Name-Calling Contest Between Libertarians and Leftists: Autistic Dorks vs. Ugly Weaklings

February 17, 2018 by Dan Mitchell

 

In TV debates, I’ve asserted that folks on the left are “neurotic” and “guilt-ridden.” And I shared a make-believe divorce agreement that exploited every negative stereotype about left wingers.
So I’m not averse to philosophical mockery, at least if it’s done with humor rather than malice.
As you might imagine, this is a two-way street. Folks on the other side make fun of libertarians quite frequently.

And not always with a smile. According to one leftist academic, we are borderline autistic.

Speaking at New York City’s Unitarian Church of All Souls…, MacLean…answered an audience member’s question about the motivations of the late economist James Buchanan, whom she considers to be one of the founders of libertarianism. In response, she suggested that Buchanan might have been on the “autism spectrum.” “It’s striking to me how many of the architects of this cause seem to be on the autism spectrum,” she said an hour into the talk. “You know, people who don’t feel solidarity or empathy with others and who have difficult human relationships sometimes.”

I don’t know anything about how autism is measured, so I can’t agree or disagree with her assertion. Though I’m tempted to reflexively disagree because MacLean’s book on Buchanan was incredibly shoddy.

But I will admit that libertarians can be a bit dorky. Heck, I’ve specifically shared humor noting our nerdy tendencies.

Moreover, Jonathan Haidt, who is a serious and non-shoddy academic, has done some work quantifying the libertarian psyche.

We’ve been deluged in recent years with research on the psychology (and brain structure) of liberals and conservatives. But very little is known about libertarians — an extremely important group in American politics that is not at home in either political party. …In a project led by Ravi Iyer, we analyzed data from nearly twelve thousand self-described libertarians, and compared their responses to those of 21,000 conservatives and 97,000 liberals. …The findings largely confirm what libertarians have long said about themselves, but they also shed light on why some people and not others end up finding libertarian ideas appealing. Here are three of the major findings:

Here’s how libertarians score on “moral values”.

Libertarians match liberals in placing a relatively low value on the moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity (e.g., they’re not so concerned about sexual issues and flag burning), but they join conservatives in scoring lower than liberals on the care and fairness foundations (…e.g., they don’t want a welfare state and heavy handed measures to enforce equality). This is why libertarians can’t be placed on the spectrum from left to right: …They really do put liberty above all other values.

Here’s how they score on “reasoning and emotions”.

Libertarians have the most “masculine” style, liberals the most “feminine.” We used Simon Baron-Cohen’s measures of “empathizing” (on which women tend to score higher) and “systemizing”, which refers to “the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.” Men tend to score higher on this variable. Libertarians score the lowest of the three groups on empathizing, and highest of the three groups on systemizing. …On this and other measures, libertarians consistently come out as the most cerebral, most rational, and least emotional. On a very crude problem solving measure related to IQ, they score the highest.

And here’s what characterizes libertarians on “relationships”.

Libertarians are the most individualistic; they report the weakest ties to other people. They score lowest of the three groups on many traits related to sociability, including extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. They have a morality that matches their sociability – one that emphasizes independence.

In other words, based on the final category, maybe there is some truth to the stereotype that we’re introverted, disagreeable, and self-centered.

I don’t know if that means we are more likely to be autistic, but dorkiness might be a semi-fair insult.
But folks on the left should be careful about stereotyping since they have vulnerabilities of their own.
Here’s a story from the U.K.-based Times, for instance, on how leftists are more likely to be weaklings.

A study has found that weaker men are more likely to be in favour of redistributive taxation. …That is one interpretation of research by academics from Brunel University, who assessed 171 men for how buff they were – looking at strength, bicep circumference, weight and height. Writing in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, they found that those men who looked more formidable were…much less likely to back policies that redistribute wealth. Michael Price, from Brunel University London, said that this fitted with some of the predictions of evolutionary psychology. …“Our minds evolved in environments where strength was a big determinant of success. If you find yourself in a body not threatened by other males, if you feel you can win competitions for status, then maybe you start thinking inequality is pretty good.” The question was which way did the relationship go? Were men who were naturally strong also more likely to be less egalitarian – calibrating their morals to fit their abilities? Or was it that men who were less egalitarian felt more need to go to the gym, unconsciously believing they needed the strength in order to reach a better place in a red-in-tooth-and-claw social hierarchy? When Dr Price factored in time spent in the gym some, but not all, of the link disappeared – implying some truth to the second explanation.

For what it’s worth, I shared a similar story on this kind of research back in 2012.  There’s also academic research indicating leftists are not as attractive.

