Opinion | Liz Truss in the Libertarian Wilderness - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...-uk-conservative-politics.html
libertarian quadrant social economic liberal conservative politics policy
shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 22
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the British economist Simon Wren-Lewis argues persuasively that financial markets were responding in large part to increased uncertainty, which was in turn largely a reflection of political uncertainty. The Truss economic plan was obviously unsustainable politically, but it wasn’t clear what would come next.
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the political point is clear. Truss staked out a political position that, to a first approximation, has no public support either in Britain or in the United States. So failure was inevitable.
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A 2017 paper by the political scientist Lee Drutman mapped out the distribution of U.S. voters on these axes; it’s unlikely to have changed much since. (And the distribution of British voters seems similar.) His picture looked like this:
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the quadrant representing a combination of social liberalism and economic conservatism — what you might call the libertarian position — is largely empty.
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you can see that most voters like government benefits, a lot. Opposition to social spending comes mainly from voters who believe that spending goes to the wrong people — people who don’t look like them.
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Liz Truss is squarely in the libertarian box. She didn’t make appeals to anti-immigrant, anti-woke sentiment; she did advocate what one analysis assessed as the most conservative economic position of any party in the developed world. So she placed herself in the political wilderness, a barren quadrant where few voters may be found.
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In America, the positions of the two parties are clear. Democrats are in the southwest quadrant, both socially and economically liberal, while Republicans are socially and economically conservative.
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There are, however, many voters who are economically relatively liberal and socially illiberal — who hate wokeness and fear immigrants but want to maintain and even expand Social Security and Medicare, at least for people they see as “real” Americans. Such voters do have political champions in other countries: France’s National Rally, formerly the National Front
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even as we marvel at Truss’s political obtuseness, we should ask what it is about the United States that prevents the emergence of anyone catering to a large bloc of voters who want the nastiness of MAGA without the right-wing economics.
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Politics in the modern West tends to be more or less two-dimensional. One dimension is the left-right divide in economic policy, between those who favor high taxes on the rich and large social benefits and those who want low taxes and small government
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The other dimension is the divide over social issues, between those who favor policies promoting racial equality and gay rights and those who bitterly oppose anything they consider “woke.”