Expanding the left and right: the political compass

[Rattrap]

I could've sworn I made a thread about this before, but a search didn't turn up anything. Just recently in another thread there was an argument about giving food to the homeless people - and whether banning/restricting that was right or left. I tried then to point out that it was neither, because that's on a different axis altogether. Welcome Premium Link Upgrade - this isn't a unique or singular idea, as there are a number of versions out there, though this one seems to be for the time being the most prominent, and at least for me the easiest to understand. There's your standard right and left - and then there's authoritarianism and libertarianism. As I argued with the homeless example, it's not right/left, but up - toward the authoritarian spectrum.

I won't say anything for/against the quiz portion of the website, but I do recommend taking a look at the election rundowns - there are some striking correllations to see in the leading parties in every country they have rundowns for, as well as showing how skewed the American perspective is regarding right and left (you'll notice that Obama - like every president we've had in my memory - is authoritarian-right. Which is where corporatism lies). I'm not sure if this website points it out itself, but you can certainly find some overlapping political compasses that plot some of the 'isms' - facism (authoritarian-right with corporatism), communism (authoritarian-left), socialism (authoritarian-center...see a pattern?).

I bring this all up to showcase that as much as we love fighting over parties like football teams, one can see quite plainly in these graphs that they're actually pretty much the same. Not just in the US, but also in Britain, Germany, Australia and so on. The reactions I've seen to the 2014 midterms remain baffling as people mention 'change' and 'now's the chance' - nevermind that the Republicans had all that chance and opportunity of change less than a decade ago, because in reality our government remains an R/D government. Slight shifts in the red and blue proportions leave it still an R/D government. We will not see change until it stops being an R/D government. Ad naseum.

This article from the Guardian does a neat job of illustrating some of this:
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Few expect politicians to tell the truth and few are particularly surprised or affected when lies are exposed. Why is this the universal experience of politics in most developed democracies? It turns out the answer is related to ice-cream.
[...]
See where Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are? It’s just like the two ice-cream stalls on the beach. How about the Australian federal election in 2013?

The two major contenders, Labor and the Liberal/National coalition, sit almost as disturbingly close on the graph as the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates. The UK is barely different.

It's not even about voting for the lesser of two evils. They're the same damn evil. And as long as we keep voting for it, that's exactly what we're going to get.