all!
I don’t find these nearly as unreasonable. For one, it doesn’t pretend Mao is only moderately authoritarian. The Democrats are nearly all in the right-authoritarian corner, but not as far as the Republicans. Individual differences may be hard to judge accurately, but it seems roughly correct.
The placement of Clinton and Mao is incorrect, but that doesn’t mean the test is broken.
By the way, it’s also possible to support someone for their competence rather than their exact political leanings. I can easily see people supporting Clinton over Sanders despite being closer to Sanders, because Clinton is more competent while Sanders can come across as a bit of a loose cannon at times.
Obviously not. Though I suppose you could argue that the difference here is one of equality more than one of freedom. Using the law to ban treating women and gay people as lesser, may be more left than authoritarian or libertarian, although personally I’m of the opinion that using laws to protect freedom of vulnerable people is also moderately libertarian.
Here are my results, by the way. No surprises here.
Point taken. For what it’s worth, I did answer ‘agree’ and not ‘strongly agree’ because there is always in-party fighting.
Here we still have in-party bickering, plus they need to fight it out between parties.
If you look at states with several major parties, like the UK, you can see what happens when one party wins the majority. It effectively becomes a single party state for its term, and government becomes more efficient because opposing parties votes don’t matter. If they have a minority, it acts as a multi party system for it’s term.
I don’t like first-past-the-post or single party systems, but in many cases they’re more efficient at getting things done (often the wrong things).
Bikes work fine. But why is there a specific number of axes to model political views correctly? I think if you continue down that line, you’ll end up with as many axes as there are specific political issues.
Decriminalization of drugs is libertarian, not left. I’m not sure about prison reform, but I expect that’s also more a libertarian issue than an economical one.
You can go as far down as one axis, if you make some large assumptions about shared values. What I’m saying is that for any body of people larger than a household, you probably need more than two axis to understand why people make political choices.
It’s almost like there’s a real-life example of the failure of liberty-based ideology unfolding with sickening regularity in American schools right now.
Have you seen what happens to Tory backbenchers when their party has a majority?
I wouldn’t say government becomes more efficient. Really, I’m with Sir Humphrey on that - government is most efficient when the politicians can’t do anything.
Whether that is desirable is open to debate admittedly.
Well, today, I am strongly in favor of both the death penalty and prison reform. If our prison system actually gets reformed, then I will reconsider my support for the death penalty, but certainly not before then.
This is one of those things where people with different viewpoints can get together for a shared goal - prison reform and criminal rehabilitation - as long as there aren’t any purity tests set up to keep people out. And, I’m happy to say there aren’t any, in my experience. The people in my area actively working towards prison reform are very welcoming to me, they are good people with a strong focus on achieving concrete goals.
