Perhaps its time for a little clarity on both identifying the political affiliations of other posters, and even yourself.

"Left" and "Right" are misleading terms. I've been called both. The problem is, the shades of grey are immense. It is better described in a 2D sense.

Economically: Far "Right" are Libertarians, far "Left" are socialists. You're either a pure free-market capitalist, a pure central planning communist, or something in between the two.

Socially: Far "Right" means you believe in a certain value set, and want the government to further enforce it. Far "Left" means you believe in total personal freedom, essentially social anarchy. Sharia law is close to the far right, a functioning socially left leaning society would be the Netherlands.

Some combination of these stances forms your political beliefs. Those on the economic and social far right are fascists. Those on the economic and social left favor community based socialist. Those on the economic left and social right are Stalinists. Those on the economic right and social left are libertarians or possibly anarchists.

This is fairly simplistic, but at least thinking in these terms more would add a little clarity.

I myself am economically center-right, and socially somewhat on the left. This, of course, makes me an independent as the Democrat/Republican parties tend to have major divergences from my own views on one side or the other.

FOCUS: Post your own self-identification on a 2D scale, debate where various parties stand on it, or poke at my admittedly simplified description of things to flesh out something more clear.

Poorly MSPainted layout sheet.

Oh look, you marked my place for me!

I've always used the political compass instead of the spectrum when it came to defining my political beliefs.

Makes it simple, doesn't it

Although if you entirely agree with one person's views, with no divergence ever, it makes me wonder.

Economically: Moderately Left
Socially: Moderately-Far Left (not as far as Anarchists, but getting there ) Example: I want all drugs to be legalized, but I also want them to be taxed and regulated, the tax money would be used mostly for the regulation and for rehabilitation programs for people who choose to get off of drugs.

I do disagree with some of Ron Paul's views, but I agree with at least 85% of them.

For example, the CIA and the FBI are totally fine to me, they could use a little reform but I don't think we should get rid of them. I even disagree with him on some aspects of public education as well.

Fascists don't support a free market so they can't be to the right economically. At least not the far right.

Edit: I'd be top right.

I'm not too much of a fan of the CIA but the FBI is ok if it was reformed. As for education, I disagree with him on just about all of his education policies.


I think the reason they are placed "Far Right" is usually because they were so strongly against the Far Left (communists and Socialists) and because of their social policies. It is true though, economically Fascists are more center-right.

They generally do, actually. WW2 era Germany was pretty economically sound, even after crippling reps, and their manufacturing was top notch. Fascists do let their extreme social-right nature spill over into some (usually targeted) regulation, but they range from economically center to right.

Ron Paul is on the [far] social right?

edit: added far

Social Left. See arrows

No, the labeling is off, but the top is social left, and the bottom social right.

Oh I see it now.

Economic Left/Right: 3.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -1.79

http://www.politicalcompass.org/test

I'm a right wing Libertarian.

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -7.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.00

Wow, you're wrong both in how involved the Nazi state was in the economy, and how bad their manufacturing was.

If we're posting our political compasses...
Economic Left/Right: -6.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.23

Being as I particularly like the political compass layout, this is just confusing. >__> Authoritarians should be on the top, looks...I'm just used to it I guess.

Also, is that Wolfenstein Hitler?

Well, I would recommend politicalcompass.org as they do a much better job of explaining this, and use more appropriate terms.
Also, I'm not entirely sure how you have divided this... axis? Is the y axis, like up and down, what defines your social ideas? Or, as you explain it, is it left/right of the y axis.
I think your chart would be more appropriate and accurate if it was divided top to bottom (y axis) between total control and no control of the government/leader/people, and left to right (x axis) between total control of the economy to no interference, as is explained on the political compass. You would come up with some much more appropriate designations on where the leaders you placed on your chart would be.

For example, Stalin was both a command economy supporter (psuedo-communist, socialist) and also an authoritarian, putting him closer to Hitler than to any leftist socialist. I think Stalin and Hitler both belong in the top half of this graph, with Stalin closer to the left, and Hitler closer to the center/right. The bottom left would be more appropriately named a "marxist" rather than a Stalinist, as Stalin was far from the ideal communist, if one at all.

Just my opinion, though. According to politicalcompass.org, I'm -3.00, -3.00, or a social anarcho-libertarian, and economic socialist in favor of more economic control. According to your graph, I'd probably be in the "stalinist" sector, but I certainly don't associate myself with Stalin, and many of my political leanings are far from those of Stalin.

I'm not sure why their economic health matters, although you're wrong about it anyway - they risked war with the West over Poland and Czechoslovakia because they needed to plunder them or their economy would collapse. Fascism is ideologically opposed to a free market, since the economy is just another corporate body, all of which are controlled by the state. Even if in practice Italy and Germany didn't regulate as much as the USSR, for example, that was more to do with practicality than any belief in a free(ish) market.

I usually rank way on the bottom left on those political compass quizzes (top left on bigwoody's graph). I really don't think they're accurate though. The way the questions are worded, I can't help but answer them a certain way. Most major political parties in my country are in the opposite quadrant, but I'm not as radically opposed to them as those quizzes would suggest.