The researchers claim that never before has the effects of physical attractiveness on politics been examined on this level and that there is “good reason to believe that individuals’ physical attractiveness may alter their political values and worldviews”. They said that their findings prove attractive people tend to lean towards the right because they have better social skills and are more popular, competent and intelligent due to the “halo effect”… Writing about their findings in the Politics and Life Sciences journal published in December 2017, the pair said that on average, hotter people have an easier life so don’t see the need for more welfare, aid and government support, unlike their left-wing counterparts.

And there’s more than one study reaching this conclusion.

A recently published study in the Journal of Public Economics concludes that the attractiveness of a candidate does correlate with their politics. They find that politicians on the right are more good looking in Europe, the United States and Australia. The study shows correlation, not causation, but the researchers float a simple economic explanation for why this might happen. Numerous studies have shown that good-looking people are likely to earn more, and that people who earn more are typically more opposed to redistributive policies, like the progressive taxes and welfare programs favored by the left. The researchers also offer a more general psychological explanation for the trend: That good-looking people are often treated better than others, and thus see the world as a more just place. Past studies have found that the more attractive people believe themselves to be, the lower their preference for egalitarianism, a value typically associated with the political left.

For what it’s worth, the three articles I just cited don’t reflect well on folks on the left, but conservatives shouldn’t feel good either since the research sort of implies that they’re entitled and arrogant jerks.

It’s unclear where libertarians score on these measures.

Incidentally, there is research on how attractiveness means higher earnings and some folks actually think government should somehow intervene to compensate for “lookism.”

Now let’s shift from soft science to hard science. A 2012 study from Trends in Genetics advances the hypothesis that ideology and values may be hard-wired.

…we review the ‘genetics of politics’, focusing on the topics that have received the most attention: attitudes, ideologies, and pro-social political traits, including voting behavior and participation. …there has been a recent shift in perspective by both life and social scientists that emphasizes the interplay between genes and the environment, and gene–culture coevolution, which has proven more accurate than any position favoring either nature or nurture. It is against this background that a growing movement has begun to address the substantial, but not exclusive, role of genetic influences in the manifestation of political differences. …These findings are summarized in Figure 1, which shows that genetic influences account for a substantial proportion of individual differences in political traits.

And here is Figure 1, which shows that genetics (the blue bars) matters a lot for certain things like overall ideology and doesn’t matter at all for other factors such as party identification.

By the way, I have no way of judging whether this is good science or bad science, and I don’t even know if the results are positive or negative from a libertarian perspective. I’m simply sharing the results because they’re potentially illuminating/interesting.

Let’s close with some research that teases out some differences between libertarians (or “economic conservatives,” which I assume is a proxy) and other groups.

Here’s some academic research on attitudes about science.

It is frequently asserted that conservatives exhibit a cognitive style that renders them less well disposed toward science than progressives, and that they are correspondingly less trusting of scientific institutions and less knowledgeable about scientific ideas. Here we scrutinize these assertions, using data from the U.S. General Social Survey. We distinguish between three different definitions of ‘conservative’: first, identifying as conservative, rather than as liberal; second, holding socially conservative views, rather than socially progressive views; and third, holding economically conservative views, rather than economically leftist views. We find that self-identified conservatives and social conservatives are less scientifically literate and optimistic about science than, respectively, self-identified liberals and social progressives. However, we find that economic conservatives are as or more scientifically literate and optimistic about science than economic leftists.

In other words, folks that lean more libertarian rank at the top in terms of knowledge and attitudes.
And here’s an article about underlying value systems.

Political battles in the US are often portrayed as a clash between “bleeding heart” liberals and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” conservatives. …Scientists are beginning to zero in on a few key differences in the ways that people on opposite ends of the political spectrum react to stimuli. …A study published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research in January suggests that you might be able to tell whether someone is liberal or conservative simply by the way they react to pictures of gross things like blood, feces or vomit. The authors found that socially conservative students will physically look away from “disgusting” images more quickly than their liberal peers (but the same didn’t hold true for people with fiscally conservative beliefs). …There’s also evidence that the areas of the brain that process and express fear are more active in conservative voters, which might make them more likely to quickly turn away from something that could make them sick. …New research on compassion is de-bunking the myth that liberal voters might inherently be more empathetic and kind-hearted people than conservatives.

Since folks on the right donate more than folks on the left, I’ve always thought the stereotype about generous leftists was absurd.

As “Libertarian Jesus” teaches, you’re not supposed to be charitable with other people’s money.
But what I noticed in the article was the difference between fiscal conservatives (presumably more libertarian?) and general conservatives. We may be allies on some issues, but we’re not the same (though I’m not sure why anyone would want to look any longer than necessary at pictures of blood, feces, and vomit).

My last item is a video exploring the research of Haidt and others on libertarian values.



Haidt isn’t a libertarian, but his research (which I’ve cited before) seems honest and rigorous.
My goal in all this is to figure out how nerdy libertarians can be more persuasive.