Many here on DailyKos have a pair of numbers beneath their comment boxes that look like this
~[-1.12, -3.67]~
I assume this refers to the person's political compass score. The political compass is a model of a political spectrum designed to be
an alternative to the originally French one-axis (Left versus Right) model, that has been widely adopted over the past two centuries
The name comes from the website I linked, which features a questionnaire which will rate your political views on two axes: Economic (Left-Right) and Social (Authoritarian-Libertarian).
From Wikipedia:
The underlying principle of the Political Compass is that political views may be measured along two separate and independent axes. The Economic (Left-Right) axis measures one's opinion of how the economy should be run: "The Left" is defined as the view that the economy should be run by a cooperative collective agency (which is usually taken to mean the state, but can also mean a network of communes), while "the Right" is defined as the view that the economy should be left to the devices of competing individuals and organizations. The other axis (Authoritarian-Libertarian) purports to measure one's political opinions in a "Social" (as distinct from "Economic") sense, regarding a view of the appropriate amount of "personal freedom": "Libertarianism" is defined as the belief that personal freedom should be maximized, while "Authoritarianism" is defined as the belief that authority and tradition should be obeyed.
They propose the following chart:
Scoring then proceeds as follows. Based on your answers to the political questionnaire, you are assigned a number for each axis from -10 to 10, with the most negative number representing the most "liberal" and the most positive number repsenting the most "conservative." Thus, you can be a "social liberal" and an "economic conservative." My score would be something like a Econ: -1, Social: -3.
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This compass is wrong. Not only wrong, but dangerous. A person trying to understand the direction George W. Bush is taking the U.S. Republican party and the United States with it would be at a crippling disadvantage.
In fact, leftism and rightism are not defined the way that the compass implicitly defines them (respectively, socially libertarian/economically authoritarian as leftist and socially authoritarian/economically libertarian as rightist).
Leftism on social issues doesn't equal social libertarianism, as the political compass implies. Just think about debates on gun control or cigarettes. Nor does it equal economic authoritarianism: the left doesn't seek just any kind of government intervention in the economy, but specifically intervention for the sake of egalitarian ends. In 1850s Russia and America it was the leftists who were the economic libertarians advocating the abolition of serfdom and slavery.
Similarly, Rightism on social issues doesn't necessarily equal social authoritarianism and Rightism on economic issues doesn't necessarily equal economic libertarianism.
But why?
Because government is, and has always been, a means to an ends. The political compass is libertarian-centric because it sees government authority as an ends, just as libertarian principles do. However, from the thinking of leftists and rightists, government is not an ends, but a means to achieve the "ideal society", some social goal which affords their ideology (for leftists, egalitarianism, for rightists, traditional privilege) and can only be achieved by government action.
So a far-rightist wouldn't be an economic libertarian: he'd regulate the hell out of the government to serve the ends of the privleged classes, perhaps those with the right blue blood connections or those with the most assets.
This is where the PC hurts us in understanding George W. Bush. According to the PC, Bush is a social rightist but an economic centrist or even leftist-- the "authoritarian right." If you are looking at it from a left-right perspective, it would categorize Bush as a centrist. If you are looking at it from the PC perspective, "authoritarian right" is no more radical, than say, "libertarian right".
But when you see government authority as a means to an ends, as Rightists do, you see that those who advocate the most government authority are also the most extreme: they are are willing to go the farthest in sacrificing individual liberty when it comes to promoting a specific ideal society, and need the most government intervention, whether it be in social or economic arenas, to achieve that ideal. The measure of extremity then is not the amount of government authority but rather the ends to which that authority is used.
By this measure, George W. Bush's contradictions begin to make sense: the use of government economic policy to promote militarism, for patronage, for large corporations, investors, and for the otherwise privileged, does not signal Bush's "leftism" or economic moderation but his economic extremism.
Bush is on the far right both economically and socially.
To further illustrate the absurdity of the PC's viewpoint, let me use a picture from the Political Compass's own website:
Look at the positions of Adolph Hitler and Milton Friedman on the chart, and how far they are from the center. Hitler is about a centimeter farther away, but other than that they are both about the same distance.
One, the most notorious and most far-right ideologue of the 20th century directly responsible for the slaughter of tens of millions. The other, a professor at the University of Chicago subscribing to monetarism. According to the Political Compass, Friedman is just as extreme as Hitler!
That's because PC refuses to categorize Hitler as economic far-right, because he wasn't a free market neoliberal-- even though the reason he controlled the economy was so that he could conduct racial warfare more efficiently.
The political compass assumes that the position which affords the most individual freedom is an extremist viewpoint, when that's hardly true at all. Indeed, the position granting a great deal of individual freedom is most often the centrist viewpoint because the person holding it has very little fixed idea of whether he wants his society to be traditionalist (far-right), where class differences are legally enforced, or egalitarian (far-left), where the lack of such differences are enforced.
Here is an alternative (Also, a brief political history of the 20th century) which returns to a single dimension (apologies for difficult font size):
This places major political movements (and if you can read it, prominent names) on a traditional left-right axis without a libertarian-centrist perspective. I divided the spreadsheet into 8 columns ranging from the far left (Marxism-Leninism, Maoism) to the far right (Monarchism, Facism, Theocracy), with extremely vague worldwide status measured in hue of blue.
Under this the true political spectrum, American classical liberalism occupies a deservely centrist position alongside democratic liberalism. Both main strands of American political tradition are, from the global perspective, centrist.
The "Left" is, well, the left. But the "Right" is not libertarianism. It is reserved, as it should be, for more militaristic, cultural traditionalist, or pro-privlege authoritarian tendencies.
How did we come to this? How did libertarianism come to incorrectly be seen as the "Right" or "conservative" position, not just by the Political Compass, but many 20th century observers?
They were not being irrational. In the second half of the 20th century, when imperialism in all forms was being overthrown, fascism vanquished as a force in WW2, and feudalism seemed of the distant past, right-wing authoritarianism, in both the economic and social sense, seemed to be receding. The debate was no longer between the right-wing authoritarians and the classical liberals, as it had been in the late 18th and early 19th centuries but between classical liberals and progressives, socialists and communists. Someone like Barry Goldwater, a strong libertarian represented the ultimate of the "Right". In their context, in their world, this was a rational way of thinking. Unfortunately for us, this has held over in things like the Political Compass.
But as the above chart shows, the true political spectrum has shifted once again. It is no longer possible to talk of maximal liberty as a "Right" position. That was before the rise of Christian right. Before the rise of guys like George W. Bush, who uses government for militaristic and class-warfare purposes (class war from the top, that is). Before the Ayatollah Khomeini/Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and their strictly controlled Iranian economy; Vladimir Putin who nationalizes Russia' oil industry in the name of state power rather than socialism; Hu Jintao who controls China's currency in the name of nationalism and mercantilism; Before Likud and its apartheid-like economic policies; or guys like Neil Stevens at Redstate who applauds the failure of free trade talks in the name of anti-multilateralism.
No, the Right is no longer libertarian. No wonder Barry Goldwater could no longer recognize his party by the end of his life. Libertarians are now on the Left. The world has shifted.
