Here's a rough distribution of the American electorate's political positions:
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| Voter Study Group |
You'll notice that the overall bias is heavily against the combination of social liberalism and economic conservatism1. In other words, genuine libertarians are pretty rare. It's nice to see data confirming what you already knew.
The two main clusters in US politics (and, I suspect, in most modernized countries) are socially conservative & economically centrist, and socially liberal & economically authoritarian. This misses a whole quadrant of possibility-space and, I think, overlooks most of the good solutions for our problems.
But this isn't a post about why there should be more libertarians, because I don't fit in with libertarians.
Many people will argue that 'right' and 'left' are natural categories, more natural than Nolanesque formulations acknowledge. There may be good reason to believe that. But it's downright weird how many people, in this age of political compass memes, still can't really seem to break outside the box and consider more sensible combinations.
Today's particular question is why there doesn't seem to be a significant mass of people who embody both pro-market economics, anti-interventionist policies, and a scientific worldview. The best example I'm coming up with is a certain subset of the rationalist movement, but that subset can't be more than a few thousand people at the absolute maximum and most of them lean towards left-libertarianism2, besides.
This isn't really a new problem; I never felt at home among the libertarian movement. My Objectivist background is probably a big part of that—back in the day Ron Paul seemed too conservative for my tastes. Despite my tolerance for high-reactionary arguments, I'm not really a traditionalist. There's stuff worth preserving from the past—like, we shouldn't torch it wholesale—but generally speaking modernity is better. Corrective optics, antihistamines, air conditioning....you can see where I'm going here. Nerds like me don't make good yeoman farmers.
Since I started reading The Virtue of Selfishness a few days ago, I've been thinking about that again. The Objectivist peg doesn't fit into the conservative hole very well (though it fits into the liberal hole slightly worse). Objectivist reject religion, embrace technological progress, are fine with women in the workplace, are generally okay with abortion, and prefer modern architecture.
This doesn't sound like a group that would vote predominantly Republican! And yet, they do, on vaguely economic grounds. As we see above, the GOP's electorate isn't exactly hypercapitalist3. But the other reason Objectivists end up closer to conservatives is that the philosophy demands an individual standard of conduct. Egoism is not hedonism, in other words. Stand up straight, look problems in the eye, and expect the best from yourself and others.
Okay, that sounds a little more like ur-conservatism. But again, the standards are different. Egoism is not Protestantism, either. Objectivists don't fit in anywhere. Then consider the fact that I don't even fit in with the Objectivists!
I've got to write that post on epistemic distance.
1I contend that the "conservative" position should rightfully be called liberalism, but that's not really the point here.
2For full disclosure, most people would probably consider me somewhat left-libertarian at this point. This is accurate insofar as I'm sympathetic to arguments for a guaranteed basic income and such, but the term carries an affect that doesn't really apply.
3This wouldn't be a problem if the party's elected representatives werehypercapitalist, but they really aren't. In my experience, new libertarians give up on the "work through the Republican Party" approach in less than three years.
