Political compass for the21st century

[pbrower2a]

(09-21-2018, 11:10 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The circle ALWAYS works best, in my opinion. You have different positions, all of them related to their opposites and shading into each other. You have the essential polarities that define the landscape. The 5-sided diagram is pretty much just the same circle, with some more-specific labels on them that are too specific, and without the clarity and inter-relationships that the cross within the circle conveys. I guess I'm a circle chauvinist

You (Bill the Piper) put social democrats in the red quint-drant, is that a word, or what's the word? The same one as Marx and Stalin, who are not democrats, but tyrants. Traditionalist means little in itself; the definition of conservative is to uphold the people in power. Politics is about power, and who has it.

Maybe the term "communist" is better replaced by "egalitarian" or "socialist". Both Nazism and Stalinism claimed to be egalitarian in objective. If Stalin saw the evil as the independent capitalist of any kind, Hitler saw Jews as the arch-villain even if the Jew was a child or in extreme age or even if the "Jew" had abandoned religious Judaism. For Stalin, killing off capitalists and preventing the return of capitalist tendencies was the way to a perfect commonwealth without capitalist exploitation. For Hitler, the way to a perfect community was to recognize that only Germans and kindred people by 'race' was to eliminate troublesome peoples who could use their capacities only to deceive and cheat "Germans" -- the Jews. Others could survive as slaves or serfs, but the Jew would thwart that.

The fault was not the amorality of the Jews; indeed I find Jewish morality compatible with human brotherhood. If someone like Churchill could fault the 'international Jew', practically a euphemism for 'Bolshevik', as many of the Old Bolsheviks were of Jewish origin, Churchill's cure for the tendency was to get the 'international Jew' to rediscover his Jewish religious and cultural roots and become resolutely Jewish. As someone whose culture is partially German, I can only recognize the Yiddish world (except for the Hasidim who reject the modern and secular world) as kindred to mine. So the big difference is that they reject Jesus and I simply forget him at times? Jewish morality and what I believe in aren't that different. No -- the incompatibility between Judaism and both Stalinism and Nazism is between Jewish morality and totalitarian immorality.

It is possible for a Jew to have involvement in a cause that has socialist and nationalist tendencies... and Zionism can be both socialist and nationalist without going to the criminal zone of fascist and Bolshevik terror.

OK, so because of the fusion of nationalism and egalitarianism, Zionism as expressed by the first generation of Israeli pols like Ben-Gurion and Meir could be in the same direction as Hitlerism and Stalinism -- except that it rejects the gangsterism. The rejection of terror, criminality, and brutality makes all the difference in the world.

Quote:There's no clear right and left on your chart. The Nolan grid indicates that perfectly, so it's better. The political compass is the same idea, except that liberal and conservative are not located at the horizontal edges, but at the far edges of the lower left and upper right quadrants. Left and right are NOT outdated; they are more clear than ever. Liberal, or left, means power to the people. It means power to the widest group of people possible, including the rights of Nature. Right means hierarchy and class, power to the bosses, conceived as the superior people.

New ideologies are often not so much pure expressions as they are fusions. The Nolan Grid seems to have its continuum between hierarchy and individuality and elitism and equality -- but it says little about counter-cultural tendencies or the distinction between nationalism and internationalism. Who knows? The perfect model might be a sphere with three axes perpendicular to each other... or even some four-dimensional hypersphere with four perpendicular axes!

Quote:The right or Conservative side enables economic bosses to keep their power by curbing state intervention, and also supports those cultural and social values that keep in power those who want to hold certain groups in a superior place or discriminate against or keep away certain groups (cultural and social conservative, fewer rights for them, etc.), and regulation of supposed deviant behavior not in keeping with cultural authority (wars on drugs, porno, etc.). Those dominant groups could be nations, so cultural-conservative covers nationalism and militarism, but also religious hierarchies. The word "nationalism" is too specific and confusing. It was not long ago that communists and liberals were nationalists, because the nation was the locus of freedom and power for a group of people oppressed by colonial, capitalist and/or aristocratic/royalist imperialism. This is exactly what was not recognized by the Americans who created the American war against Vietnam.

But the Right needs the State as an enforcer, an entity that can compel commitments to raw deals that people made in distress that have lost all relevance to the subject and that the elites enforce so that they can maintain power and privilege. The Right is often militaristic because (1) war is profitable, (2) conquest can bring new subjects into captive markets as workers and consumers, (3) conquest can get command of desired resources, and (4) the command-and-control model of the military is well-suited to the economic order of the sweat-shop and plantation that exemplify the profit motive at its worst.

