Yet many Americans imagine that a libertarian politician, if elected, would never compromise. History and incentive theory emphatically say otherwise. There are a lot of people, including commenters on this site, who laugh at Fox News' absurd characterizations of liberals, yet somehow cling to similarly cartoonish notions of what libertarians are.
The danger libertarians pose to America is like the danger that sharks pose to humans: wildly exaggerated by a media that reports on extreme events as if they're typical and reacts to Atlas Shrugged in the same way shark-phobics reacted to Jaws.
Such is the context for the overheated responses when libertarian ideas are treated seriously. When Robert Draper, or a Reason magazine staffer, or other bearish commentators speak of a "libertarian moment," they're not anticipating a Ron Paul-like figure ascending to the White House and ritually debasing the Federal Reserve, or the wholesale elimination of the welfare state, or a radical Libertarian Party presidential candidate suddenly breaking America's de facto system of two-party rule.
The relevant question is whether younger voters will support policies and elect leaders that enhance liberty in comparison to the status quo. If that's what is meant by "a libertarian moment," and it seems like a perfectly reasonable definition of the phrase to me, then we may indeed be witnessing one. I'd make a more modest claim: that the abject failure of Democrats and Republicans, including politicians enthusiastically supported by Krugman, Chait, and Frum—as well as the ambivalence people like them display to grave, widespread civil liberties violations, lawbreaking by government officials, and the power of the national-security state—has created an opening for libertarian-leaning independents to make gains with the public, if they can transcend the cult of personality that surrounds Ron Paul; avoid picking misguided, counterproductive battles like the one over raising the debt ceiling; and embrace a conception of liberty that isn't so narrowly focused on tax rates and property.
There are problems with the libertarian movement, just as there are problems with the conservative and progressive movements. The best critiques of smart anti-libertarians like Krugman, Chait, and Frum shouldn't ever be thoughtlessly dismissed. Their critiques would improve libertarianism if taken to heart. At the same time, libertarianism's critics error when they focus so much attention on Ayn Rand, the libertarian movement, the Libertarian Party, or pols like Paul.
In the future, libertarian gains are likely to come when Republicans and Democrats, liberals, conservatives, and independents, co-opt their most popular ideas.
That's how libertarian ideas have prevailed in the past, on issues as varied as deregulation of telecoms, free-trade deals that have lifted many out of poverty, and opposition to sodomy laws, book bans, and censored art.
In his Times article, Draper commits a similar analytical mistake. He writes:. This is not the first moment that libertarians have claimed as their own. Forty years later, little had changed. Actually, 40 years later, a lot has changed!
Men are no longer arrested for having gay sex. There hasn't been another military draft. Public-housing projects and price controls were dismantled. Ron Paul literally did change the terms of nationally televised debates. That Gary Johnson did no better than John Hospers says very little save that third-party presidential candidates cannot win in our system. Important libertarian victories are happening right now.
Consider drug prohibition, which is being challenged in multiple states, as are draconian sentencing rules. Like gay marriage, criminal-justice reform seems poised to sweep the nation within a generation.
Frum reductively dismisses youth opposition to the war on drugs as "social liberalism. Drug reform has been a core goal of libertarians for decades. The war on drugs has done as much as any policy in modern U.
The reforms we're witnessing constitute significant expansions of liberty. But had the author not chosen snark over substance, his book could have served as a peculiarly timely cautionary tale, because the conflicting philosophical principles that drive this story are central to understanding American politics today. The differences between the libertarian stumblebums who moved to Grafton and the staff of the Koch-funded Cato Institute are mostly sartorial.
If it seems unkind to slam a writer for indulging in a bit of a laugh as he slogs his way through a story that basically boils down to fundamentally divergent views of tax policy, consider the chapter in which Hongoltz- Hetling drags his reader into an ultimately unsatisfactory discursion into the political dynamics of French- occupied Tunisia.
In the chapter, he references the work of the Oxford University professor Daniel Butt, a noted scholar of colonialism. I get it. Mary J. Ruwart, a leading candidate for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination in , wrote,. Some children will make poor choices just as some adults do in smoking and drinking to excess. When we outlaw child pornography, the prices paid for child performers rise, increasing the incentives for parents to use children against their will. Libertarians departed from liberals and joined conservatives on only one value: universalism, where libertarians were substantially lower than liberals.
