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Years ago I had a sort of harebrained thought, that one's support for authoritarian policies might be inversely correlated with one's self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm. That is to say, if you believe that you are well-positioned to protect yourself from harm, you will tend to view protecting oneself and one's family as a personal responsibility (e.g. "we don't call 911, we call the coroner"), and will hence tend to skew libertarian on the political compass. Conversely, if you believe that you are not well-positioned to protect yourself from harm, you will tend to view protecting oneself as a responsibility for the government, and hence tend to skew authoritarian.
I think it's fair to say that the current dominant iteration of Western left-liberal politics has a visible authoritarian streak, with their support for lockdowns and vaccine mandates, their hostility towards unfettered free speech, their concomitant support for online censorship etc. you've all heard this before. Conversely, the dominant iteration of Western rightist politics is more libertarian - most visibly seen in the hands-off approach to Covid taken by Republican states in the USA, but more broadly in their support for unfettered free speech.
Hence, my theory would predict that people with a low self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm will tend to lean left (because the current dominant iteration of left-liberal politics is authoritarian-leaning), whereas people with a high self-perceived ability to protect themselves will tend to lean right (because the current dominant iteration of right politics is libertarian-leaning). Note that this is entirely contingent and downstream of which way the wind is currently blowing: if the dominant strain of left-liberal politics was libertarian, it would attract people with a high self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm, and vice versa.
Who tends to think that they are well-posed to protect themselves from harm? Gun owners, martial artists, bodybuilders - in other words, young strong men. Who tends to think that they are not well-posed to protect themselves from harm? Old people, people with physical disabilities (the former two groups among the most vocal supporters of lockdowns, for understandable if misguided reasons), physically weak men, and women.
What's the mechanism? Certainly testosterone is linked to a greater propensity for risky behaviour, so it's plausible that individuals with a higher concentration of testosterone in their bloodstreams would tend to have a higher self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm. One data point: administering testosterone to Democrat men allegedly causes a rightward shift.
This is very much a half-baked theory that I'm keen to develop further, and I'd be eager to see data backing it up or contradicting it.
Note that this is only self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm, which can obviously be radically skew of one's actual ability.
Something I don't see being commented on that I would guess skews distribution - politics aren't fixed and women have a tendency to adopt the politics of their partners. We shouldn't treat the political identity of someone in their early 20s as a fixed attribute, never to be changed, and we especially shouldn't do so for single women. Trump won 51-47 among married women, while losing 36-63 among unmarried women. Surely some of this is selection bias (e.g. conservative women get married at higher rates), but I would guess that some of it is that marriage tends to promote more conservative politics.
Isn’t the literally most conservative occupation in the country ‘homemaker’? Makes sense that women who depend on traditional gender roles are strongly conservative, but if marriage promotes conservative beliefs this would be another datapoint towards that idea.
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Which would fit with my theory, if married women feel that, unlike single women, they don't need the government to protect them from harm when their hubby has his Smith and Wesson handy.
Likewise, they're less susceptible to financial risk due to a partner's earnings potential, the buffering effect of having two potential sources of income, and the generally improved quality of life that comes with shared living expenses.
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How do you square this with ACAB stickers on the left and Thin Blue Line flags on the right? With "Build the Wall" on the right and "Give me your huddled masses" on the left? With Bathroom bills? Those all seem to be cases where the "right" broadly speaking is asking the gub'mint to protect them, and the left is saying just let it happen we can handle ourselves.
I'm increasingly convinced as time goes on that there are like maybe 25 libertarians in the entire USA, and everyone else just adopts libertarian talking points when it is convenient to their preexisting tribal commitments. No one who is a Trump supporter is also a Libertarian, that is just flat out incompatible.
ACAB is pretty much a wealthy white movement- that is, among people who are fantastically unlikely to need police protection. Thin blue line seems a lot more class neutral, albeit still overwhelmingly white. And bathroom bills are usually framed as protecting our women and children in spaces we can’t enter for social taboo reasons by conservatives.