Quote:At the left side of the Nolan chart are those who are liberal on both social and cultural issues and democratic rights, and liberal on economic issues recognizing that the state needs to curb the capricious power of the bosses and make sure there's opportunity for all. "Counter-cultural" doesn't really convey this political meaning. Not all political liberals are like rajneesh or new age hippies, by any means, and it's not only cultural freedom that they want, but freedom from the tyranny of the economic bosses. The left of the circle is thus both cultural and economic, not just cultural. Maybe I just don't like the label; "self-expression" doesn't really cover "bleeding hearts" for victims of oppression.

The top of the Nolan chart is libertarian; equal to the lower right on the political compass. Libertarians and libertarian-anarchists usually endorse greater democratic and social rights, rather than the superiority of ethnic or religious groups, and tend strongly to anti-militarism; but also endorse freedom of enterprise and laissez-faire, which in practice means an economy owned and run by the few who can compete and win in such a social-darwinian unregulated and un-taxed set-up. Your chart puts only the free market libertarians at the top. They belong on the right, not the center; unless they are also social/cultural and peace-movement liberals, in which case they are high-center. The near-opposite polarity between the economically libertarian social darwinists like Ayn Rand and the liberal democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders is not indicated on your chart, but that's still the most important polarity today. On the European-oriented political compass, economic left and right are clearly shown as "left and right" per se. A labor social democrat like Corbyn would be almost on-the-edge left, slightly below the horizon, while Ayn Rand would be at the right edge; maybe just a bit below also. I'm not sure how cultural liberal or democratic she was, but it seems libertarian economics was her prime focus at least.

I see any counterculture as a rejection of tradition in morals, loyalties, and class structure. It could be that innovative ideas such as Freudian psychology that at first seems daring proves itself useful and becomes mainstream. So it could be with Marcuse, who does not seem so radical now as he did in the 1960s. Maybe as the eccentricity loses its relevance (with the death of the thinker) what might have been counterculture in one era becomes tradition.

This said, the counterculture is not where one goes to seek power and economic gain. Maybe a really-vile person like the late Charles Manson could find suggestible people capable of doing horrible things if he brainwashes them. Most of the time a counterculture has the problem of cohesion as shown in the expression 'like herding cats'.

Quote:The bottom of the Nolan chart (upper left on the political compass) is totalitarian or statist, and people who lean that way look to the state for solutions for economic equality, as well as for protecting the groups that they identify with and depend on for the sense of safety and self-esteem and regulation of behavior and morals. Nazis are in the far lower right and Communists are in the far lower left. The opposite of Stalin is not Ayn Rand, I don't think, because she leans further to the right, since her main priority is free enterprise.

The libertarian-statist polarity is obvious, as are the traditionalist-modernist polarity and the egalitarian-hierarchical polarity. Non-violence and a rejection of fanaticism tend toward the center. A five-way division of politics does seem geometrically awkward even if correct.

...Now back to a more contemporary issue in politics: if most Americans (our economic elites and our remaining racists excluded) are too egalitarian to fully fit the extreme position of Ayn Rand, it is quite clear that most Americans have found Ba'athism, Nazism and Stalinism objectionable  as antitheses of what they believe in. The Ku Klux Klan keeps resurfacing at times with its pretense of standing for American virtues, but the purported virtues of the Klan are not what most Americans see as theirs. Americans are incompatible with authoritarian traditions (let us say the fanatical Islam of Khomeini, Qutb, bin Laden, and al-Baghdadi) that really are exotic, but something comparatively benign but exotic (Bahai, Wicca, Sufism, Zen Buddhism, maybe Hare Krishna) is tolerable.  Extremists usually end up on the legal fringe, isolated except among like-thinking fanatics, generally ignored until they act out with violence and criminality until they are either blown away or put away. I think of the Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, Jim Jones' "People's Temple", the Branch Davidians of David Koresh, the Manson 'family', and of course the Aryan Nations.

Now what about Trump? He's close to being a fascist in his nationalism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism. His political appeal has been to the 'forgotten man' much as one expects with any demagogue. He excoriates any difference with his view of the world, and he is extremely hostile to intellectual difference (which includes practically any intellectual activity other than praise for his personality and interests). He has attracted few creative people to his side; even Hitler found sculptors, painters, and architects to exalt his esthetics. The problem with him and most Americans is that he violates so many of our political and social traditions. He spoke to the 'forgotten man' by attacking everyone else in a spiel that one associates with the late Don Rickles except that instead of cutting down the rich and powerful he went against the middle class and well educated. He has been a huge disappointment. America is not in the blue sector of Bill's pentagon; more of America is in the 'yellow' zone or in one of the other four sectors but close to the middle.

Thus I see the low approval polls for Trump as President.