Update, 2017

The diagram below is from an article "How Trump Won, in Two Dimensions," by F.H. Buckley, from The Wall Street Journal of August 10, 2017 [A15]. This is the result of a study by Lee Drutman of the "Voter Study Group," analyzing the vote in the 2016 Presidential election. Red dots are Republican voters; blue dots, Democrats; and yellow dots, "other."

It is not clear whether Drutman was aware of the history of the Diamond Quiz, but this reproduces the quadrants familar from the examination of the Quiz above. The upper half of the diagram is socially conservative, the lower half socially liberal. The left half is low on economic freedom, the right half high.

The Empty Quarter here is the libertarian quadrant, at the lower right, with the whole diagram skewed noticeably to the left, although there is a heavy Republican presence on the economic right. At the same time, Democrat voters obviously are deeply committed on the economic left, i.e. to socialism, the welfare state, or command economics.

The real battleground here is the upper left quadrant, which on this page is being called "populist" or "authoritarian." Here, Republican, Democrats, and a good number of "other" voters heavily overlap; and this is where Drutman says the election was decided. Enough people with lefist ideas about economics, who otherwise might have voted Democrat, were socially conservative enough to vote Republican instead. This was a powerful dynamic, Drutman says, among Catholic voters in, for instance, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, which helped secure the victory of Trump. Of course, we also see Republican and Democrat voters, as well as "other," in the lonely libertarian quadrant. The ranks get pretty thin out in the maximum personal and economic freedom direction.

Thus, in general this is a disheartening display for the future of freedom. But it necessarily leaves some interesting questions unexplored. In those terms, quite a few social consernatives don't mind that much what other people do but do want to be left alone in their own convictions. They are theatened by the program of the left to force radical views about sexuality on everyone else, suing businesses, for instance, where Christians will not provide services for gay weddings, or requiring that women's bathrooms be open to anatomical males with a female "gender identity." Lefists, of course, never ask Muslims what they think about such things (knowing that homosexuals are executed in Iran and that generally homosexuality is illegal elsewhere in Muslim countries); but they vilify Christians for it. The vote here therefore may represent a backlash, not so much against "gay rights" as against using such rights to destroy the freedom of others.

There is a similar question down in the lower left "liberal" quadrant. Not all liberal socialist people agree with the aggressive anti-Christian program. Bernie Sanders condemns the attacks on free speech at American colleges. However, Bernie is out of step with his university brain trust, and his own previous love of Cuba and the Soviet Union leaves us wondering about his honesty. Also, it is unlikely that Bernie would excuse Christians from providing services for Satanic rites, i.e. gay weddings, or would have a problem with anatomical males in women's restrooms. When Indiana tried to protect religious liberty, and when North Carolina prohibited anatomical males from using women's restrooms, the media firestorm was intense and merciless. Again, the press never asks conservative or observant Muslims what they think -- unless, of course, it is to solicit some anti-American or "Islamophobia" grievance statement. After all this, one may harbor the suspicion that the dominant opinion at lower left is just what conservatives have understood, that it is intolerant of religious people observing the moral restrictions of their religion -- unless they are Muslims.



We might also wonder about the meaning of the upper left quadrant. This is the area of the least freedom both personally and economically. The form of the analysis for the diagram may have confused the meaning on this point. People who say they are socially liberal, but are intolerant of religious people, and in general believe in a police state to enforce their "tolerant" ideology, belong in the upper left quadrant, not the lower left. Similarly, religious people who are conservative in their own lives, but who are actually tolerant of other poeple governing their own lives as they wish, may actually belong in the libertarian quadrant.

The quadrant of least freedom has always been proper, at its extreme, to totalitarian ideologies. While the farcical "Resistance" to Donald Trump portrays him as a fascist and themselves as anti-fascist, the rioting anarchist and communist students at Berkeley are clearly the equivalent of Fascist black shirts (the dress of the anarachists) or Nazi brown shirts. In short, they are the fascists. And this is widely recognized across the political spectrum, except on the sympathetic far left. Yet Trump, like many of the conservative Republicans, believes in Protectionist and anti-trade measures. This probably accounts for most of the Republican voters in the upper left quadrant. But this also attracted a lot of Democrat voters. Labor unions have always been Protectionist, and Democrat politicans used to pay more attention. Union leaders, of course, often have sold out the Democrats so completely (like NAACP coming out against charter schools, which are more popular with black parents than with anyone else), that they ignore the sentiments of the members of their unions.

