It should be well known amongst the politically minded here that "left-wing" and "right-wing" can sometimes be bad adjectives to use when describing politicians and parties. It creates a false dichotomy out of people when in fact political opinion can be splattered all over the board randomly. The common response to this is to graph political opinions on one of two axes, magically converting our world view from one dimension to two. Usually, the division is between social and economic opinions, and is defined by government control in either field. This is a major improvement, but I can't help but think it's still not adequate. It seems there are issues that don't quite fit under either the economic or social category. The left-right axis in the two-dimensional model is defined as a pure command economy (roughly, communism) on the former extremity and a pure free-market economy (capitalism) on the latter. But what of taxation? Opinions on taxation are often grouped together with economic opinion, but this looks like pigeonholing. Taxes are sometimes used to influence the economy, but this is only indirect. And how about public services? I'm not familiar with how someone can categorize the issues of free health care and free public education as economic questions. And which axis do you fit your opinion on when it comes to the priorities in your government's budget and whether it's being balanced? It seems to me that we need at least one more dimension. Any ideas of how to define this dimension?
You're focused on only one aspect of the two-dimensional model. What is above or below the horizontal axis? What is the Y to the left-right X? Before I can begin attempt to consider the possibility of formulating Z, I need to know what Y is.
The social axis. I mentioned this in the original post. But maybe I wasn't precise enough. It's the one that's sometimes named the libertarian-authoritarian axis, and you graph opinions on people's rights and such on it. EDIT: The Political Compass is an example of this 2D model. There's also a similar graph proposed by libertarians, but I don't know what it's called or where to find it.
Okay, that's about what I was expecting, but I'm not entirely confident that the Y axis, as such, is refined to such a degree that part of the problem can't be solved there. However, we might formulate a Z axis by looking at the direction of flow in one's formulation of the social contract. The simplest division, does government work for people or do people exist for the state? Commercial institutions? And so forth. However, we're creating a spherical map, by a certain manner of visualizing the three-dimensional structure, and there may well be so many divisions and facets within that range that they become meaningless.
What ideas do you have in this respect? This axis certainly would have room for taxation and public services. I like it. Possibly.
the problem i see with graphing like that is that someday, someone will come along that stretches their particular polarization off the graph, and a new one will be needed.
Athelwulf I just took the compass quiz again; it's been a while. I scored X=8.00, Y=7.33. The thing is that at some point we must look at definitions. In the same way that most people don't choose deliberately and consciously to be evil (e.g. terrorists such as George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden hardly think of themselves as evil, despite the sum of their actions), the relationship between the individual and the concept of government will bear great influence over how one's 2-D coordinate is plotted. Within a large enough sample, we will find multiple manifestations of an 8.00x7.33 plot. There will be significant differences between the end products, and sufficient to rebut common generalizations such as (stereo-) "typical liberal/conservative". Which is why I'm drawn to the social contract: forcing that consideration directly will limit the pathways by which someone might broadcast the idea. It is difficult to speak well and seriously of government as a servant of the people if you do not believe this situation to be proper and true. It's why so many people see through pretentious sham elections in dictatorial states: the government presents itself as a servant of the people because this is what is expected by the leading edge of the "rat-race" called the civilized world. Apparently, this notion of serving the people is widely and firmly considered virtuous. The idyllic consideration is abstractly "good". In the economic upper tier of Western culture, we don't face the problems common in the Arab world, or recent and echoing in Latin America. In the United States, for instance, I would agree with Lysander Spooner: ... (T)he great crimes committed in the world are mostly prompted by avarice and ambition. The greatest of all crimes are the wars that are carried on by governments, to plunder, enslave, and destroy mankind. The next greatest crimes committed in the world are equally prompted by avarice and ambition; and are committed, not on sudden passion, but by men of calculation, who keep their heads cool and clear, and who have no thought whatever of going to prison for them. They are committed, not so much by men who violate the laws, as by men who, either by themselves or by their instruments, make the laws; by men who have combined to usurp arbitrary power, and to maintain it by force and fraud, and whose purpose in usurping and maintaining it is by unjust and unequal legislation, to secure to themselves such advantages and monopolies as will enable them to control and extort the labor and properties of other men, and thus impoverish them, in order to minister to their own wealth and aggrandizement The robberies and wrongs thus committed by these men, in conformity with the laws--that is, their own laws--are as mountains to molehills, compared with the crimes committed by all other criminals, in violation of the laws. ("Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty") The fundamental difference underlying all politics is the individual's perception of the relationship between itself and the collectives it acknowledges. This motivating factor as yet appears in no substantive dimension on the graph; all we see when we view X and Y, right now, are the products of various products: "grilled tuna" flavored cat food, Vienna sausages, and ground beef are all "meat". There is a difference, though, whence they come and how they are formulated. In American politics, then, we're comparing "smeat" and "textured vegetable protein", pretending they're both steaks, and not paying attention to the fundamental components of either. We need a more fundamental measurement than we have.
