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SarahC comments on Link: Compare your moral values to the general population - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm beginning to be skeptical about research that tries to show that basic moral orientations, personality types, or even genes correspond to liberal, conservative, and libertarian.
Looking historically and globally, not all political party conflicts aligned as "left" and "right," and the idea of a distinctively libertarian ideology, neither left nor right, is probably no more than fifty years old. Tories vs. Whigs might be called a left/right split. But what about Jacobins and Girondins? Federalists and Anti-Federalists? 19th-century Democrats and Republicans?
If there are fundamental categories distinguishing different kinds of human personalities, and if they're supposed to explain political views, then it's a problem if they only explain current (and predominantly American) political views.
Libertarian is largely just a more extreme, less left and more right leaning version of what's called liberal in Europe, isn't it? Liberal parties go back quite a bit longer than fifty years.
Maybe that's true.
I know libertarians claim intellectual ancestry from 19th century figures (Tucker, Spooner, Mill, Bastiat) but I don't know if classical liberals of the 19th century formed a "third party."
How useful are "left" and "right" or "liberal" and "conservative" anyway? The folks over at the Political Compass suggest that while most mainstream political figures fall in a line with strong correlation between their views on social and economic issues, there are still substantial exceptions.
See, for instance, this chart dealing with candidates in the 2008 U.S. elections. Draw a line from Dennis Kucinich to Tom Tancredo and you have the U.S. political mainstream represented almost entirely on a single continuum. Broadly, people who are toward the left economically also tend to be less traditionalist on social issues such as religion, sex, speech, patriotism, and family; people who are toward the right tend to be more traditionalist on these issues.
The same correlation can be found on this chart of European nations: draw a line from Sweden and Finland to Greece and the UK, and you take in the same direction: economically rightward and socially more authoritarian. Likewise on this chart of U.S. states, this one for Australian parties, and this one for Canadian parties
(Their labels of "Libertarian" vs. "Authoritarian" for the social-issues axis leave something to be desired, since "authoritarianism" has strong negative connotations for a lot of people and "libertarianism" is also the name of a political ideology; but never mind that.)
It might be useful to think of the Kucinich/Tancredo axis (or center-left/authoritarian-right axis) as the "main sequence" of politics: most of the data points fall on or near this axis, but whole categories of exceptions exist. The entire Libertarian movement ranges from the middle right (Ron Paul land) down towards the bottom of the diagram; the left-anarchists are at the bottom left; the Communists towards the top left; and the so-called "extreme right" (like the BNP, the French National Front, or Pat Buchanan) are towards the center top.
And then there's me over in a spot nobody wants. Le sigh.