Take the test to see which political quadrant you inhabit

And yet their methodology makes clusters of people that make sense. One would expect Chomsky Kropotkin and Goldman to be pretty close, just as one would expect Bush, Obama and Romney to be pretty close.

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The social axis.

The conflict in modern politics is not between authoritarian and libertarian, it’s actually between traditionalism and progressivism with ‘the status quo is fine’ in the middle. From the centrist position of ‘just let things be whatever’ (which is I think the most you can really accuse centrist dems of), you have on each extreme increasingly intrusive methods to impose changes on society one way or another.

I got:

which is a term I never heard before. This test seems much better than the Political Compass test.

My results put a big, red clown nose on Noam Chomsky. I can live with that.

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Traditionalists have a strong tendency to be authoritarian (just try breaking a tradition in front of them) while progressives tend towards social libertarianism, with some crossover where the status quo people are as well

This is what conservatism used to be, and significant parts of the European conservative parties still are. The “conservatives” in the US are actually reactionaries, people whos only reaction to change is “put it back!”, with the ideal time being either before the Civil Rights Act or the American Civil War.

How do you account for the difference between reformist progressives and revolutionary progressives in your scale?

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The New Democrats movement, I’d argue, is a reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union and the need to prove that the failure of soviet experiment was not the failure of socialism. It’s a rearguard action, not a betrayal of the left. The people who participated in it were significantly to the left of the then prevailing consensus, which was built on Reaganite triumphalism. Then, within the Democrats, you had the reshaping of the party away from its racist roots.

I’ve already see people castigated as ‘influential in third way politics’, but when you look at what they actually did, what they did was write critiques of free market capitalism. If you are calling those people right wingers because of their positions at the time in a different context relative to today, then well, Ghandi sure doesn’t belong on the left either.

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Revolutionaries are more extreme on both of the scales, especially if they espouse the use of violence.

There’s some alignment with traditionalism and authoritarianism but on closer inspection it falls apart. The reactionary right sure didn’t have any respect for Obama’s presidency, did they? They sure don’t like the idea of gun control, mandatory vaccination, environmental regulations, affirmative action, no platforming… but when the shoe is on their foot, it’s all free speech zones and fun stuff like that.

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That doesn’t disprove authoritarianism, in fact their reaction to being in power proves it. When they are not the government they complain about the fairer redistribution of power, and when they they are the government they try to take power away from people to put it in the hands of a minority.

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I was just running into this problem with the politiscales one. So many of the questions were questions on topic that not only I reject the premise of, but that the quiz knows I’ve rejected the premise of earlier. If an earlier feeler was “Prisons should be abolished” and I strongly agree, it makes no sense to ask me later on whether or not conditions in jails should be improved.

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Well said, Hillary’s result doesn’t surprise me at all. In the US, after the parties and donations filter candidates, you’re usually left with 2 right wingers in the running. Pick any right wing authoritarian you like!

I’d like to see Elizebeth Warren placed on this chart. My guess is she’d be slightly left of Bernie.

Yes, and even this chart seems to be centred for the states. Some of these questions wouldn’t be disputed at all in many countries.

One question I didn’t like was this:

A significant advantage of a one-party state is that it avoids all the arguments that delay progress in a democratic political system.

This is true, regardless of whether you like it or not. I’m curious as to whether agreeing makes you more authoritarian. I said I agreed, because it’s simply a fact, but I also think a delayed, thoughtful process is better in 99% of cases.

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Look, you are using ‘authoritarianism’ as a synonym for ‘evil’, and it’s not that. They don’t ‘hate the fairer redistribution of power’, they have a different conception of what ‘fair’ means. They don’t support minorities having power just because it’s a minority, they support a specific minority, that they identify with, holding power.

They can plead for states rights on one hand and impose draconian law on the other - both of them are just tools to fuck over black people. The Ku Klux Klan are equally happy in a dictatorship or an anarchy, as long as whites are supreme.

When the police escort a black kid into a white majority school against hordes of screaming protesters, the libertarian-authoritarian axis is an absolutely useless axis to think about things.

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I disagree, but I’m running out of energy and I have other things to do

I wasn’t using authoritarian as a synonym for evil though. I live in a very grey and grey world.

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If you take out the economic axis from consideration, the core conflict in the left is between those moderates who think the arc of history will tend towards justice without much pain or intervention, and those who think radical, illegal, or lethal action is required to correct things. Similarly on the right you have those who think that the government should just do as little as possible and that’ll be the good old days where merit rules, and those who want there to be a strong hand and talk darkly of purging the blight of liberals and foreigners.

That’s the spectrum. The Libertarian-Authoritarian scale is literally horseshoe theory.

Sanders is significantly more centrist than Hillary on the social axis, that’s what killed him amongst black voters and won Hillary the primary. Telling people to focus on economics and saying that’ll fix racism is exactly that. That particular argument, Sander’s economic leftism and Hillary at least identifying social issues as a separate issue, that was the entire 2016 internet discourse in a nutshell. You might claim that HRC is actually secretly evil!!! but that’s how the vocal supporters of both broke down.

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See, there are some cases out there, like that Todd Kohlhepp or Donald Smith guy, committing brutal crimes, caught red handed or with tremendous physical evidence, with witnesses other than the police, and appear totally irreformable. When the crimes are that barbaric, I am not only for the death penalty, but believe the cruel and unusual punishment portion of the Eighth Amendment should be waived.

The examples you provide appear to be political prisoners and/or shakedowns. Without witnesses outside the state, i.e. depending only on the word of police or police hired forensics, no, I do not agree with the death penalty.

Here’s 2004:
image

If you consider the entire quadrant as a cluster, then you’d be right. But mostly they seem to gut feel it quite a bit and adjust the position to whatever they think will get passed around a lot.

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I wouldn’t want anyone to start editing wikipedia, I just wanted to grab something that looked a bit like a reasonable consensus so that people could express if they varied from it. But from the two lines I quoted, I’m not sure what elements you are actually objecting to when you say “the parts that refer to individualism.”

I’m not sure if I was clear that I was only quoting those first two sentences, not referring to the entire article.

I read the Charter of the Social Contract of Rojava and I find the principles in it consistent with the two sentences I quoted. It seems like freedom is a core value there.

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The libertarian end of the continuum seems to bunch corporate personhood in there with human rights. For example, the idea that people should be free for the most part from government control is very different from not having environmental regulations for corporations.
This is part of the reason some people don’t like the word “Libertarian”. In my opinion, personal rights and corporate rights are often at odds.

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Well, some surprises. The website still has some kinks. My compass appears to be blank.

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Fucking history fail.

tng-riker-what

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