I’m going to speak in generalities and hopefully not spark too much of a debate.
Democrats tend to favor bigger government and less restrictive social policy. Republicans tend to favor smaller government and more restrictive social policy. Libertarians tend to favor smaller government and less restrictive social policy. Or to quote Drew Carey, “A Libertarian is a conservative that still smokes pot.”
What is someone called that tends to favor bigger government and more restrictive social policy? I don’t usually associate social policy with socialism but I could be wrong on that given the name.
Libertarians tend to define themselves as the opposite of authoritarians, where authoritarian is defined as a political philosophy favoring strong government intervention in both the economic and social spheres. At the extreme end of that spectrum your best candidate is probably good old-fashioned European fascism, and Soviet-style communism.
The problem with this answer is that it’s too vague; “socialism” covers a lot of political ground, and libertarians would generally find little fault with the social and civil-liberties policies of many democratic-socialist countries.
Those definitions are terrible. There are in fact left leaning libertarians, although in the US most people labeling themselves libertarian lean hard right economically and are meh on social policy.
Using your descriptions, bigger government and restrictive social policy sounds like the religious right of the Republican party to me. A theocracy would probably be the opposite of your version of libertarian.
A party that tends to favor more repressive economic and social policy is authoritarian, and at its extreme totalitarian, like Stalinism and fascism, as friedo mentions.
And both liberals and conservatives favor more restrictive social policies, just on different things.
Well, not so long ago, most blue-collar Americans would have fallen into that category.
There was never a name for this category, but the old New Deal coalition was built on Northern ethnic blue-collar workers and Southern rednecks.
Pennsylvania steel mill worker Stan Kowalski and Alabama truck driver Billy Joe Baker both believed that the government had an obligtion to spend money to help out the poor and the unemployed. Both were delighted that the government was giving Social Security to their elderly Moms, and financial aid to their kids in college. Both were undoubtedly religious guys who believed in old-fashioned “family values,” believed in “getting tough” on crime, and would have been all for restricting content on TV and movies.
Of course, a generation or two ago, the Democrats weren’t notably more liberal on socia lissues than the Republicans, which meant Stan and Billy Joe voted a straight Democratic ticket.
Democrats and Republicans both favor a Big Government in that they both want to increase government spending in some ways: The Republicans want to increase spending in military contracts, the Democrats in social programs.
Anyway, the polar opposite of Libertarianism is whatever you want to call the governmental system currently in control of North Korea. I think the traditional (Cold War) term was Totalitarianism, which even people like Nixon realized was different from Socialism.
Not really. North Korea is remarkably liberal in some respects. Residents have the right (or at least access) to on-demand abortion; homosexual acts and relationships are legal; and there are virtually no drug laws, though of course hardly anyone can afford anything other than domestically-grown opium.
Well, there really does not have to be an real and exact polar opposite (at least not one that anyone has advocated) to every political position, but I can agree with those who are suggesting that Soviet style Communism is the nearest to a polar opposite to libertarianism. This should not be a surprise, really, since libertarianism thought emerged from the work of fierce anti-soviet critics such Ayn Rand and Hayek. It was really invented to a be a polar opposite of communism (as they imagined communism to be).
It is not a basic principle of communism (as, say, Marx conceived it) that civil liberties should be restricted, but, in practice, as things developed in Russia, Maoist China, and their satellites, they were in fact very much restricted.
Those who call themselves socialists, in distinction from communists, generally do so to mark the fact that they, unlike Soviet-style communists, are strongly committed to preserving civil liberties, so socialists is not the right answer here.
Fascists and Nazis strongly restricted civil liberties too, of course, but they were also quite happy to coexist with a capitalist economic system, and really the heart of libertarianism is blind worship of (a highly idealized, imaginary version of) capitalism. Thus on economic matters, libertarians are not really directly at odds with fascists (although they tend to have rather different ideas of what capitalism should be like - fascists are more realistic about it :rolleyes:). Libertarians are, of course, directly at odds with communists on this point, since the heart of communism is the outright rejection of capitalism, which it regards an unmitigatedly evil system that must be stamped out.
Soviet communism could be pretty prudish and socially reactionary. Homosexual acts–IIRC, maybe only male homosexual acts–were illegal. I’m pretty sure pornography was officially disapproved of as well, as “bourgeois decadence”. The Soviet system was probably more gender egalitarian than Tsarist Russia, but I think it was still fundamentally pretty sexist until the end–not a lot of women in the Politburo.
That’s essentially anarchism by another name. There is also a libertarian left. And as far as the social policy: libertarians made a big deal about it in the past, but these new Tea Partiers who call themselves libertarian don’t care so much.
There is also the Pournelle chart, Nolan chart, World’s Smallest Politcal Quiz, etc. However, the Political Compass is IMHO the best in the group, since it seems to have less to sell and doesn’t come from the bias of a libertarian perspective (really!!? Libertarianism is on the “Reason Enthroned” side? And your opposite is “Irrational”?)
Except that the “libertarian left” on there is not what most people mean by “libertarianism”. “Libertarianism” as most people, and presumably the OP, use the word, means what is there called the “libertarian right”. What is there called the “libertarian left” is standardly called anarchism or syndicalism.
In fact, that version of the compass bears out what I said: opposite to (what is usually called) libertarianism, we see Stalinist Soviet Communism.
No, Socialism is only an economic philosophy. It does not espouse any social controls. Some of the highly successful Socialist democracies are also socially libertarian.
I agree the answer is authoritarianism (it’s definitely not socialism). The basic way to frame it is that Libertarians believe almost total individual liberty should be the founding principle of society, whereas Authoritarians believe society should be organized around submission to an authority with very little individual liberty.
I also agree those are pretty bad definitions of Democrat and Republican beliefs - “bigger” and “smaller” government is not a very clear way of assessing them. Democrats would generally prefer slightly higher government spending, with more of it going towards social welfare. Republicans would generally prefer slightly lower government spending with much less going to social welfare, and more going towards subsidizing business and to protection programs like defense, police, border controls and drug enforcement.