Border are probably the big wrinkle here.
I'm not really married to any of the examples, but I don't think the whole right/left split proposed is compatible with complex reasoning, in OP's statement it is meant to be emotional, pre-rational.
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I think it would be reasonable to classify Bryan Caplan as a libertarian, and he supports open borders. I'm not sure if you could strictly call Objectivism a subset of libertarianism, but certainly Ayn Rand is an influential figure within the libertarian school, and IIRC John Galt's speech contains a passage where Galt says that the only functions of government should be to protect citizens from threats from without (e.g. foreign invasion, which I take to include secure borders) and threats from within (e.g. murder and theft at the hands of one's fellow citizens), and the government should otherwise leave well enough alone.
I'll concede that Thin Blue Line flags on the right is a wrinkle in my theory, but I don't think ACAB stickers actually contradict it. Yesterday I was binge-reading a bunch of articles about the defund/abolish the police movement in 2020, and as far as I understand it, supporters of the movement generally don't think "just let [crime] happen we can handle ourselves". They rather tend to support abolishing the police in favour of delegating a large range of social functions to social workers, case workers, psychologists etc., as opposed to pure laissez-faire state-of-nature existence.
Well, it's a spectrum, not a binary. There's a big difference between "we don't need police at all" and "we do need police" and "we need police and they should be legally empowered to do anything they so choose to stop/prevent crime". My half-baked theory is that where one falls on the authoritarian-libertarian spectrum will be inversely proportional to one's internally perceived ability to protect oneself, so people who believe that they are very poorly equipped to protect themselves from harm will be very authoritarian, people who believe that they are very well equipped to protect themselves from harm will be very libertarian, and everyone else will be somewhere in the middle, proportional to said self-perceived ability.
Agree.
Objectivists deny any belonging to libertarianism and have an odd tendency to support global government.
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Ron Paul made the excellent point that a border wall will keep Americans in as much as it will keep Mexicans (et al) out. A border wall is incompatible with Libertarianism because it is the obvious pre-req to restricting Americans from exiting the country. Open borders are good for me, not just for my roofer.
I'd say the side that thinks they need as many men with as many guns as possible patrolling the streets patting down anyone who looks suspicious are more frightened of crime and less confident in their ability to deal with it than the side that thinks you can deal with it via social workers and suchlike. That's absent a judgment on who is right, or what the correct level of fear is: when I'm scared of things I want to deal with them violently and immediately, when I'm not viscerally scared of things I talk about long term root causes.
Sure, but map the spectrum onto either a binary or the spectrum or left-right and it doesn't come out with "Rightists are confident self-defenders" and "Leftists are nervous weaklings." The positions on cops map more to "members of my perceived tribe should have more power." Which is my point about libertarianism: people adopt libertarian and constitutionalist talking points when their tribe is under perceived threat from the government, and ignore them when their tribe is in power. Free speech absolutists were on the left when I was growing up, they are on the right today, who knows where my kids will perceive the first amendment to be assuming insh'Allah the first amendment makes it to them.
Arming up with guns and patrolling your territory is dealing with it. I'm not afraid of criminals, but I nevertheless support putting them down violently, and making sure they can't organize.
The right is broadly more supportive of lower taxes, the right to bear personal arms, and neighborhood watches, too, so..
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That's a fair characterisation and a point that I'd overlooked. I'd be curious to see what hard-libertarians' preferred approach to crime is.
I think my comment may have unintentionally presented this theory as a be-all and end-all theory when I viewed it as more of a contributing factor which might assist in leading one down one garden path or another. I'm not denying that there are strong, confident people who nevertheless support authoritarian policies, or vice versa.
Agree.
That's fair, and I apologize if it seemed like I was jumping down your throat. I think you can see how "Right man strong, left man scared" is kind of a boo-outgroup alarm, in the same way as /r/science loves to post articles about how conservatives are dumber, less open to experience, etc.
