No, They're Not Libertarians

I saw an article somewhere that, in describing the Kentucky Senate race, said that it had become unexpectedly competitive after Rand Paul and his "extremist libertarian agenda" won the Republican primary. In general there's a sense that the Tea Partiers are libertarians. This sense is wrong. Rand Paul, at least as he is running for Senate, is not a libertarian. Neither are Sharron Angle, Marco Rubio, Ken Buck, Joe Miller, or, last and at this point arguably least, Sarah Palin. To see why, you need to look at what "libertarian" means, and that means examining the political ideology-space in detail. This post is half a rebuttal of the Tea Party-libertarianism connection and half an excuse to use some recent musings about Political Space. (Warning: mathematical metaphors and models ahead.)
Now, of course, ideology-space is many-dimensional. Suppose that each issue resides on a single-dimensional axis, some of which are discrete and some of which are continuous (for instance, you either want abortion to be always legal, usually legal, usually illegal, or always illegal, and you favor a maximum marginal income tax rate anywhere from 0% to 100%, though probably somewhere in the middle). This is not quite true: there are some issues that break down in more than two directions, and would need multiple axes, though arguably these can be thought of as multiple different issues. Combining all of these issues, we get a giant Political Space. It has a whole lot of dimensions, and that makes it difficult to work with, both because the odds of any two people lying particularly near each other would be very small in such a large space and because it's, you know, hard to picture 1000-dimensional space. You also can't really use it to make any sort of at-large ranking of people.

Conventionally, we shrink this n-dimensional Political Space into a 1-dimensional space. Roughly speaking, instead of treating the various axes of political opinion as independent and adjoint to one another, you line them all up parallel to each other; this means identifying the direction along one of the axes with the direction along every other axis. Then, you take some sort of weighted average, possibly normalized to the attitudes of a given society. This lets us line people up on a Political Axis, conventionally considered a left-right axis, and say Dennis Kucinich is more liberal than Barack Obama is more liberal than Joe Lieberman is more liberal than George Bush. If you want a unique ordering like that, you need to shrink everything down into a 1-dimensional space.

But 1-space is very bad for getting the flavor of a person's political ideology. It literally recognizes no flavor: all liberals are liberals, all conservatives are conservative, all centrists are centrist. This is, obviously, false, especially as to centrists, who are likely to come in a vast array of different stripes. So where the original n-space was descriptive in perfect detail of an individual's ideology, but damn near useless for rankings, the new 1-space gives a unique ranking, but retains zero detail beyond that ranking. We want something in between, and there is, of course, a reasonable way to construct that middle path: the Political Plane.

You've probably seen the Political Plane in action. It is used by the people who run www.politicalcompass.org, a very nice little quiz. They conceive of political ideologies not as lying on a line, the left-right spectrum, but on a two-dimensional plane. One of the axes, they say, is the traditional left-right axis, which they consider to be economic policy. The other axis is social policy, running from "authoritarian" to "libertarian." Take the Cartesian product of these two axes (I warned you there would be math!), and you get a political plane. You can then identify various points on the plane as corresponding to known ideologies: the center is, obviously, centrist, and you can place Communism, fascism, neo-liberalism, anarchism, social democracy, conservativism, libertarianism, etc. at various points along the edge.

I want to suggest a slightly different way to think about that political plane. For starters, I don't think saying that the economic axis corresponds to the old one-dimensional axis is entirely accurate. I also think you can view these axes in one of two different ways, which I believe ought to give similar or perhaps identical results. The first way is to view them as being constructed similarly to the way we constructed the old one-dimensional axis: take a bunch of individual issue axes, line them up with one another, and take a weighted average of sorts. In this case, though, we separate the issues into two categories, economic issues and social issues. This is, basically, the way the good people at Political Compass do it, and it's probably the best way for measuring.

