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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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I like the political compass as a tool for mapping politics beyond left-right (with more dimensions it's even better, but sparsely populated, which indicates that it is missing some symmetries of politics), but it fails to grasp how politics is not as much a spectrum as it is a tree of ideas that mate with each other and evolve, diverge according to circumstances.
You wouldn't say that there is a spectrum between a shark and a dolphin, but they share a common ancestor and have similarities driven by their environment.
It's this nuance of accumulated history that the political compass can oversimplify as a snapshot for people without the time to waste studying political history.
Well yes, but it was never the goal of the political compass to portray the history of beliefs. It is just a way to visualize the current alignment.
Yes, but that's what I'm saying. Positional closeness sometimes hides a lot of foundational differences and creates the illusion that there is a continuous path between any two points. Eg between tankies and nazis :)
Tankies and Nazis would be both on the outer end of the authoritarian axis, but on completely different ends of the economic axis. If you take 3, 4 or even more dimensions there will barely be any positional closeness left. You can visualize every form of difference in the form of an additional dimension.
I am not advocating specifically for a 2 axis political spectrum. My original comment was just pointing out that the horseshoe theory is bullshit.
They are not on opposite ends. Nazis were not laissez-faire, protectionist actually: On the economic axis they were close to the middle.
Plus I'm not saying they are that close, I'm saying that the line you can draw between them can not be followed continuously, you probably need to take a few loops around other systems like Weimar liberalism, Italian Socialism and feudal Czarism or Marxism to go from one to the other.
I just gave that example because it looks like convergent evolution shaped by similar circumstances despite completely opposite origins.
I think that is where our differences in thinking are:
I was thinking about modern nazis, which are way more laissez-faire than the "original" (at least where I live). At the same time I would argue it is not very important how a belief evolved if you are talking e.g. current party programs or policy. Sure it can be important for research, but it is only of secondary importance for "applied politics" if the result at the end is the same.