In the end, what seems unambiguous about this analysis is the unpopularity of economic freedom. In one way, this is puzzling. Everyone should know better by now. But the Fall of Communism has not prevented the American professoriate from finding Communism appealing. And they teach this to American children. Of course, Communism fell more than a quarter century ago, so perhaps people have just forgotten. The economic problems of Europe, however, especially France, are current. The bankruptcy of Greece is current. The poverty of Cuba is current. The hunger in Venezuela is current. The devastation of Detroit is current. The flight of people from New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Illinois is current. The prosperity of Texas is current. The professoriate that ignores the evidence of these things is irresponsible and incompetent. Of course, there was no reason to have ever believed that English Department Marxism ever would have been competent to make political or economic pronouncements. This situation therefore only serves to discredit the system and ideology of education in the United States, especially in the humanities and social (i.e. pseudo-) sciences. But this evil may be self-correcting.

College students are realizing that their degrees are not worth what they used to be, especially when the debt they must assume is unprecedented -- and cannot be discharged by bankruptcy -- and especially when a lot of their courses consist of political propaganda that will be of no help to them in finding jobs or pursuing careers -- unless their hope is for a universal minimum income that the Left (and, astonishingly, some libertarians) now advocate -- unless they hope to have a career in leftist political activism funded by George Soros. Male students are realizing that colleges are a "hostile environment" for men, if not also for white people in general. Thus, enrollments are down. Some schools have closed unneeded dormitories.

But this is a slow process. Where H. G. Wells said that, "History is a race between education and catastrophe," it is now a race between the poisonous "education" current today and its destruction and reform. It remains to be seen whether the process will succeed in time to avoid the catastrophe.

The Trump Phenomenon



In the history of political philosophy, the freedom emphasized by Rand and the Nolan Chart is only a certain kind of freedom. It is a modern conception of freedom, formulated in terms of the limitation of the power of government and so the protection of private action from government interference. This "liberty of the moderns," as it was first called by the French novelist and statesman Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (1767-1830) in his essay "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns," is very different from the "liberty of the ancients": the latter originally meant the positive power of citizens to participate in government, while the former means, as Constant put it, "to come and go without permission, and without having to account for [our] motives and undertakings." The "liberty" of the citizens of Athens meant that, as David Boaz of the Cato Institute says, "Socrates, indeed, was free because he could participate in the collective decision to execute him for his heretical opinions." The modern liberty of Americans, however, should mean that an "obnoxious individual" (as James Madison said) cannot be executed for practicing freedom of speech or freedom of religion, which were the only complaints against Socrates.

Similar to Constant's distinction is that made by the recent political philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), who famously contrasted "positive" freedom, the right to exercise political power, from "negative" freedom, the right to be left alone by others exercising political power. The original Nolan Chart is entirely about the "liberty of the moderns" and negative freedom.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is often credited with originating the idea of negative freedom and of "civil society" (as opposed to "political society"), which is then that sphere of action free of government control in which citizens actually exercise their negative freedom. Hobbes, however, was an absolutist who honored nothing in the way of "positive" political liberties and who saw the sphere of civil society and negative freedom as granted and allowed entirely at the discretion of the monarch. Hobbes' historic counterpart was John Locke (1632-1704), who saw the "negative" liberties as the original and natural rights of men, which were to be protected, not granted, by government. Locke believed that, as governments existed only to protect natural rights, the power ceded to government was only a limited grant for specific purposes. Should government fail in its proper purposes and exceed its legitimate powers, then the government would lose its legitimacy. This theory is then employed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.

Another recent conception of "positive" liberty, which gets confused with the "natural rights" advocated by Locke and Jefferson, are "welfare rights" such as a right to a job, a right to medical care, a right to adequate housing, a right to disability payments, a right to child support (from the government in default of a "deadbeat" parent), a right to be cared for in retirement, etc. These, it can be argued, are necessary for anyone to have "real" freedom: "You can't be free," as Dennis Hopper said in the 1969 movie Easy Rider, "if you are bought and sold in the marketplace every day." Such positive welfare rights remove everyone from what Marx called the realm of "necessity," where we have to worry about survival, to the realm of "freedom," where we can enjoy life by doing what we like.

The problem with "welfare rights" as positive "liberties" is that, while they might enable the beneficiary to do what he wants, they must be applied by the threat or the use of force against the freedom and/or property of others. A "right to a job" means that somebody else must be required to provide the job. A "right to medical care" means that somebody else, doctors and nurses, must be required to provide that care. These kinds of rights thus will either effect "involuntary servitude" on the part of employers, doctors, nurses, etc., or they will simply require sufficient taxation to hire people who, for enough of a price, will be willing to do these things. Positive "welfare rights" thus are no different from positive liberties that correspond to political power in general, and they may be assimilated to that in our consideration. If there are few negative liberties, i.e. if one does not have the right to dispose of one's body or property as one wishes, this concedes to political power the job of so disposing. How that political power is used will depend on how that political power is distributed and/or what the political power is expected to accomplish. How "welfare rights," which empower political society, have gotten confused with civil rights, which defined civil society and limited political society, may be seen in The Corruption of Civil Rights and Civil Law.

