And why is this typology terrible?
Continuing the discussion from Fuck the leftist purists:
Pew revises their typology every few years. Take the quiz and find out your category:
The best category is the one that I’m a member of, naturally. I’ll let you know which one it is later. I agree that Pew’s taxonomy is imperfect as it does not adequately reflect the profundity of my global view. I acknowledge their effort though.
progressive left, which isnt surprising.
the left isnt a monolith though.
the prison question is confusing. I want harsher prison sentences for anti democracy acts and plutocrats, and lighter sentences for minor crimes
Outsider Left and the “are the youngest typology group” is curious for me at 62.
I seriously question the accuracy of this quiz. It calls me a deep-red Committed Conservative, despite the fact that I said the government should greatly expand services, inmates do too much time in prison, that I gave the Republican Party only a 10% likable rating, and said corporations make too much profit.
Ambivalent right which is close.
Establishment Liberal, which is unfathomably based 
I hate simplified 2 answer tests like this without nuance. I gave up quickly on it.
How can you take it at all seriously?
Progressive liberal, which I think might still be too close to the center for me.
This 68 year old Outsider Left doesn’t take it seriously at all, and I agree that nuance is definitely missing.
The only serious aspect to it is that a stratified random sample of the US population took the test as well, and the statistics were reported.
For example only half of the ambivalent right think that the GOP represents them well. 2/3 of the progressive left are white non-hispanic. Establishment liberals are highly politically engaged, have the highest education, have a similar age profile to the population as a whole, are racially and ethnically diverse, and by a huge margin are most based.
Ambivalent Right
Establishment liberal. For context I’m a 44 year old, Midwest dweller with some college education.
And no I can’t take this too seriously. As others have said, it’s short, completely lacking in nuance, and some of the responses seem to be weighted oddly. And I completely agree that the prison question needed more than three responses. None of them captured my opinions on prison sentences. The percentile comparisons to the general population and your own type at the end were interesting to look at, but I’m unsure as how to interpret those numbers.
There’s a note on the first page stating that there’s going to be an updated the test coming out this month. Might be interesting to revisit.
Ditto. I’d rather take a polygraph test for all its accuracy.
“Ambivalent Right.”
Huh.
“Outsider left”, this isn’t a particularly good quiz with too many questions missing huge amounts of nuance and me not liking any of my options. The question about prison sentence length, for example, should’ve been about reforms and what purpose prison serves, not how long people serve in there. The “left” answer may have been shorter sentences, but I’m not sure shorter sentences across the board would be good – we’d improve drug offenders being in prison for too long but we might start letting murders out in a couple of years. Reform is much more complicated than that. It’s about justice and equity and rehabilitation, not calendar dates.
Do you want moderate or big expansion in government services is somewhat ambiguous. Is medicare for all or some other single payer big? I mean, probably. Kind of. But it’s actually not that big to just expand an existing program to cover all people. That sort of thing made it hard to answer a lot of questions.
“Outsider left” basically just means… I dislike the democratic party but I FUCKING HATE the republican party. I probably could’ve qualified as progressive left if I answered a few borderline questions differently. I actually don’t mind “outsider left” as a categorical description, I’m just not sure it makes sense to place it on the left/right axis.
Edit: It shows you how you compare to the average answer afterwards. Apparently 77% of Americans disagree that there are other countries better than the US. In 2026? Really? That’s pure indoctrination.
“Progressive Left” for what it’s worth, but man those questions were terrible.
For example, asking whether corporations make “too much profit” is pointless; there is no “just right amount of profit”. The question is: what are they doing to earn that profit? Are they screwing their workers to achieve it? Their customers? The environment? The law? That’s the important shit. What I want is more regulation and enforcement to prevent bad behavior toward their customers and the markets, not “less profit” per se.
And I didn’t even know where to start on the trade question.
In short - a big, big grain of salt is needed with those results.
The public on whom they inflicted this garbage survey had all the same questions and problems we have.
The idea that a bad survey badly conducted yields meaningful results when we’re comparing individuals to a group is simply wacky. Explained that way it doesn’t come close to passing the laugh test.
It wouldn’t even let me submit my answers. Kept saying I didn’t answer four of the questions even though I answered all of them. But yes, it lacks nuance. Big time. So much so that it is close to useless. It’s like the (infamous IMHO) question that pollsters ask about whether or not you think the country is “going in the right direction”, leaving no room for clarification on if you think think things should be going more to the left or more to the right.
ETA: It finally let me submit my answers, but rather than giving me a “type” it just showed a bar going from deep blue on the left, to deep red on the right, with the percentages of each group in the general public. That’s wrong in so many ways it’s not even funny. Among other things, I find it strange that they call the center “stressed sideliners”.
ETA 2: I finally got it to work. It calls me an “establishment liberal”. I suppose that’s close enough, but again leaves out several nuances. Several questions are worded poorly. The question about people saying too many offensive things or getting offended by what others say is especially bad, for the obvious reason that what people do or have done to them is more important than what someone says. The question about prison time fails to distinguish between the person doing a multi decade sentence because it’s their third time getting busted for smoking weed under a three strikes law (that person should be doing none or a lot less at a minimum) vs. the person who murdered someone else because their heart is full of hate but gets a 5 year sentence with the possibility of time off for good behavior because they’re a good ol’ boy (that person should be doing a lot more). And so on.
This may sound like a dumb question, but what does “based” mean in this context?
It’s kid slang for “good” from a few years ago. As in “Those old people on a message board said “based”. That’s way cringe, bruh”.