This has been the buzz around the office for the last couple of days: we've been having fun with the political compass. We were at a seminar about critical thinking in students and one of the suggestions was a tool to help them perceive the bias they approached a subject with.
Its central premise I take to be self-evident: that the axis of left and right is unsatisfactory for plotting political convictions and that another of authoritarian vs. libertarian is needed. This, obviously, doesn't work for Americans who like to confuse 'liberal' with 'left' when they are not the same thing. This is part of the reason why former lefties (say Wolfowitz et al though for all their trumpeting of SDS leadership I've never seen them mentioned in anything on the SDS) end up with a very right wing government.
I have long argued that Irish political parties are only comprehensible if you have a three dimensioal axis including both these measures and nationalism and unionism. The lack of a major fascist party here is partially attributable to strong nationalism being associated with the left a bit more than the right. DeValera would have been a willing fascist but his fellow travellers would not.
By the way, I score somewhere between Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.
From people at work's score I suspect that most people's politics, when not considering which of their limited parties to vote for, are far less authoritarian than the options offered them. And probably quite a bit left too. Howard Zinn noted that about polling the US people rather than the options they are offered
1 comment:
nice heads up on the political compass. great fun indeed and who could pretend not illuminating also? s'ppose a cynic might suggest -especially for those of us neighbouring messers gandhi and lama [:-)]-that the fourth dimension be added too. we're only youngflas after all
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