Quizzes are all flawed by definition, as they impart the author's biases or are limited by the scope of their questions.

That said, they tend to be in the neighborhood, and if you're honest with yourself, self-identification works just fine.

Socialism = anti-capitalism

State capitalism = capitalism

If the left is socialist, then Stalinism is both economically and socially rightist.



Furthermore, it is a fact of politics in general that the government is more conservative than the people it rules; we're used to this state of affairs so that even when our politicians $%&@ us we continue to vote for them.



Again, if left-right is as simplistic as socialist-capitalist, it is impossible to differentiate between state and free market capitalism on said left-right spectrum. Thus, Stalin and Mises, both with a total lack of regard for human dignity, share the far right. In order to differentiate the two, you must exclude socialists from the scale entirely, so that left-right can be the state capitalist-free market capitalist dichotomy which capitalists conventionally use anyway.

Center Left Social Libertarian.

I just wouldn't support a party that is totally in line with my own views. That would be a disaster for the nation.

But socialism is only definitively economically left. A socialist could be left or right on social authoritarianism.



I would think that state capitalism would simply fall right of socialism, and left of free market capitalism.

I'm going to say that true social liberalism should include a belief that there isn't a universal truth, or that one shouldn't act on 'universal truth'. The Bolsheviks for instance considered that their admirable economic ideals allowed them to do things like consider gays anomalies to be dealt with.

This criticism would only work if socialism, as you define it, filled up an entire quadrant by itself. However it shares space with social democrats, social liberals and so on, since it's actually "If socialism is to the left...", not "The left is socialist...". That the democrats and liberals are statists is irrelevant, since they share more in common with socialism than those on the opposite side of the scale. It makes sense for Stalin to be in the Authoritarian/Left quadrant since, regardless of his personal motives and ideology, the economy was state-run and collectivised, which is associated with left-wing economics. Makes no sense at all for him to be on the right for economics, which is suppose to be in support of a free market, as stated by the OP. It's the same problem with how you defined the left. The right isn't capitalism; capitalism is merely on the right.

If there isn't a universal truth, why would it be wrong for the Bolsheviks to do whatever they wanted to gays?

EDIT: Maybe that's better as a topic for another thread...

Economic Left/Right: -5.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.49

Wow, I would have expected to much more Right economically then this indicates, and vice versa socially.

Accepting 'killing people is bad' doesn't mean that I'm putting my opinions on you.

You touch on a pet peeve of mine - but probably not in the way you intended.
The notion that political ideology can adequately be mapped in two dimensional space is largely an artifact of the fact that political scientists favor multidimensional scaling (or mathematically related approaches) as a methodology of choice when studying such issues. MDS has a pronounced tendency to produce a two dimension solution (itself a function of the way in which data is gathered) which is seen as evidence for the validity of things like the political compass. I am not a political scientist but suspect that other data analytic approaches would reveal a slightly different view of how to distinguish one political viewpoint from another.

I think the only real way to do it without a level of vagueness is to delineate every issue's stance, since it varies widely from person to person. If you have someone's stance on EVERY issue, then you know exactly where they stand

Look at you all with your two sided and four sided diagrams. It sickens me. Clearly what we need is a three sided diagram that does away with the vulgarities of liberal interpretation and cuts straight to the bone: who do your policies benefit?

On that note (and to annoy people), I propose the Ideological Trilemma!

I love it Vlad, I utterly love it.

My policies are probably most closely to the top part of that triangle.

How can strenght through joy, volkswagen, big government spending in housing, and legislation for longest paid vacation at the time be economically right. It just shows that people should abandon these over-simplified graphs if they want a more deeper understanding. Hitler was probably closer to a social democrat economically.

where do lumpenproletariat fit, or do they get their own little indentation somewhere.

I'm not sure if there is an ideology that bases itself on and sets out specifically to benefit the lumpenproles as a group. I've never seen a political party advance 'more crime' as a major policy platform. There are ideologies that latch onto them of course (fascism most notably), but for the benefit of another class.

I would hereby like to form the Crime Party. Do not give us your votes, we wish to steal them.

Our first move it to buy ownership stakes in the Diebold corporation.

I'd like to submit a revised version of the Ideological Trilemma; one that should resolve any concerns about disenfranchisement.

Hitler is economically to the left of most liberal and conservative parties in the West on the political compass site. So if we're going by that and comparing our results to one another, Hitler is relatively left of centre in mainstream Western politics, but still on the economic right.

I didn't think we could outdo "you never know" today. Well done people.


Well done.

That thing is about as lulzy as it is stupid.

this cracks me up.

For one thing, you didn't pay attention to the numbers on the side of your graph, unless you're claiming that every single person you posted is to the right on social issues.

For another thing...

god, I'm just not going to bother. You called Obama a communist, it's not worth the headache in pointing out how stupid an argument that is. Or, indeed, how offensive that is to communists.

Because communists are racist?


Actually, come to think of, I don't know that I've ever met a black communist or really heard of one (Van Jones notwithstanding).

Off the top of my head, the entirety of the Negritude movement, though this is France we're talking about.

They exist I assure you. W. E. B. DuBois anyone?

Or how about Sasha and Malia Obama? I heard they got the H1N1 vaccine according to their need.