Libertarians were unique on two values: benevolence, where they scored moderately below the other two groups, and self-direction, where they scored the highest slightly higher than liberals and moderately higher than conservatives. If libertarians have indeed elevated self-direction as their foremost guiding principle, then they may see the needs and claims of others, whether based on liberal or conservative principles, as a threat to their primary value.
The Ethics Position Questionnaire [44] is composed of two item subscales measuring moral idealism and moral relativism. Idealism reflects the extent to which a concern for the welfare of others is at the heart of an individual's moral code e. Relativism concerns whether or not an individual believes that moral principles are universal e.
The scale is commonly used in the business ethics literature and has been shown to predict immoral behavior in ethical situations [45]. The Ethics Position Questionnaire was completed by 8, participants 4, men; 4, liberals, 1, conservatives, and 1, libertarians. Table 2 shows that libertarians score moderately lower than liberals and slightly lower than conservatives on moral idealism. This result is consistent with our findings on the MFQ and Schwartz Values Scale measures, in that libertarians appear to live in a world where traditional moral concerns e.
This is a slightly modified version of the original; for the moral traits we replaced sincere and helpful with kind and loyal, and for the non-moral traits we replaced athletic and industrious with intellectual and hardworking.
In this measure participants are given a list of 8 moral and 8 non-moral positive traits each described with two synonymous terms, e. This scale was completed by participants men; liberals, 85 conservatives, and 77 libertarians. Table 2 shows that libertarians scored moderately lower than liberals and substantially lower than conservatives on the self-relevance of moral traits. They did not differ from liberals and conservatives on the importance they ascribed to non-moral traits.
The results suggest that libertarians are less likely to see moral traits as important to their core self, compared to liberals and conservatives. At the same time they are just as likely as these two groups to base their self-concept around positive non-moral characteristics, such as being funny or outgoing. Notably, libertarians were the only group to report valuing pragmatic, non-moral traits more than moral traits. Libertarians may hesitate to view traits that engender obligations to others e.
In the original conception of Moral Foundations Theory, concerns about liberty or autonomy or freedom were not measured. But as we began to collect data on libertarians and to hear objections from libertarians that their core value was not well represented, we created questions related to liberty in the style of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. We generated 11 items about several forms of liberty see Appendix S1 and collected responses from 3, participants 2, men; 2, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians.
Principal component analysis using varimax rotation indicated two clear factors Eigenvalues of 3. Six items loaded greater than. Three items loaded greater than. Table 2 shows that libertarians scored highest on both kinds of liberty also see Figure 1. Libertarians are not unconcerned about all aspects of morality, as suggested by their scores on the MFQ and several other widely used morality scales.
Rather, consistent with their self-descriptions, they care about liberty. Like conservatives, they endorse a world in which people are left alone to enjoy the fruits of their own labor, free from government interference. They also exceed both liberals and conservatives but are closer to liberals in endorsing personal or lifestyle liberty.
We conducted two analyses to answer this question, in addition to the above comparisons. First, we conducted a cluster analysis of participants using Moral Foundations Questionnaire sub-scale scores, to see if we could statistically extract libertarians based on their pattern of responses concerning their values, rather than on their self-identification.
Second, we conducted a principal components analysis of the measures included in Study 1 in order to see if the values that libertarians espouse did indeed form a coherent factor.
Visual analysis of the resulting dendogram indicated that a major third cluster split occurs at a significant distance from further divisions, and we therefore classified all participants based on this three-cluster solution.
Mean scores and the composition of each group are given in Table 1. Scree plot analysis [49] indicated a 4 factor solution was appropriate, with only four factors having an eigenvalue greater than one. Four factors were extracted using varimax rotation, which we interpreted as conservative values e. MFQ-purity , other-oriented values e. MFQ-harm , self-oriented values e. Table 5 lists all factor loadings greater than.
Standardized factor scores were computed for each participant and analyzed across political groups Figure 2 , indicating that libertarians are indeed characterized by liberty values, conservatives by conservative values, and liberals by other-oriented values.
The above analyses suggest that libertarians indeed hold an empirically distinct set of values, compared to liberals and conservatives. Given that liberty values form an empirically distinct value cluster that has pragmatic utility in differentiating groups and is distinct from other self-oriented concerns such as power and achievement, it is likely that concerns about liberty represent a moral intuition previously unmeasured in Moral Foundations Theory.
