What exactly does it mean to be a “left-wing libertarian?”

[Damocles]

According to the traditional depiction of the political compass, a left-wing libertarian occupies the bottom-left quadrant. In the broadest and most general terms, these people generally seek to redress grievances and inequities that fall disproportionately on lower classes, while also challenging the idea that the state is the means through which this must be achieved. Indeed, some anarchist factions believe that the state itself ought to be abolished. Yet, they can also be for or against recognition of private property rights, while also either accepting or rejecting Hegelian concepts of class antagonism.

It’s for this reason, I find, that this quadrant frequently gets memed on from all corners. From the auth-right, it’s seen as a bunch of blue-haired, juuling college students, easily provoked or “triggered” into action at the mildest of inconveniences. From the auth-left, they’re seen as ideological traitors or collaborationists with the bourgeoisie, or even mischaracterized as right-wing. From the lib-right, they’re seen as a bunch of socialists seeking to destroy private enterprise, and are merely a fifth-column for communism.

Part of these dissonant characterizations by ideological opponents be explained by a general lack of consensus of what exactly this quadrant entails, itself fueled by rampant sectarianism. This post is meant to foster a discussion on what it means to be a left-wing libertarian, what sort of philosophies and precepts give rise to the left-wing libertarians, and what sort of policy planks a left-wing libertarian might uphold, and finally, how they apply to the contemporary American political context. When I am able, I will offer my thesis in a later post to attempt to answer all of these questions, and you are free to defend, critique, contradict, or oppose them.

For right now, though, I’ll turn the floor over to you. What exactly does it mean to be a “left-wing libertarian”?

[Damocles]

You are attempting to describe something that doesn't really exist based on an over-broad application of the political compass. That particular way of analyzing politics puts a broad variety of ideologies — the Nordic model of liberalism, anarcho-primitivism, Georgism, anarcho-syndicalism, democratic socialism, various green political movements, and arguably liberal democracy itself — in the same bucket based on their general position on the political compass. "Left-wing libertarianism" seems like a broad generalization that papers over some very real differences among these schools of thought (and not a particularly useful one).

The generalization that all these ideologies "challenge the idea that the state is the means through which this must be achieved" is certainly questionable, at least for those that fall toward the upper edge of the quadrant. Because of the limits of the political compass, you catch a lot of people who do very much believe in the power of state intervention but who nevertheless end up in the bottom left because they don't hate gays or whatever.

Surely, the limitations of the model are very real and are very much there. I used it only because of its ease of access and its omnipresence in most casual political discussions, as a means to foster further inquiry. I don’t by any means believe that entire schools of thought can be reduced down to a point on a graph, but it can be a useful tool for identifying general trends and themes that pervade across multiple ones.