marcus westbury

A little piece i wrote in today’s Sydney Morning Herald…

Wanted: a political home for idealistic pragmatists

Marcus Westbury
July 8, 2008

Social networks make it easy to inadvertently broadcast a shocking taste in music, the real reason you didn’t turn up at work this morning or an unconventional sexual orientation. They can occasionally unearth a relatively unremarked political phenomenon, too. I discovered recently that an overwhelming sample of my Facebook friends are apparently “left libertarians”.

Facebook’s Political Compass application quizzes users on issues of political philosophy and plots the results on two axes: one between left and right, based broadly on how much, if at all, governments should intervene in the economy; and the second between authoritarianism and libertarianism.

That 42 of my 43 friends who have taken the test are apparently “left libertarian” reveals a few things. The obvious one is that they may not be very representative, and a subset of them self-select for political quizzes on Facebook.

It also reveals that the American centre is probably somewhat to the authoritarian right of the Australian one. On the US-developed test, supporting universal health care or agreeing that a free market requires restrictions on the ability of “predator multinationals to create monopolies” bumps you left. My token right-wing friend – once a relatively senior Liberal Party figure – barely scrapes it to the right of centre by this measure.

Nonetheless, I found the results remarkable. I noticed the pattern in my own friends as Bruce Bartlett, writing in The New Republic, observed that several key players in the libertarian wing of the US conservative movement had endorsed Barack Obama out of frustration with the authoritarian nature of US conservatism in the Bush era.

When did left-leaning libertarianism become the significant and perhaps even dominant ideology among progressives?

A generation or two ago the dominant left-wing ideology was decidedly authoritarian socialism. But only right-wing commentators and museum-piece communists seriously think anyone really believes in socialist-style central planning any more. So who, exactly, are these libertarian lefties? The best I can offer is anecdotal observations mixed with tenuous extrapolations about how they may differ from the socialist left and the libertarian right.

Read the rest of it here.

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