Patterns of endorsement across all four components indicate that libertarians have a moral profile that is clearly distinct from both liberals and conservatives see Figure 2. Our results suggest that libertarians are a distinct group that places lower value on morality as typically measured by moral psychologists. This pattern was replicated across a variety of largely separate samples with moral concerns measured using several different approaches.
Our measures were not overtly political in content, and there were few questions about the role of government. Rather, we used measures of general values and moral beliefs, and found that libertarians were consistently less concerned than other groups about the individual-level, other-oriented concerns that most theorists place at the heart of morality: harm, benevolence, and altruism.
The contrast here was starkest with liberals, but we also found that libertarians were much less concerned than conservatives with group-level moral issues e. Libertarians viewed commonly measured moral traits, but not pragmatic traits, as less essential to their self-concept. This is not to say, however, that libertarians are devoid of moral concerns. Contemporary moral psychology has paid little attention to the valuation of negative liberty as a specifically moral concern.
Independence may be seen as a pragmatic value [47]. Respecting the autonomy of others may be seen as a way to promote the welfare of individuals [43] , consistent with liberal ideas about positive liberty, rather than as an independent moral construct. It is predictable, then, that on such measures libertarians appear amoral i.
However, our results show that libertarians score substantially higher than liberals and conservatives on measures of both economic and lifestyle liberty, the Schwartz value of Self-Direction, and the centrality of independence to one's core self measured using the Modified Good Self scale. Libertarians may fear that the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives as measured by the MFQ are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights — libertarians' sacred value e.
If liberty is included as a moral value, libertarians are not amoral. Rather, standard morality scales, including the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, do a poor job of measuring libertarian values. Therefore, our first prediction was strongly supported: libertarians value liberty more strongly and consistently than liberals or conservatives, at the expense of other moral concerns.
We now turn to the question of libertarian dispositions. In particular, might libertarians simply feel the emotional pull of most moral concerns more weakly than other people do? Might libertarians generally be dispositionally more rational and less emotional? Study 2 tests whether these dispositional traits level 1 may lead libertarians to certain values level 2 and then to the endorsement of certain ideological narratives level 3 , which tie these values together in the form of an ideology [9].
In Study 2, we sought to examine cognitive and emotional differences among libertarians, liberals, and conservatives. Psychologists have long theorized that values evolve from the interaction of heritable dispositions, childhood learning, and social-contextual factors [34] , [51]. We expected the libertarian dispositional profile to converge with the results of Study 1, in which libertarians showed a relative lack of concern for the most common moral considerations.
Given the well-documented influence of emotions on moral judgment and behavior [24] , [52] — [54] , if it turns out that libertarians feel fewer or weaker moral emotions, then it is understandable that their morality would be substantially different from that of liberals and conservatives.
Among the main traits that have been found to distinguish liberals from conservatives are those related to cognitive style. Liberals score higher on traits related to tolerance for ambiguity, need for cognition, and openness to experience [4].
Based on the explicitly intellectual focus of libertarian writing, and on their general lack of concern for tradition and traditional morality, we expected that libertarians would generally resemble liberals on such measures. These considerations led us to our second prediction: Libertarians will reveal a cognitive style that depends less on emotion— and more on reason— than will either liberals or conservatives. We expected this cognitive style to relate to the distinct moral profile described in Study 1, leading to libertarian self-identification.
The Big Five Personality Inventory [55] is a item measure of five personality traits often said to be the most fundamental traits in personality psychology: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The measure was completed by 29, participants 14, men; 19, liberals, 3, conservatives, and 2, libertarians. Table 3 shows that libertarians scored lower than the other two groups on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion.
They scored low similar to conservatives on neuroticism, and they scored quite high similar to liberals on openness to experience. The libertarian pattern on the Big 5 complements our findings on their explicit values in Study 1. Libertarians report lower levels of the traits that indicate an orientation toward engaging with and pleasing others i.
Low scores on agreeableness in particular have been said to indicate a lack of compassion and a critical, skeptical nature [51]. In addition, as in Study 1, we see that libertarians share traits with liberals high openness to experience as well as conservatives low neuroticism.