The whole idea of the difference between negative freedom and positive freedom has been attacked in a recent book, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxation [1999], by Cass Sunstein and Stephen Holmes. Their argument is that it costs money to enforce both kinds of rights -- negative rights at least need police and courts to enforce them -- and that taxes pay for "negative rights" just as much as for "positive rights." Therefore, they are the same thing. This approach in effect eliminates natural rights, civil society, private property, and privacy, making everything a matter of political control, and so accomplishes the totalitarian project of giving the government control of everything. They say that "the fact that the Fourth Amendment is violated so regularly shows that the public is not willing to make that investment." In other words, taxes are not high enough to make the legislatures, police, and courts do their duty in observing and enforcing the Fourth Amendment. How more money would make the faithless, who have their own reasons for subverting freedom, faithful, is mysterious. We might as well ask, "How are higher taxes going to make people like Sunstein and Holmes understand the theory of the Declaration of Independence and remain faithful to it?" The problem is not money, but an easily identifiable desire for absolute power -- though it is a clever twist to turn the all-but-worship of taxes by the recent left into a theory of the protection of rights (welfare rights as well as the right to be left alone). Sunstein and Holmes might take note that "negative rights" are things that can be protected in principle in a "state of nature," with no government, by effective self-defense, while "positive rights" in a state of nature would mean using force to steal things from unoffending others, or forcing them to do things they don't want to do. Since people like Sunstein and Holmes basically want a police state, their eagerness to abolish negative rights is easily explained. They want the power to steal things and force people to do what they don't want to do, without having to worry about them defending themselves. Few more shameless arguments for tyranny have been offered in the 20th century.

Another appalling and even more shameless burst of Hobbesian authoritarianism now can be found in The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, by Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy [Oxford University Press, 2002]. Nagel and Murphy (on the Law Faculty -- a terrifying thought -- at New York University) not only reaffirm the thesis of Sunstein and Holmes that rights do not exist without the state and taxes, but they proceed to the logical conclusion that people simply have no right to their property, savings, and income, i.e. to the fruit of their own labor, "in any morally meaningful sense." We can have whatever the government condescends to leave to us. They even say that there is no "defensible" notion that such a right is based on any notion of merit or reality. This is so vile that it almost defies belief. It certainly exposes the obvious belief of the Left that all our wealth and possessions really belong to them (since they think of themselves as the natural and proper rulers), to dispose as they wish. Locke's idea that the dangers of the state of nature to the growth of wealth motivates the creation of goverment "to secure these Rights" and allow for greater wealth, is now turned on its head, and the likes of Nagel and Murphy interpret the greater accumulation of wealth under the protection of government as meaning that all that wealth belongs to the government. And, as Hobbesians, they throw it in that even the wealth that one might have secured in the state of nature belongs to the government also. As Locke or Jefferson would certainly say, these are not the terms under which anyone in the state of nature would agree to a social contract for the formation of government. It is certainly not the natural law terms under which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written; but then it should be obvious by now, though never spoken in common public discourse, that people like this are promoting ideas that are alien to the American Revolution, alien to American Constitutional principles, and in fact derive from European fascist and communist totalitarianism. These are men with the hearts of tyrants. But this will likely not be asserted in "polite" company.

Since the original Nolan Chart employs two kinds of "negative" liberty, it is possible to represent "positive" liberty on a separate axis, producing a three dimensional display of political positions. [Click on the chart for a larger version of the image; or here for a black and white image, which may print out better] How much there will be for "political society" and political power to do will be defined by the degree of personal and economic freedom that is envisioned. With what political power is then to be allowed, the question is then how it is to be exercised. The spectrum will stretch from the exercise of all political power by one person (Monarchy, or any individual dictatorship), to the equal exercise of all political power by all (Anarchy).

In between the logical extremes, there will be the exercise of power by a relatively limited number (Oligarchy) on one side, the exercise of power by majority of all (Democracy) on the other, and then, in the middle, varieties of Representative government, with mixed Oligarchic and Democratic forms (a Republic).