The other way, however, takes direct advantage of the fact that these issues are not independent of one another, and approaches that dependence from the other direction. In this view, the two axes represent fundamental views of rather basic questions. The "economic" axis, as I see it, relates to the matter of property rights. What I might call "crude" property rights are the property rights Locke is widely considered to discuss: this is my property, I own it, you can't take it. People who place a high value on this kind of property rights are conventionally placed on the right-hand of this axis. On the left are people who favor what one could call a different kind of property rights: the right to have some property, even if that means violating some people's crude property rights. The "social" axis is composed of what I think of as being either political rights, like the right to vote and various of the 4th-8th Amendment-style rights in criminal justice, or happiness rights, which I define to be the right of an individual to pursue happiness however they see fit. The "libertarian" end of this axis is strongly in favor of both kind of right; the "authoritarian" axis is strongly opposed. I use quotes because I don't think those words perfectly describe the two ends. I might instead call the two ends "individualist" and "authoritarian." I admit that uniting these two slightly different areas of political ideology isn't 100% valid, and in theory you could be pro-political rights and anti-happiness rights or vice versa, but I think that political and happiness rights are well enough connected to justify it. (Yes, I know I framed those in a rather pro-left-wing way. Consider it stipulated that I have used language that is biased in favor of my positions simply out of convenience, and that in this post I am not endeavoring to claim that happiness rights are good, even if it sounds like I am.)

I believe that it is of only minor consequence which of these systems we use, because I think that the fundamental values the second method describes determine, roughly speaking, the array of opinions on the varied issues that the first method aggregates. So in theory the two methods examine the same process from the input end and from the output end; they ought to agree, at least within a reasonable margin of measurement error.

So then, how do these axes line up with conventional political labels? Well, American "liberalism" is relatively anti-crude property rights, and rather pro-political and happiness rights; this is also true of democratic socialism abroad, and American liberals are really just moderate social democrats (except Bernie Sanders!). Conservatives, conversely, favor crude property rights and tend to oppose political and happiness rights, the latter especially for religious reasons. (If you dispute that conservatives oppose political rights, which side is it that likes to limit the rights of criminal defendants? Which side prefers to purge voter rolls rather than run registration drives?) Libertarians, conventionally described, favor both crude property rights and political and happiness rights. The other corner of the plane is not heavily covered in America; that's where state communists like those of the USSR and Cuba reside.

So, using this framework, are the Tea Parties libertarian? Not on your life. The first way to see this is that they are vigorously opposed to happiness and political rights. They're anti-gay, they're anti-sex, they're anti-drug, establishing that they don't support the right to pursue happiness in one's own way, and they also like to talk about violent overthrow of the government if they lose an election. Not very supportive of political rights, ne? Moreover, the thing they get muddled about is property rights. They claim to be soooo anti-tax, the classic crude property rights position, but they also loooooove their Medicare, a classic right-to-have-property program. On the economic axis, they're just kind of befuddled. On the social axis, they're anything but individualistic. They don't even come close to being libertarians. And that applies to Rand Paul, too: as best I know, he's neither pro-gay nor pro-weed, unlike his father Ron who is fairly pro-marijuana. So, libertarians? I think not.

A final word about my model: there are, off the top of my head, two major categories of issues that don't fit excellently into the two axes I describe here. Those are environmental issues and military issues, or theoretically foreign policy issues more broadly. I think there's a reasonable case to be made for considering foreign policy a whole third axis, in which case libertarians tend to be relatively isolationist and the Tea Party tends to be rather militaristic, yet another fail. International issues, though, are not really a simple line; they're more like a triangle, with isolationism, imperialism, and internationalism at the vertices. The environment, though, isn't conventionally thought to be big enough to get its own axis. I think you can argue that domestic, small-scale environmentalism is actually in the economic category: do individuals have the right to acquire and hold parts of the environment, even if that means degrading or destroying them? Or do individuals have a right to have there be a non-despoiled environment? Of course, considered from a non-anthropocentric view, those matters change. Global environmental issues, primarily global climate change, are a little different, and could be argued as foreign policy matters. I think there is a theoretical argument for making environmental issues a separate axis, namely that while the other three axes refer to intra-humanity relationships, environmental issues concern the relationship between humanity and "nature," the non-human part of the world. However, including foreign affairs and environmental issues along with the social issues and economic issues would require either a four-dimensional array or a five-dimensional one, if we consider foreign policy to be fundamentally two-dimensional, and those are kind of tough to model. (Full disclosure, I do think that the Tea Partiers match up with libertarians on environmental issues, namely, they're against the environment. But that's 1 out of 4, which isn't very good.)