The Interpersonal Reactivity Index IRI [56] is a item measure of empathy, with 7 items covering each of four distinct aspects of empathic responding to others: 1 empathic concern for others, 2 fantasy, 3 personal distress, and 4 perspective-taking. Participants were asked whether certain statements did or did not characterize them very well e. The IRI was completed by 6, participants 3, men, 4, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians.
Table 3 shows that libertarians scored moderately lower than conservatives and substantially lower than liberals on empathic concern for others also see Figure 3. Libertarians score slightly lower than liberals and similar to conservatives on personal distress, perspective taking, and fantasy.
According to Davis [56] , low levels of empathic concern indicate lower levels of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others, which may underlie libertarians' lower scores on the harm foundation of the MFQ, and their general rejection of altruism as a moral duty. The Disgust Scale Revised [57] , [58] measures individual differences in the propensity to feel disgust toward three classes of elicitors: 1 core disgust animals and body products that pose a microbial threat, such as rats, vomit, and dirty toilets ; 2 animal-reminder disgust corpses, gore, and other reminders that human bodies are mortal, like animal bodies ; and 3 contamination concerns about coming into physical contact with other people.
The measure was completed by 32, participants 16, men; 23, liberals, 3, conservatives, and 2, libertarians. Table 3 shows that libertarians scored moderately lower than conservatives and slightly lower than liberals also see Figure 3. However, the comparison to liberals appears to be driven by the fact that libertarians tend to be male and men tend to have lower levels of disgust sensitivity [57].
Within each gender, libertarians and liberals score similarly on the disgust scale. In contrast, libertarians score moderately lower than conservatives on measures of disgust within both genders see Table 3 and across all three classes of disgust.
Previous research has shown that liberals are less disgust-sensitive than conservatives [14]. The low level of disgust sensitivity found in libertarians is consistent with previous research about the relationship between disgust and conservative attitudes on social issues, particularly those related to sexuality e. MFQ-Purity in Study 1. Libertarians may not experience the flash of revulsion that drives moral condemnation in many cases of unorthodox behavior [59].
The Hong Reactance scale [60] is an item measure of psychological reactance [61]. The scale measures the extent to which people are emotionally resistant to restrictions on their behavioral freedom and to the advice and influence of others. The measure was completed by 3, participants 1, men, 2, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Table 3 shows that libertarians score slightly higher than liberals and moderately higher than conservatives on psychological reactance also see Figure 3.
The high levels of reactance expressed by libertarians fit well with the value they place on liberty as a moral foundation. It is of course possible that libertarians' responses to the scale are primarily expressions of their current political beliefs, but it is also possible that people who have the strongest visceral reactions to interference from others are also the people most drawn to the ideals and identity of libertarianism.
Reactance may in fact function as a moral emotion that draws individuals toward the ideal of negative liberty. We selected 20 items from the full item empathizer scale, and 20 items from the full item systemizer scale to create a single survey that could be completed in less than 10 minutes. Cronbach's alphas for these measures were. The measure was completed by 8, participants 4, men, 6, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians.
In fact, libertarians are the only group that scored higher on systemizing than on empathizing. Given that these traits are known to differ between men and women, it is important to examine these effects in each sex separately. Table 3 shows that the same effects hold when looking only at men, and when looking only at women. Research by Baron-Cohen [62] has shown that relatively high systemizing and low empathizing scores are characteristic of the male brain, with very extreme scores indicating autism.
The Need for Cognition scale [64] is a measure of the extent to which people engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activities. People with high need for cognition are more likely to form their attitudes by paying close attention to relevant arguments, whereas people with low need for cognition are more likely to rely on peripheral cues, such as how attractive or credible a speaker is.
The measure was completed by 8, participants 4, men; 5, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Table 3 shows that libertarians scored slightly higher than liberals and moderately higher than conservatives on Need for Cognition also see Figure 4.
This pattern is consistent with the libertarian valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion. Libertarians may enjoy thinking about complex and abstract systems more than other groups, particularly more than conservatives. Six moral dilemmas adapted from Greene et. Each dilemma required a choice about whether to take an action to save multiple individuals at the cost of a single individual's life. Each dilemma was modified so that there was one more aversive version e. Participants were randomly assigned to receive one version of each dilemma; each participant received three aversive and three less aversive dilemmas.
