politics in a cardboard cutout sense
Posted under Miscellanea at . Last updated 2016-09-18 00:00.
Having spent most of my life alternately bored stiff of or driven to despair by the one-dimensionality of conventional descriptions of political thinking, I am interested to find a website based on an explicitly two-dimensional rather than one-dimensional analysis: The Political Compass. Their two dimensions and many interesting graphs are stretched between poles of “social authoritarianism/libertarianism” and “economic left/right (or communism/neoliberalism)”. So, from uselessly simplistic to descriptively two dimensional. Not much of an improvement, given the hugely polydimensional nature of politics and the underlying factors that produce it, but an improvement nonetheless.
(Though there is a curious echo here of The Thatcher Lie about the initial divisibility of economics and society. I don’t wholly reject these graphs, but I think it important to understand that social policies have economic implications, economic policies have social implications, and both have wider ecological implications. These things arise mutually.)