Yesterday being the 4th of July I spent some time thinking about the state of politics in our coutry.
In our system, politics is presented as being left or right or somewhere in between. I do not intend this thread to be a merit of any of the positions of left or right or upside down or any other political position.
I would ask the question, is this linear model accurate to describe the wide array of political positions?
I maintain that it is NOT true, and proffer the Nolan Chart as proof:
I am sorry but I think the site makes you take the ten question quiz before you can get to the chart. I will look later for a link to the chart that avoids the quiz since that is irrelevant to illustrate non-linearity of the political landscape.
But if you wanna take it, its only ten questions and quick to do. of course if you already know of the Nolan Chart you don’t need to see it.
So is the political model of left-right only accurate?
No model actually models everything about its subject matter: “the map is not the territory”
What a model does is give you a way to think analytically about something by simplifying it.
Left-right is a model that works for a lot of politics. It does not work for all possible things you can analyze about politics, hence the existence of other models such as the one you point to.
Neither of those models, nor any model at all, is “accurate” in the sense you seem to be implying.
It is interesting to note that American Liberals and Conservatives tend to actually be fairly close together on this scale, which would tend to explain how we generally manage to get through elections with a lot of angry words, but no small arms fire.
Of course these charts only work for people who actually have conherent, consistent political views.
Of course it’s not accurate-- it’s the simplest model you could devise. There are plenty of others, and we’ve done dozens of threads on this subject over the years. We even did a whole series of threads based on one model where a bunch of us weighed in on each question asked by the model. I think it was called “Political Compass”, if you want to search for those threads.
You can find just about every classification scheme conceived to date, linear or multidimensional, at the Wiki page Political spectrum. There’s some really fascinating stuff:
Things are seldom simple, and this is clearly not one that is.
My usual rule-of-thumb is a grid with civil liberties on one axis, and financial responsibility on the other. I guess those are the two criteria I am most concerned with, and it reveals why I can’t be happy with either major party/movement. Conservative Republicans might be somewhat more fiscally responsible (but not always) but they always seem to want to stick their noses in my bedroom. Liberal Democrats may be more live-and-let-live on a personal level, but they always seem to want to have their hand in my pocket. Centrists seem to get most everything wrong, in the spirit of compromise.
Roddy
The Pournelle chart is interesting, but I always failed to understand how Communism is rational but nazism is not, at least in its results with real life examples.
I quite agree with you. Did you ever notice the inconsistency in the platforms of both Republicans and Democrats? Neither has a platform which is possible to achieve in its entirety. The small government does not have manpower to enforce the morals of the people, it would take a huge government to be effective at policing the people in every area republicans want us policed.
On the other hand, Democrats want personal freedoms but at the same time they want the huge alphabet soup government with all kinds of agencies with jurisdiction in the social arena–which inevitably will lead to regulating our personal lives by its very nature.
Libertarianism of course says a small government is best because it does not have the power to interfere in our social lives.
Authoritarianism says a big government to regulate every aspect of our lives is best. This is what we have mostly wound up with, in my opinion.
This is basically a big tent problem. There are two major parties in the U.S., and both parties include factions with serious opposition to the agenda of other factions within the party.
Ultimately, for a truly accurate political model, you’d need one dimension for each political issue. Whether a person supports a right to abortion does not determine whether they support a right to gay marriage, and neither of those determines whether they support private gun ownership, and none of those determines where they want the tax rates to be, or how they’re distributed. Certainly, there are correlations, and some regions of the political space are more densely populated than others, but they’re all independent.
I suppose one could take a large survey of people to populate such a model, and then find the eigenvectors of the resulting distribution. If one were to do so in any country with a two-party system, I expect that the highest-weight eigenvector would correspond to the difference between the two parties. Then you’d have to debate which of the other eigenvectors are significant enough to be worthy of inclusion.
To the extent at least that communism (more strictly, Marxism) is based on a (incorrect and failed) theory of human society, whereas Nazism is considered based on two fundamental rejections of rationality: the Nietzschean rejection of all moral values as artificial, and their substitution by a mystical race-myth. Which of course may be a drastic oversimplification of both, ymmv.
Pournelle, I think, defined it as the belief that we lived in a rational universe and that we could use reason to improve the world and perfect mankind, while people on the other access believe that human nature is innate and fixed and social problems and human imperfection are inevitable.
It measures Utopian sentiment and asks the question, “Can we be better than we are?”
Yeah, the political compass model seems to represent both sides of the coin (social and economic) pretty well. It highlights that there isn’t much difference between the US parties fiscally and shows how authoritarian the Republicans are on the social scale, especially compared to the rest of the world.
It is explained in the article. Rational is a lousy label. IIRC, it refers to the belief that the human condition can be improved by political action. Utopian<->Anti-Utopian might be a better label.
The “Rational versus irrational” axis doesn’t mean what you’re probably thinking it does. What the chart is saying is not that Communists are rational and Nazis are not, but that Communists believe all inequity and trouble can be solved through the application of reason, whereas Nazis do not (Nazism actually places the very existence of conflict and inequity at the heart of its philosophy.) It’s not that Nazis didn’t believe in being rational; merely that they did not feel rationalism would result in perfection of the human condition. Communism is at the precise opposite extreme; Communists believe you can perfect society if you tinker with it in a certain scientific manner.
[vague hand-wave]I think this has been done, at least for members of Congress (which has the advantage that they have measurable preferences related to specific bills), and the result was that (about, memory is vague and I have no idea how to google this) 90% of the variations could be mapped on a left-to-right axis. Adding a second dimension dealt with about 5% of the remaining idiosyncracies. I don’t remember if they discussed how many dimensions they needed to reach 99 or 100%.