authoritarian, libertarian, right, left-- what quadrant of the Political Compass are you in? [View all]

[carolinayellowdog]

One of the downward trends in DU lately has been the widespread abuse of the terms authoritarian and libertarian. These are both terms with long and honorable histories in published literature, referring to attitudes and policies about the legitimacy of government control of individual behavior. Google ngram allows one to search published literature for appearance of various terms and to compare their frequency over time. This ngram shows the use in books of “authoritarian,” “libertarian,” and the far less common use of “hard left” and “Libertarian” from 1908 through 2008 (the cutoff point for the database.)

Despite their long history in scholarly writing, both terms have been abused here as content-free epithets, even to the ridiculous point of alerts and hides for using the term “authoritarian” in a perfectly legitimate context. But IMO the more serious and systemic problem is the confusion about the term “libertarian.” Although it was hijacked by a rightwing extremist US political party a few decades ago, most Democratic voters support positions that are on the libertarian rather than the authoritarian end of the scale developed by the creators of The Political Compass. And no one outside the US is idiotic enough to use “libertarian” as synonymous with “Libertarian” thereby turning the vast majority of progressive voters worldwide into disciples of the worst novelist in history. (Worst both ethically and esthetically IMO.) The “liberty” championed by Ayn Rand and Rand Paul is that of the extreme right of the Political Compass.

The questionnaire here results in a score that places one in a quadrant that is either libertarian or authoritarian on the Y-axis and left or right in the economic sense on the X-axis. My own result is far down in the left-libertarian quadrant, as you can see here. I would not be surprised if 80% of active DUers, including those who abuse the term “libertarian” as if synonymous with a crank rightwing third party, are in fact left-libertarian in their views.



Take the test for yourself—maybe I’m mistaken. But it seems to me that a tremendous amount of poo is being flung based on semi-deliberate abuse of two words that must be restored to their proper meaning if we are to have a reasonable discussion of the major issues of the day.