[wbxrs]

Looking at those charts, why are libertarians considered right-wing? They may be so economically, but they definitely are to the left (or even the far left) socially.

Giving that this post talks about social stuff, and not economical stuff, I believe that 51%/49% chart to be simply wrong.

[kerbalspacepro]

Libertarians are considered right-wing because the left-right axis is simply, "How much do you think the government should be involved in the issues?" When it comes to economics, the answer "more" is left and the answer "less" is right-leaning. When it comes to social issues, the answer "more" is left and the answer "less" is right-leaning.

How can this be? Well, the answer is that while social conservatives sound very authoritarian- and they are- when it comes to things like gay marriage, sex, etc, the authoritarian force for them doesn't come from the State. Ideally, it comes from society and the church. They would rather the government not get involved at all, private beating do the work.

Socially liberal people, however, want the government to protect this behavior. Notice that the Left didn't take the 2015 SC decision and say, "Yay, we've got marriage, we're done." No, they wanted the government to protect the employment rights and other various rights of gays.

Where do libertarians stand? Well, they don't want the government to help! When given a hateful baker, they say, "Hate and bake, I don't care, the market will handle it!" On the spectrum of answers to "How much do you think the government should be involved in the issues?" this is obviously a right-leaning answer. The distinguishing factor is that libertarians don't have any personal gripe against the discriminated, they just think the government shouldn't raise a hand to help them.

tl;dr: The Left-Right access is about government involvement, and libertarians want less involvement, just like their more "socially conservative" counterparts.

[rosser]

On the one hand, I think your comment, while excellent, is an egregious oversimplification.

But it's actually the left-right axis that's the egregious oversimplification, and as long as people insist on reducing political questions to that one axis, the "discourse" will continue to be as meaningless and "more heat than light" as ever.

[kerbalspacepro]

Definitely, agree that it is an oversimplification. Political science lends itself to that failure mode pretty easily.

[goatlover]

> and libertarians want less involvement, just like their more "socially conservative" counterparts.

That's not what I observer from social conservatives when it comes to their beliefs. The majority want to use government to force their values on society, like having prayer in public school, fighting the drug war or banning abortion.

Also a majority tend to be rather hawkish and in favor of intervention abroad. Libertarians are in favor of none of those things.

[kerbalspacepro]

You're right, there's a bit of fuzz there, especially when it comes to foreign policy.

I would argue that social conservatives, when pressed on it, only want the government to enforce their point of view because they are otherwise impotent. If you gave them a choice, "Free public school for all, but no prayer in school" or "No free public school, and all the schools are run by your church" their hearts would favor the latter, even if they say aloud the former.

[Simon_says]

> libertarians don't have any personal gripe against the discriminated

It's worth pointing out that 'the discriminated' refers to both the hated and the hateful. And in fact, the hateful are hated themselves for being hateful.

The law generally doesn't change on an issue until there's at least a sizable minority of people in favor of the change. So when the law does change, it's more of a lagging indicator, anyways.

[Nasrudith]

While it may be theoretically true there is a small linguistic hint at the bias - you hear "left-libertarian" as its own distinct term as opposed to right-libertarian implying a default of the term as right leaning.

Not going to get into any messier qualitatives like no trur scotsman/libertarian in name only or crypto-politicals.

[nyolfen]

in the present american political environment, the left outgroups libertarians while they find policy influence on the right

[thebooktocome]

They may be socially liberal as individuals, but they are all too willing to curtail the government's ability to protect the rights of minorities. That's why they get classified as right-wing by most everyone except themselves.

For example, the libertarian solution to the Christian baker, gay wedding cake problem is that the government does not have the right to stipulate non-discrimination laws for public-facing businesses. Follow that logic to its natural conclusion, and we're back to segregated restaurants. Doesn't sound very leftist to me.

[rosser]

The counter-argument to that is often something like, "Well, people just won't patronize the segregated establishments, because who would support that?!", and with that, we've demonstrably already lost touch with reality.

[aeorgnoieang]

I roughly agree with your diagnosis about why libertarianism is considered right-wing but your example elides some pertinent details, e.g. segregation was sometimes (often?) imposed on private parties by the relevant governments.

[sigstoat]

> That's why they get classified as right-wing by most everyone except themselves.

"libertarians are always classified as X" reliably identifies a person as opposite-of-X.

if you hit up the conservative forums, you'll find libertarians regularly described as dope-smoking lefty hippies, and whatever else.

[wbxrs]

You have a point, I guess I had never seen it that way.

[iron0013]

That hasn't been my experience. On most conservative forums, most people--clearly conservative--describe themselves as "libertarian". Look at elected officials: who's more likely to describe themselves as a "libertarian", Republican politicians or Democratic politicians?

[sigstoat]

you're talking about self-description. i wasn't.

[iron0013]

What? I don't follow. Why would conservatives, who describe themselves as "libertarians", call libertarians "dope-smoking lefty hippies"? I'm saying your account of how conservatives describe libertarians rings false.

Conservatives don't consider libertarians to be "them", they consider libertarians to be "us"--that is, they don't make a distinction between conservatives and libertarians.

[thebooktocome]

It wasn't too long ago that Paul Ryan was considered a libertarian, and a positive direction for the Republican party.