Yes, in retrospect suggesting that men only support leftist policies because they're physically weak was rather poorly phrased.
Indeed, it's not only physical weakness contributing to that.
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When I work the polls for primary elections, there are two visible personality traits that have a roughly 100% predictive rate for party affiliation. If you are clearly, visibly neurotic and nervous about interacting with the world, you want a Democrat primary ballot. If you have a casual, easy confidence in yourself and the world around you, you want a Republican primary ballot. As a disclaimer, this only applies to people for whom those traits are so exaggerated that it seems obvious in the first 5 seconds of interaction.
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This theory predicts that young people are well to the right of senior citizens.
Not necessarily. As I said, the determining factor is one's self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm, which can obviously be radically skew of one's actual ability. I think the average 19-year-old man is actually able to protect himself from harm far better than the average 75-year-old man, but this says nothing about their relative self-perceived ability to do so. Considering that Zoomers report vastly elevated rates of mental distress than older generations, there's no contradiction in the idea of a fit and healthy 19-year-old man who believes, contrary to all objective evidence, that he is helpless to protect himself from harm. What you end up with is a virgin vs. chad meme, with a fit and healthy 19-year-old man who is scared of his own shadow*, in stark contrast to a 75-year-old man with a host of comorbidities who refuses to stop smoking or wear a seatbelt.
*not a strawman, I personally know several people meeting this description or something approximating it
Is this falsifiable? How would you check for so-called "perceived ability"? Ask them how many fights they've been in?
Ask someone a series of questions, like "how worried are you about being attacked by a stranger?" or "if you were attacked by a stranger, do you think you would be able to defend yourself?" You could pair this subjective polling with objective data like "how many guns do you own?" or "do you have a black belt in karate?"
My half-baked hypothesis is that, all other things being equal, people who don't own any guns, don't practise martial arts, don't think they would be able to defend themselves if they were attacked by a stranger etc. will be more likely to support authoritarian policies than the converse.
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As you get older, you become very aware of your own growing fragility.
Which does not automatically imply that the (accurately) self-perceived fragility of an older person is necessarily greater than the inaccurately self-perceived fragility of a younger person.
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This is actually the case in Sweden now, except the reasoning goes the opposite direction.
There was an expectation of a "generation Greta" effect but instead the opposite happened. The leading preliminary explanation is that young people being victims of and knowing victims of violent and organised crime, and having limited ways to protect themselves go to "the right". Older people meanwhile are largely insulated from the crime and grew up during a safer time.
It'll be interesting to see what more extensive analysis will say.
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I believe that you are mis-specifying your research questions. You cherry-pick two issues and conclude that "the current dominant iteration of left-liberal politics" is more authoritarian-leaning than the current dominant iteration of right politics, but that is almost certainly untrue. On many other currently dominant issues, such as crime and immigration, it is those on the right who take the more authoritarian position. And, re one of the two issues you mention, free speech, the authoritarian position is hardly the sole province of those on the left; it all depends on the speech in question.
So, if you are really interested in exploring this issue, and your post is not just an elaborate "boo outgroup," you need to compare the true outliers re support for authoritarian policies (ie, libertarians) to everyone else.
And, btw, here is a paper that weighs against your hypothesis. It finds that exposure to androstenone increases preferences for social order, which of course is a conservative position (see, eg, the recent discussion here of the German Green Party poster) and hypothesizes that detecting androstenone in others is interpreted as a sign of potential danger, which certainly implies a concomitant reduction in perceived ability to protect oneself from harm.
My comment was not intended as a "boo outgroup" comment. While I have misgivings about the authoritarian leanings of many Western left-liberal parties/movements, I also think many libertarians are completely nuts, and I'm glad not to live in a country in which gun ownership is common. If someone I know hung this poster on their house, I'd think they were a lunatic.
I never claimed it was and I don't know why you're implying that I did. I made the much narrower claim that, in the West, hostility to free speech is more commonly found among left-liberal parties than right-leaning parties. This does not remotely imply that left-liberal parties are the only parties which are hostile to freedom of speech, in the West or elsewhere.