The measure was completed by 4, participants 2, men; 2, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Table 3 shows that libertarians were moderately more utilitarian than conservatives, and slightly more utilitarian than liberals also see Figure 4. Their judgments were more utilitarian in both the more aversive and less aversive scenarios.
The Cognitive Reflection Task [66] is a set of 3 logic questions that have correct and intuitive answers. Correct answers on these questions is said not just to measure intelligence, but also to measure a person's ability to suppress an intuitive response in service of the cognitive reasoning required to solve these problems.
The measure was completed by 9, participants 4, men; 7, liberals, 1, conservatives, and 1, libertarians. Table 3 shows that libertarians find the correct answers to these questions at a slightly higher rate than liberals and moderately higher rate compared to conservatives also see Figure 4. The cognitive reflection task provides a behavioral validation of the hypothesis that libertarians have a more reasoned cognitive style.
Taken together, a convergent picture of the rational cognitive style of libertarians emerges Figure 4. Consistent with McAdams' personality model [34] , previous research has found that dispositions predispose individuals to moralize specific concerns, which in turn constrain ideological choice [9].
We examined a model in which dispositional effects on ideological identification are mediated by value orientations, as measured by the Moral Foundations Questionnaire with questions concerning liberty added. This model has been previously found to be a superior fit to similar data, in comparison to alternative models [9].
The dependent measure was a dichotomous variable, self-identification as libertarian. Using AMOS 19, three structural equation models were created and compared: 1. Given our large sample size, the change in goodness of fit statistic is likely to be more diagnostic of model fit compared to statistics such as Chi-Squared [69].
Parsimony would suggest selecting the full mediation model, and examining the regression weights estimated in the partial mediation model Figure 5 to compare the direct path to libertarian self-identification versus the mediated paths for Disgust Sensitivity. As predicted, libertarians showed lower levels of emotional responsiveness on standard measures of the moral emotions of disgust and empathy Figure 3.
Multivariate analyses indicate that, consistent with McAdams' personality model and previous research on these moral emotions, these dispositions relate to values, in ways which may predispose some individuals to choose to identify as libertarian.
From an intuitionist perspective, libertarians' relative lack of emotional reactions may help explain the generally low levels of moral concern that we found in Study 1 see also [25]. McCrae and Costa [51] argue that low levels of neuroticism, agreeableness, and extraversion are indicative of an unemotional style. Libertarians were the only group to report a more systematic, rather than empathic, way of understanding the world, a characteristic of men [62] that may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women.
If morality is driven largely by emotional reactions, and if libertarians are less emotional on most of the measures we examined, then libertarians should be moved by fewer moral concerns, as was the case in Study 1. Libertarians did display high scores, however, on one measure of emotional reactivity, the Hong Reactance scale Figure 3 , which was found to lead to libertarian values and ideological identification.
This pattern is quite consistent with the pattern of moral evaluations expressed in Study 1 where libertarians' low valuation of traditional moral concerns contrasted sharply with the uniquely high moral value they placed on liberty.
Psychological reactance may provide an intuitionist explanation [8] for the libertarian moralization of liberty. The use of liberty rhetoric may have different psychological origins in different political groups. Autonomy is posited to be a universal basic human psychological need [73] , and thus liberals may be attracted to liberty as a means of improving the psychological welfare of individuals.
Similarly, social conservatives may be attracted to liberty as a means toward opposing redistributive taxation policies that challenge the status quo, yet still feel comfortable with the lifestyle liberty constraints that tradition and conformity require see [22] for an explanation of this inconsistency.
In contrast, libertarians may not see liberty as a means, but rather as an end, in and of itself, based on their heightened feelings of psychological reactance. The idea that libertarians are dispositionally more reactant than others when confronted with societal constraints is a potential gut-level explanation for their moralization of liberty. Consistent with their stated preference for rationality, libertarians seem to enjoy effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks Figure 4.
Where they germinate in different parts of the country, and they gain strength, and it brings together an unholy alliance, frequently, of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists — even libertarians. Brennan did not say the Biden administration would target libertarians. Brennan does not hold a position within the Biden administration.
Nick Shapiro, former deputy chief of staff to Brennan at the CIA, told PolitiFact that Brennan's comments in the interview referred to government efforts to find and charge people involved in the attack on the U. Capitol on Jan. He was not referring to the Libertarian Party," Shapiro said.
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