THEY'RE JUST AFFLUENT WHITE GUYS WHO DON'T WANT TO BE PART OF SOCIETY:

Elusive Libertarians: Do “libertarian leanings” constitute a significant political movement? (John Zogby and Zeljka Buturovi, 2/18/10, National Review)

ifferent as conservative and libertarian positions can be on some issues, this appears not to matter very much. The reason is that economic issues are central to the libertarian worldview, and on these issues, libertarians have far more in common with the Right than with the Left. According to our July 2009 survey, 69 percent of conservative and 68 percent of very conservative adults share the view of 64 percent of libertarians that “Economic freedom is the foundation for all other freedoms.” In that survey, we asked: Which of the following issue categories is most important to your current ideology: social/cultural issues (abortion, gay rights, gun control); economic issues (free markets, free trade, union rights); foreign-policy issues (intervention in other countries, national defense); or environmental/energy issues (government subsidies, global warming)?

In the past, we at Zogby were often pestered by libertarians. “We are unfairly forced in your surveys,” they complained, “to choose between two crude views neither of which captures our philosophy.” It was in reaction to their insistence that they are fundamentally different from both liberals and conservatives that we added the “libertarian” category on our ideology question.

In this, we were not alone. Theories have been developed to accommodate ideological patterns that do not fit the somewhat limited Left–Right continuum. For example, The Political Compass has attempted to map attitudes toward economic and social freedom more accurately by creating four possible ideological types (authoritarian Left, authoritarian Right, libertarian Left, and libertarian Right). More elaborately, Brian Mitchell’s Eight Ways to Run the Country uses attitudes toward hierarchy and use of force to establish eight political types, two of which serve merely to disentangle the Hayek from the von Mises variety of libertarianism.

Let us for a moment follow these writers’ assumption that a person’s ideology is solely determined by his policy views. And let us also assume that social and economic liberties can largely be disentangled and that libertarians are as close to liberals on social issues as they are to conservatives on economic ones — a view implicit in the argument for liberaltarianism. Still, our data show that different aspects of ideology are not equally important for a person’s ideological identity, and, somewhat ironically, that this is especially true of libertarians. For all their insistence that liberty has multiple facets, libertarians appear to cherish one of them much more than others. This means that liberaltarians should not hold their breath waiting for self-described libertarians to join them.