The LiberPlot
posted by CS | 12:20 PM 
Looking for a photo of Shadegg for my previous post, I happened across this terribly interesting site: The Liberty Index at the Republican Liberty Caucus website. Each year, the caucus creates a Liberty Plot or LiberPlot, which will look familiar to those of us who have taken the World's Smallest Political Quiz. The authors of the index take the roll-call votes of a session of congress, both in the Senate and House, and create "Personal Liberty" and "Economic Liberty" percentages for each member (with 100% being perfectly libertarian). From these, they create a combined score, with which to rank members. And they do an executive overview of the session.I'll leave it up to you to take a look at the graphs through the years and see if you can glean any trends or current indicators of things to come. One thing I've noticed is that according to these graphs, the Democrats in general appear to be becoming more authoritarian.
But I don't need a graph to show me this.
3 Comments:
Maybe I am reading the charts differently than you, but I gather that the closer to 0% of economic and personal liberty would mean authoritarian.
In case, does it do any good to point out the Dems are growing more authoritarian, when the Cons already have that side of the graph covered?
The only trend I can pick from these graphs is that Dems and Cons are moving farther apart, no intermingling anymore on any issue. Just further proof that the US is becoming more polarized.
Bryan - Yes, the closer to "0" one is on both the Personal Liberty and Economic Liberty scales, the more Authoritarian one is. It makes sense that one cannot be "free" by any true measure if he has no economic liberty - no matter how much personal liberty he may possess.
Quite a few Democrats actually scored a "0" on Economic Liberty.
Yes - the camps are moving further apart. I picked up on that as well - so I would suggest we're not reading the graphs all that differently.
To your point about conservatives being Authoritarian: no, Authoritarianism is that darkest pink quadrant (on the left). The conservative brand of Authoritarianism is known on this chart as "Right Wing" and that is the darker blue quadrant. Both regions can be thought of as Authoritarian, however - In this you are correct. However, look at the sheer # of Democrats in the dark pink, versus the lone republican in the dark blue. This was my point.
Yes, the US is definitely becoming more polarized. It would seem to me that both conservatives and liberals are quite fed-up with the other.
What do you suggest as a remedy, short of conservatives getting out of the way? :-)
Okay, I see about the darkest pink being the authorative side.
As for my remedy, I'm running for president under a party I made up- Liberty Factory.
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