02-07-2019, 04:35 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-07-2019, 04:36 PM by Eric the Green.)
I transfer the discussion of this topic that occurred on the wrong thread, to here. Post #2222 on the Let's make fun of Trump thread, in the current events, general political discussion topic.
(02-02-2019, 11:16 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:
If you examine the Communist system under Brezhnev, for instance, you'll b hard pressed to see any remnants of the class struggle there either. It was a slightly less capitalistic version of a one-party state than the Chinese have today. They also claim to be communists.
I've always subscribed to a three-axis political compass:
Communal, with pure individualism at one extreme and something akin to a hive at the other,
Economic, with pure laisse faire and Marxism as the extremes, and
Authority, with pure democracy (or even anarchy) and totalitarianism at the extremes.
Feel free to add religion, if you need another axis. I have from time to time myself. All it shows is the complexity of human and societal interaction.
(02-01-2019, 06:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:
On the existing two-axis and two-quadrant Nolan grid, that would be the vertical axis for anarchy (or libertarian) at the top vs. totalitarian, (or statist) at the bottom, upper right vs. lower left for economics, and upper left vs. lower right for individual rights vs. social conservatism (group power/hive mentality); normally called the cultural or social axis. I think those are adequate. Religious conservatism in politics is just another hive mentality or group power type. Examples of these conservative groups are nations, races, and religions In many cases they are all fused, as in fascist Italy. Hitler was an extreme example of all three group types as part of their ideology, and the religious aspect was uppermost, consisting of the final solution to the Jewish "problem." Donald Trump is another example of this fusion, although not always explicitly stated; but Trump can lie and obfuscate by changing his statements at a moment's notice.
On the European political compass, the axes are exactly the same, but they are placed at different locations around the wheel. In that chart, the cultural/social axis or individualism/civil rights vs. group power is the vertical axis. Economics is the left vs. right axis, and the anarchy vs. totalitarian axis falls at lower right vs. upper left. No revision is needed to these wheels in my opinion.
(02-02-2019, 09:54 AM)David Horn Wrote:
I highlighted the religion comment as an example of why two axes don't get the job done. Religion is neither conservative nor liberal, communal nor individual. Your beliefs in astrology fall fully within the religious sphere, and you are anything but conservative. I would put you more in the communal than individual class too, but others can feel otherwise. After all, there are monks who go off to live isolated and pure lives, and they are certainly driven by their religious beliefs. On that axis, strength of belief or non-belief is the measure, not affiliation with other beliefs. Other axes can also be assigned, but only if they are uncorrelated with the axes already defined. I've never had much luck with more than 4.
(02-02-2019, 11:16 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:
I started with the classical 4 Nolanist sectors:
leftist individualists (counterculture)
right-wing individualists (libertarians)
leftist collectivists (communists)
right-wing collectivist (nationalists)
But I felt something is missing. I added one for regimes devoted to religious transcendence, and got my 5-sector diagram. Seems to work.
Some people want to have an autocracy-democracy axis. I had another idea. The distance from the centre of the circle measures the readiness to use violence or "extremism". Tyrants and violent anarchist revolutionaries are both on the periphery. Autocratic power is just a tool. Violent revolutionaries dislike it, when it's used by their opponents (the Bolshies hated the tzar), but they have to qualms about seizing autocratic power when it becomes available.
(02-01-2019, 06:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:
Individual vs. collective is one way to describe the vertical axis on the Nolan chart. I think anarchy vs statist is a more accurate term. As you noted, "communist" is too extreme a term for liberals, and for all the folks in the lower-left quadrant, although it may apply to those near the bottom of the chart. The essential thing about the Nolan chart is the two axes of economics and culture/social issues. These axes run diagonally from the edges of the quadrants. The left side of the chart corresponds to liberals in the USA. They are liberal on both economics and culture. The right side are conservatives; they are conservative on both. At the top, pure libertarians are liberal on culture/social issues, and conservative on economics. They maintain this means that they uphold "freedom" from state control on both subjects. At the bottom, pure statists are liberal on economics and conservative on social and cultural issues. They want state control in both fields.
