To the degree that “left” has meant “abolition of private property,” I am confident no US president is one the left of the political compass. Similarly, no president could be “libertarian,” as maintaining the state is job one for them. Heck, the NDP in Canada hovers around the centre of the scale.
It’s hardly an analysis at all.
And Trump makes it really difficult to set up any sort of concept of a “political compass”, since he illustrates that liberal and conservative aren’t just two directions on a single axis. Trump is simultaneously the least liberal and the least conservative president this country has ever had.
The politicalcompass.org plots on 2 axes: left/right and libertarian/authoritarian. And it has notes on its methodology and definitions. Thus it can show Stalin and Hitler high on the authoritarian scale but far apart on the left/right scale, and Chomsky and Friedman as libertarian but far apart on the left/right scale, with Chomsky as left or more than Stalin but absolutely far apart on the libertarian scale. Take a look; it it more interesting than you might think. But at the end of the day, Trump and Biden are closer to each other than they are to Chomsky.
My guess is that Biden is center-right, more or less. Kind of a pre-Reagan Republican. He is certainly not a leftist except in some rabid rightwing dream. I agree that Carter may have been the most left president, at least in my lifetime.
Trump isn’t a point on a political graph, because he doesn’t have any politics, in reality. He would have been just as happy to be left wing if he could have sold himself that way. He yells garbled fascistic nonsense. What do his followers believe he is promising? I don’t think they know or care. “Hurt people that I think are laughing at me!” “Break the government!” Where does that land on any graph?
I don’t think the chart has a spot for “inchoate fascist,” it’s true. But fascists appear all over the map, unaware or unconcerned with contradictory ideas. Indee, Umberto Eco, in his essay “Ur-Fascism,” argues that fascism is syncretistic and thus contradictory. And in the grasping for political power, the fascist is unconcerned with lies and contradictions.
I surprised this is even in dispute. No president in the last 50 years has even approached the degree to which FDR and LBJ pushed for social programs and market regulation.
I think the distinguishing thing about Trump is his incompetence. With most presidents, you can at least count on them to either do something for principled reasons or for self-seeking reasons. Trump is pretty much unique in doing things which harmed both the country and his political career. That makes him unpredictable.
Surely not all over the map. Wouldn’t they all, by definition, be at the authoritarian end?
I have to agree with this. Andrew Jackson was styled as “King Andrew” by his opponents mostly for trying to break up the state party machines that were forming. And while he was a slaveholder and brutal in his treatment of Native Americans, his attempt to break up the Bank of the United States was one of the most radical economic ideas of the 19th Century. Wilson was an idealist in foreign policy, but a segregationist at home. Truman, now appreciated by historians, managed to so enrage both the left and the right elements of Democrats that they both deserted him and ran their own candidates in 1948.
By map I meant a broad reference to ideology and speechifying, some sounding left, some right, some more libertarian depending on their audience. Few promise to rule their supporters with an iron hand, after all. On the chart of the compass, which looks at what they do, of course all are authoritarian, but there are degrees even there.
Totally agree on FDR and LBJ.
And Carter was not the left-most President as someone else said. Carter actual embodied what many pols only claim to be, socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Beyond the fact that he was dealing with stagflation, I’ve read that he had an instinct from dealing with corrupt Georgia legislators that the more people asked him to spend funds on a program, the less willing he was to fund it.
There should also be an axis of Populist.vs.Elitist. Reagan and Herbert Hoover were both conservative, but Reagan was a populist, Hoover an elitist.
And once again, Trump is wherever on that axis it suits him at the moment.
Though that’s hard to define too as almost everyone (even going back to the earliest days of the US) claims to be a populist and accuses their opponents of being elitist.