Liberals and Authoritarians

Logan Ferree of the Freedom Democrats blog compiled scorecards for members of Congress and posted them on the Nolan Chart (as seen above). The Nolan Chart plots people by their stands on personal freedom and economic freedom:

Left-Liberal: Support personal freedom, but not economic freedom
Right-Conservative: Support economic freedom, but not personal freedom
Centrist: Supports both personal freedom about half the time, and supports economic freedom about half the time
Authoritarian: Against both personal and economic freedom
Libertarian: In favor of both personal and economic freedom

Members of Congress were plotted according to their votes on 30 "social" questions (i.e., relating to personal freedom) and 40 economic questions from the 2005-06 session.

For decades, Democrats tended to score on the "Left-Liberal" sector and Republicans on the "Right-Conservative" sector. But the 109th Congress tells a different story for the Republicans. While Democrats - the blue dots - are clustered in the Left-Liberal sector as expected, Republicans are clustered more or less in the Authoritarian, not Conservative, sector. This means they can not be relied on to vote in favor of liberty on either personal or economic issues.

One problem with the Nolan Chart is that it doesn't take foreign policy considerations much into account (although a few foreign policy votes were included in this scorecard). War and foreign policy are the biggest issues facing us today, and this chart doesn't (and can't) directly address them.

So this doesn't prove anything once and for all, but it does provide further evidence that Bush-era Republicans are not the same kind of "conservatives" we're used to.