In all cases, a political chart is only about politics. Politics is your view on what kind of state we want and who will have the power in it. Other charts are for other subjects.
The Islamic State is an extreme contemporary example of social conservatism. They require obedience by all persons to their strict and narrow interpretation of Islam, on pain of execution as infidels. They are also nationalists, because the caliphate is the only true state to uphold and defend and expand against all others. They don't seem to be particularly racist, although Arabs are the main promoters of the IS. Arabic racism often creeps into the Islamic State and other Islamic regimes, however, because Arabs resent the oppression imposed by Western-backed Arab regimes and they want their own state.
In Hitler's case, the Nazis upheld the German indigenous folk religion of the middle ages, as represented in Wagner's operas to which Hitler was devoted. His religious regime required elimination of Jews and gypsies. Deviants like homosexuals were not allowed. His regime was explicitly racist, proclaiming the superiority of Aryans, and nationalist, proclaiming the goal of "liberating" Germans from other regimes, and then conquest of living space for the one superior nation, Germany, to which his regime was devoted and dedicated.
The specifics of the specific social group upheld as superior, and entitled to rule and entitled to blame, jail and/or kill those who don't agree, don't matter too much on a political chart. The principle of social conservatism is the same, whether we are talking about the Christian religious right and moral majority, Muslim fundamentalists, Catholics who advocate a Catholic state, Hindu nationalists, Nazi Arian racists, fascists in general, etc. Most of them uphold aspects of all three kinds of group, religious, national or racial, and they overlap. They may use religious institutions to inspire loyalty and obedience, without having any real interest in the precepts of the religion. It's obedience to group authority that they want. American fundamentalists of the religious right-wing in politics are generally also super-patriots who uphold their idea of America right or wrong or America first, and this means keeping out other races from America in the name of stopping illegal immigration.
As these authoritarian right-wing politicians fall closer to the bottom center of the chart, the degree of economic control increases too; and as it blends with the left side of the authoritarian axis, then economic class can also be one of the groups whose entitlement to rule is upheld. Communist totalitarian regimes also tend to enforce ethnic and national uniformity, so aspects of the quadrant next door creep in. There are gradations and shadings in all the quadrants; that's what makes a circular chart accurate and useful.
(02-02-2019, 11:16 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:
If you examine the Communist system under Brezhnev, for instance, you'll b hard pressed to see any remnants of the class struggle there either. It was a slightly less capitalistic version of a one-party state than the Chinese have today. They also claim to be communists.
I've always subscribed to a three-axis political compass:
Communal, with pure individualism at one extreme and something akin to a hive at the other,
Economic, with pure laisse faire and Marxism as the extremes, and
Authority, with pure democracy (or even anarchy) and totalitarianism at the extremes.
Feel free to add religion, if you need another axis. I have from time to time myself. All it shows is the complexity of human and societal interaction.
(02-01-2019, 06:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:
On the existing two-axis and two-quadrant Nolan grid, that would be the vertical axis for anarchy (or libertarian) at the top vs. totalitarian, (or statist) at the bottom, upper right vs. lower left for economics, and upper left vs. lower right for individual rights vs. social conservatism (group power/hive mentality); normally called the cultural or social axis. I think those are adequate. Religious conservatism in politics is just another hive mentality or group power type. Examples of these conservative groups are nations, races, and religions In many cases they are all fused, as in fascist Italy. Hitler was an extreme example of all three group types as part of their ideology, and the religious aspect was uppermost, consisting of the final solution to the Jewish "problem." Donald Trump is another example of this fusion, although not always explicitly stated; but Trump can lie and obfuscate by changing his statements at a moment's notice.
On the European political compass, the axes are exactly the same, but they are placed at different locations around the wheel. In that chart, the cultural/social axis or individualism/civil rights vs. group power is the vertical axis. Economics is the left vs. right axis, and the anarchy vs. totalitarian axis falls at lower right vs. upper left. No revision is needed to these wheels in my opinion.