Thank you, I look forward to reading it.
YW.
Re the free speech issue, I meant that it is by no means obvious that hostility to free speech is greater on the left than on the right. Rather, those on the left are hostile to certain types of speech, while those on the right are hostile to other types of speech. In my experience, very few people on either side support free speech in principle to any degree.
Freudian slip? :P
I take your point though.
Given my work, definitely not. But fixed, thx
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The idea that speech is innately valuable is intuitively wrong to many, myself included -- free speech as a principle has always been an underdog struggling against human nature.
I don't think free speech advocates generally believe that (all) speech is innately valuable. Indeed, most defenders of free speech will address the obvious fact that they are frequently defending shitty speech from terrible/crazy/stupid people. The argument is that "the right to speak your mind without being punished" - i.e., that the Powers That Be should not be able to define what you are or are not allowed to say - is innately valuable.
Obviously, there are failure modes (hence the typical leftist pedantry about how censorship by every media and financial platform in the world isn't really censorship, it's just "social consequences for your behavior"), and there are also arguments people have made here that actually, censorship is good and the government should restrict what you can say ("to what aligns with my values," of course), but "speech is innately valuable" is a straw man.
How can speaking your mind be valuable if the speech itself is not? What about you, random person, is so incredible that the mere act of saying your shitty thoughts out loud transforms them into something worthwhile?
You say it's a strawman, I say it's a necessary component to free speech. The human soul is not an alchemic chalice transforming lead into gold, here.
Because I would like to be able to speak my mind, even if I'm an idiot or a loon, without being put in jail or cast out of society. That is the principle being defended, not "Everything that comes out of everyone's mouth is worth hearing."
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Also it seems opposite of the thrive survive model that Scott posits. (Which I think better explains more of those unmentioned issues you bring up)
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I think there's something to be said about the correlation, but I'm not convinced that the causation falls out the way you describe. For one thing, a given person's capacity to protect himself is not fixed; a mugging or nearby riots might convince him to buy a gun. Did his politics change before, during, or after acquiring the gun? Maybe!
There have been previous discussions about the political significance of internal vs. external locus of control that might be relevant here?
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Once again I'll remark that my experience with these debates was subtly different. At least when it came to vaccine mandates (hard mandates, which were never really a topic here, and soft mandates like the vaxx pass, which was briefly implemented), the initial biggest push for them came from (otherwise-)liberal centre-right types, including pro-market think tanks and Confederation of Finnish Industries, Finland's influential employee union organization (closest American equivalent would be NAM). These types quite consciously presented vaccine mandates as an alternative to lockdowns and something that would ensure there would no longer be a need for a lockdown, since that would be bad for economy. Of course this was then associated with elitist anti-anti-vaxxer discourse on how the state must force the antivaxxers to be responsible if they cannot be responsible themselves, but neither of those is really all that unfamiliar to Finnish centre-right, including ostensibly liberal parts of the centre-right.
More left-wing factions came to support the vaxx passes, too - like with all other COVID authoritanism, it was in the end a cross-political and cross-class phenomenon that was wildly popular for a time - but the initial push didn't come from the left, it came from centre-right, at least here.
Similar marketing from the centre-right in Hong Kong, except now we have vaccine mandates AND extreme masking AND social distancing AND the potential threat of lockdowns AND a push to vaccinate ever younger people. Now they're trying to convince people that 5 year olds really have to get vaccinated, to protect them from the huge risk that covid poses to people that age... Classes with too few vaccinated pupils will have to go online, with the surely unintentional consequence of making parents resent those who don't get their children vaccinated.
And... Hong Kong still has an extreme vulnerability to covid, because so much of the older generation still refuses to get vaccinated, and everything other than vaccinating the elderly is comparatively trivial from a public health standpoint. It's like being in a cold night in the Arctic and trying to compensate for a lack of a fire by using lots of candles.
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