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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.
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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