(02-02-2019, 09:54 AM)David Horn Wrote:
I highlighted the religion comment as an example of why two axes don't get the job done. Religion is neither conservative nor liberal, communal nor individual. Your beliefs in astrology fall fully within the religious sphere, and you are anything but conservative. I would put you more in the communal than individual class too, but others can feel otherwise. After all, there are monks who go off to live isolated and pure lives, and they are certainly driven by their religious beliefs. On that axis, strength of belief or non-belief is the measure, not affiliation with other beliefs. Other axes can also be assigned, but only if they are uncorrelated with the axes already defined. I've never had much luck with more than 4.
(02-02-2019, 11:16 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:
I started with the classical 4 Nolanist sectors:
leftist individualists (counterculture)
right-wing individualists (libertarians)
leftist collectivists (communists)
right-wing collectivist (nationalists)
But I felt something is missing. I added one for regimes devoted to religious transcendence, and got my 5-sector diagram. Seems to work.
Some people want to have an autocracy-democracy axis. I had another idea. The distance from the centre of the circle measures the readiness to use violence or "extremism". Tyrants and violent anarchist revolutionaries are both on the periphery. Autocratic power is just a tool. Violent revolutionaries dislike it, when it's used by their opponents (the Bolshies hated the tzar), but they have to qualms about seizing autocratic power when it becomes available.
(02-01-2019, 06:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:
Individual vs. collective is one way to describe the vertical axis on the Nolan chart. I think anarchy vs statist is a more accurate term. As you noted, "communist" is too extreme a term for liberals, and for all the folks in the lower-left quadrant, although it may apply to those near the bottom of the chart. The essential thing about the Nolan chart is the two axes of economics and culture/social issues. These axes run diagonally from the edges of the quadrants. The left side of the chart corresponds to liberals in the USA. They are liberal on both economics and culture. The right side are conservatives; they are conservative on both. At the top, pure libertarians are liberal on culture/social issues, and conservative on economics. They maintain this means that they uphold "freedom" from state control on both subjects. At the bottom, pure statists are liberal on economics and conservative on social and cultural issues. They want state control in both fields.
In all cases, a political chart is only about politics. Politics is your view on what kind of state we want and who will have the power in it. Other charts are for other subjects.
The Islamic State is an extreme contemporary example of social conservatism. They require obedience by all persons to their strict and narrow interpretation of Islam, on pain of execution as infidels. They are also nationalists, because the caliphate is the only true state to uphold and defend and expand against all others. They don't seem to be particularly racist, although Arabs are the main promoters of the IS. Arabic racism often creeps into the Islamic State and other Islamic regimes, however, because Arabs resent the oppression imposed by Western-backed Arab regimes and they want their own state.
In Hitler's case, the Nazis upheld the German indigenous folk religion of the middle ages, as represented in Wagner's operas to which Hitler was devoted. His religious regime required elimination of Jews and gypsies. Deviants like homosexuals were not allowed. His regime was explicitly racist, proclaiming the superiority of Aryans, and nationalist, proclaiming the goal of "liberating" Germans from other regimes, and then conquest of living space for the one superior nation, Germany, to which his regime was devoted and dedicated.
The specifics of the specific social group upheld as superior, and entitled to rule and entitled to blame, jail and/or kill those who don't agree, don't matter too much on a political chart. The principle of social conservatism is the same, whether we are talking about the Christian religious right and moral majority, Muslim fundamentalists, Catholics who advocate a Catholic state, Hindu nationalists, Nazi Arian racists, fascists in general, etc. Most of them uphold aspects of all three kinds of group, religious, national or racial, and they overlap. They may use religious institutions to inspire loyalty and obedience, without having any real interest in the precepts of the religion. It's obedience to group authority that they want. American fundamentalists of the religious right-wing in politics are generally also super-patriots who uphold their idea of America right or wrong or America first, and this means keeping out other races from America in the name of stopping illegal immigration.
As these authoritarian right-wing politicians fall closer to the bottom center of the chart, the degree of economic control increases too; and as it blends with the left side of the authoritarian axis, then economic class can also be one of the groups whose entitlement to rule is upheld. Communist totalitarian regimes also tend to enforce ethnic and national uniformity, so aspects of the quadrant next door creep in. There are gradations and shadings in all the quadrants; that's what makes a circular chart accurate and useful.