by Max Barry

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Region: The Commonwealth of Crowns

Gieruland wrote:I must admit that I, too, have been accepting this claim for years without so much as a second thought. Apparently it has been repeated so often that it has become some sort of truth to many so now I'm not sure if there is any truth in it. I tried to find some comparison to e.g. Dutch political parties but another version of the political compass seems to be used in the Netherlands ('conservative/progressive' instead of 'libertarian/authoritarian') so I'm not sure if they match, but using the information on the pages mentioned below, democratic presidential candidates of the USA seem to be in the top right corner, leaning to the middle (with Trump in the top right corner, leaning to to top right corner, so more authoritarian right); the UK's conservative party seems to be matching Trump, while the difference with Labour is enormous, which is in the bottom left corner. Dutch and Belgian progressive political parties tend to be in the top left corner and Dutch and Belgian conservative parties in the bottom right. But I probably need more than these two websites to check this.

https://qz.com/1748903/how-2020-us-democratic-candidates-compare-to-global-politicians/

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politiek_spectrum#Meerdimensionale_benaderingen ('links' = 'left'; 'rechts' = 'right', data from the Dutch national resp. Belgian federal elections in 2012 resp. 2010)

I'm often one to ruminate on an idea for a while, so I apologize if my timing is jarring.

I'd start by saying that I don't think the conservative/progressive axis in the Dutch example is a good proxy of authoritarian/libertarian; however, I do think that it improves upon the general weakness of the linear left/right mental model by splitting the analysis between a cultural and an economic dimension. Of course, with every such additional refinement, these models become more complex, and therefore it becomes increasingly difficult to concisely communicate a person's or group's political stance. Instead, simple models that are strongly reliant on historical and cultural context inevitably return to prominence for convenience's sake.

As for the Quartz article, it is indeed illustrative of how one can imagine the placement along left/right and authoritarian/libertarian dimensions, but I don't really agree with their classifications in the US. As they make clear in the article, the website does not disclose its exact methodology, but I would tentatively say it looks like they put more weight on what these politicians say than what they do (yeah, trust politicians to tell you the truth...). As a center libertarian (-0.38, -5.23) according to the same website, https://www.politicalcompass.org/, it may not be any surprise that I view the single most important dimension of any mentioned here to be the authoritarian/libertarian axis. This is the axis that I think to be universally important across history and cultures, yet widely disregarded in common parlance. Perhaps this should be promoted?

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