A Republican form was envisioned by people like James Madison, who wished to impose practical, and not just theoretical, limits on government by the use of the Separation of Powers and a system of Checks and Balances. This worked well enough but was ultimately undermined by one grave oversight: The United States Constitution provided no mechanism for its own enforcement. That task was soon taken up by the Supreme Court, but Thomas Jefferson realized that the Supreme Court, as a part of the federal government, could not be trusted to faithfully maintain the limits to the power of the federal government itself: "How can we expect impartial decision between the General government, of which they are themselves so eminent a part, and an individual State, from which they have nothing to hope or fear?" [Autobiography]

In the end, especially during the Civil War, World War I, the New Deal, and the Sixties, the Supreme Court began to concede extra-Constitutional powers to the federal government simply on the principle that it wanted them. The only mechanism that existed to check the failures of the Court was the torturous avenue of Constitutional Amendment, politically impossible when so many people had begun to believe that unlimited power for the federal government was actually a good thing. And then again, it is hard to know how a newer version of the 10th Amendment could be more plainly worded than the old one. A new Amendment would have to descend to the ignoble level of contradicting specific Supreme Court pronouncements that the original Amendment was simply a "tautology" or "truism" that wasn't really meant to limit federal power. (See Two Logical Errors in Constitutional Jurisprudence.) An effectively updated Constitution would have to address all the sophistry and dishonesty that was used to undermine the original one, besides providing for such additional checks and balances as would abolish the dictatorial powers of the Court.

On the economic spectrum (X axis), a basic division might be made between "social" (or "socialist") forms, allowing little economic freedom, and "market" forms, allowing a lot. Thus, on the XZ plane, which displays economic freedom and political freedom, the political spectrum divides into "social" and "market" forms. In "social" forms there may be divergent uses of political power over economics, e.g. in a Monarchy taxation may be directed to the benefit of the monarch and his family and friends, or taxation may be directed to the "welfare rights" of others. Thus, Otto von Bismark and Wilhelmine Germany sought successfully to defuse socialism through State old age pensions and other welfare benefits. In a Democracy, the tendency will naturally be for people to vote themselves increasing benefits and thus increasingly to encroach on the freedom and property of those who are economically productive, or at least more productive than most voters. With the dynamic of "Public Choice" rent-seeking, voters in a democracy will also be tempted to vote and countenance small taxes here and small taxes there, all for some public or personal benefit, without noticing or understanding that the cumulative burden will begin to seriously impact their ability to dispose of their own income and property. They also may fail to notice that voting for things like publicly financed medical care implies that the government will have the power to forbid "unhealthy" activities which may impose a burden on the public purse, as riding motorcycles without helmets and riding in cars without seatbelts have been banned by many States under federal pressure.

On the personal spectrum (Y axis), a basic division might be made between "moralist" (or "moralistic") forms, allowing little personal freedom, and "tolerant" forms, allowing a lot. Thus, on the YZ plane, which displays personal freedom and political freedom, the political spectrum divides into "moralist" and "tolerant" forms. Athenian democracy (with absolute majority rule, and no independent courts or bureaucracy), which condemned Socrates but which had few restrictions on commerce or property, could be called a moralist market democracy (or a conservative democracy). American government, which edges from a republic over into a democracy (with confusing oligarchic elements from judicial and "administrative" government), with stronger protections for speech and art than in the past, but less strong protections for commerce and property than in the past, could be called a tolerant social republic (or a liberal republic). The Soviet Union was a moralist social (i.e. authoritarian) oligarchy, or monarchy (dictatorship) under Stalin.

The Anarchy end might seem to be the negation of political power altogether. It isn't, because if one were to be an authoritarian anarchist, this would mean that one would be justified in using force against both the person and property of others on the basis of a spectrum of posssible moral or economic wrongs. "Anarchy" does not mean that there is no political power; it just means that any political power is exercised only by each individual. This would have been called the "state of nature" by John Locke, though he would have thought that rights could not be effectively enforced in such a state of nature. (To Hobbes, rights wouldn't even exist in the state of nature.) 19th and 20th Century Anarchists have ranged from social anarchists who didn't believe in private property ("Property is theft," is the characteristic maxim), to those who wanted to limit private property to what could be immediately used by the occupant (Georgism, like Albert J. Nock), to complete libertarian anarchism, where extensive property rights are accepted -- though of course an anarchist owner of extensive property could protect that only by the consent and voluntary or paid help of other individuals.

A Monarchy might be thought to eliminate all other freedom, but the idea of the existence of "benevolent dictatorship," or of "Enlightened Despots," like Frederick II (the Great) of Prussia, was precisely that someone like Frederick retained all political power for himself but allowed considerable personal freedom, though mainly in speech and thought ("Say what you like, but do what I say"). At the time, no regime allowed economic freedom much beyond the standard forms of Merchantilism (though Britain and the Netherlands were already ahead).



The accompanying chart contains a set of questions to apply to the third axis of the three dimensional chart. As above, "yes" answers score 10 points and "maybe" answers 5 points. These questions on "positive" political liberty address various specific issues of political participation or liability, rather than general constitutional questions. The test thus does not reflect a simple numerical distribution of power as described above or the subtlety of the previous definition of "republic." The test also does not touch the question of for whose benefit political power is exercised, especially in the absence of strong negative freedom, regardless of the distribution of power. Suggestions are welcome.

Psychological Types

I am a Union man

Political Economy

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