I couldn’t find the actual graph for any year, only tables of individual congresspersons.
out of curiosity, then, why are you “New Deal Democrat?”
You do realize that statists or authoritarians include Hitler, Stalin, and their like, don’t you?
Not that I would promote Nazism but maybe they were right. Cecil has been fighting ignorance since 1973 and the unwashed masses seem to be winning.
I’m just kidding. The failure of a majority does not mean that the thing they failed to do is wrong.
I’m not sure that elected officials are the best sample to use, since they get elected on the back of support from their party, and the party is naturally going to tend to mostly support people who align closely with their own platform. Someone who holds a mixture of “left” and “right” political views is going to have a hard time getting elected in either party.
Communism, rational or not, is rationalistic, it believes in the power of reason to improve/perfect human life. Nazism is romantic, emotional, and it’s all about the will. Bertrand Russell drew a line of intellectual descent from Voltaire to Stalin and another from Rousseau to Hitler. Those are the ideological differences, anyway; the practical ones, what it was like to actually live under the one vs. the other, etc., different discussion.
Well shit it says I am a statist, with conservative tendencies. WTF, I am about the most liberal person I know.
The Pew political typology (warning* - pdf) which was discussed in a recent thread did a cluster analysis of Americans’ political views. It probably did not use Principle Component Analysis, but very rough estimates of the eigenvectors (“eigen-voters” 
) could be reverse-engineered from the statistics it presents.
Two caveats:
- Normalization is required for eigen-analysis; i.e. when “comparing apples and oranges” one must agree on the weights. This will be troublesome as there is a big difference in opinion on how important some issues, e.g. gay marriage, should be in national politics.
- The comment about difference between two parties matching the first component assumes that platforms reflect voter opinion. A counterexample would be free trade: both parties support it, but voters are more protectionistic.
(* BTW, above I’ve imitated others and dutifully warned about a pdf file. But I’ve no idea why we warn about pdf’s here.)
No contradiction: NDD is a Texas statist and you’re a Massachusetts statist! 
In my experience many people read the questions wrong. When they are utterly surprised at the results I have helped them be sure they answered the questions correctly. I would do it over and be sure you haven’t missed a word or underemphaized it in the question.
But if you are absolutely sure you understood the questions properly, maybe you’re not as liberal as you thought. Either that or everyone around you is hyper-conservative
I have long pretty much figured that the Republicans and Democrats are essentially one party–Republicrats, I call them.
I acknowledge that what they say is different, but in the results they don’t seem to differ too much. No matter which party has been in power, the government has grown and our rights have shrunk.
I think that the linear model is meant to deceive the public that there is nothing available other than the one party system in order to keep themselves in power and continue the show that something different is available than what we have received. It’s business as usual with both.
Don’t worry, the Democans will take 'em next year!
Hey, nobody this side of the Atlantic invented the thing, and it was only ever “meant to” provide people with a rough-and-ready coordinate system to make some sense of a system which, previously, was as simple as one man’s mind (and that of Louis XVI was very simple indeed).
You might be entirely correct. But I didn’t say it had to be invented here. The other side of the atlantic might deceive when it comes to politics too.
And saying linear left right is a poor model does not claim that there isn’t a worse model, of course.
Good thing, I’m sick of Republicrats! :smack:
This is true, and is something I was trying to figure out myself. I suppose that one approach would be to have two dimensions for each issue: One for how one feels about an issue, and another for how important one considers that issue. Sort of like intensity and hue or saturation in color space. Then normalize each view-axis such that the spread of view is about the same for each one, and somehow use the priority-axes in weighting for the principle-vector analysis.
But then, I’m not a statistician, and there are almost certainly subtleties I’m still overlooking or glossing over.
As always, XKCD has the perfect comic for this thread: xkcd: Nolan Chart
Seriously, though, I think that politics is more complicated than a single Left-Right axis, but I also think that more than a say 2-3 axes would result in a lot of complication without really adding any meaningful description. You’re always going to have a handful of individuals who, for whatever reason, don’t follow a particular trend, but adding a lot of extra axes to handle special cases isn’t worth it.
To that end, I kind of like the idea of doing a poll, plotting everything, and taking Eigen vectors, but it’s difficult to know what to make of that without actually seeing the results. Would there be a clear small number of vectors that are the primary influences or will there be be a steady drop off? Will vectors end up on trends that don’t make a whole lot of intuitive sense? I’d love to see that kind of data and apply some information theory techniques to it and see what we get.
I can remember being in grade school (maybe junior high) and asking a question that was seen as absolutely absurd: If the Soviets were socialist and the Nazis were socialist, why was the teacher putting them at different ends of the political spectrum?
Well, hum hum, cough cough, the political spectrum is circular, you see, so the far-left is the same as the far-right. I thought it was bullshit then, I think it’s bullshit now.
Part of the trick in coming up with a representative diagram of political thought is in being honest and objective about it (and not relying on what some teacher said). There was a very interesting segment (whether you agree with it or not) on Soviet/Nazi socialism and how it’s taught in school in Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism.
As has been stated before, it’s tough to come up with cookie-cutter answers when there are degrees to and separate forms of the two ends of the classic right-left model.
That’s like asking “If the grass is green and the sky is green, why do we put them on opposite sides of a picture?”. The Nazis weren’t socialist. Yes, yes, the origin of their name was “National Socialist”, but none of their policies resembled anything that could be accurately described as socialist.
I vote, something else. Politics, no matter which brand, is all about speaking lies in a misleading manner to achieve personal wealth and power. Platforms are a myth. It is all about the MONEY, not theirs, other peoples money. Our politicians are bought and paid for. They are owned. Not by the rich, that seems to be one brands “talking hate word”, but by Power hungry individuals. Bill Gates is rich and powerful, but I do not think anyone here could put him in this category. What about Al Gore, certainly wealthy, does not have to work, and never has, but, is he a power hungry jerk? Of course. Hillary? Of course, the Bushes, well, of course. See? If it quacks like a Hitler, it is one. If u all do what I say right now, I will save the world, feed you all, get rid of the undesirables, give you all security, and MAKE everyone be nice. My special police will see to it. Withholding power and allowing it in pinches and pokes by informed voting will work wonders on World Domination Power grabbers.