– What is the political compass cause I still can’t understand it
In: 1
The political compass is a way of visually representing political ideologies that aims to surpass the traditional left-right spectrum by including more dimensions. Its purpose is to assess an individual’s political beliefs using two main axes: economic and social.
It’s a crude system of visually representing what is really two distinct spectrums of political values onto a map. Where your personally sit on the map really comes down to two questions:
– how much should the government control wealth to distribute it? (left side – lots, right side – none)
– how many laws should there be about what we can and cannot do? (top side – lots, low side – none)
There’s far more to your own political self than where you sit on this compass, however – especially in a world that’s increasingly post-scarcity and lived in online social spaces. If you ask me, it’s more or less outdated for real political analysis, if not yet replaced.
Back in the french revolution the members of parliament were divided between the radicals and those who wanted to return to the monarchy, the conservatives. The conservatives sat on the right and the radicals sat on the left. Ever since then the western world has divided political stances into “left” (more liberal, in favor of change in the economic and social hierarchy) and “right” (more conservative and in favor of the status quo or how things used to be). This would suggest a political spectrum, with some opinions and stances at every point from the farthest left to the farthest right and everything in between.
But a single spectrum perhaps does not capture all of the nuance of different political opinions. What about people, for example, who are in favor of radical changes, but think a strong dictator or even monarch is the only way to get them; are they on the right or the left? So various multi-axis political spectrums have been proposed that overlay two different axes: right vs. left (typically in horizontal alignment) with some other axis on the vertical – the most popular is authoritarian vs. libertarian. Thus an (x,y) coordinate grid is formed where the perfect neutral stance would be at (0,0) and every other political opinion – in theory – can be plotted.
But! You might be thinking, that isn’t what a compass is at all. And you would be right, because the name “political compass” is dumb. It was popularized by a certain website of that same name that purported to plot users on the political spectrum based on their responses to a number of value propositions. Then it became a meme on reddit.
The left/right is economic policy.
Left is about taxing people and spending that on public good, and the right is about not taxing people and letting the private sector handle the public goods.
The up/down is authoritarian/libertarian.
Authoritarian is all about large government and lots of control. Libertarian is about personal freedom and minimal government interference.
All the way right and all the way authoritarian is fascism (Nazi Germany). All the way left and all the way authoritarian is a socialist dictatorship (USSR, China, North Korea). All the way right and all the way libertarian is anarchy, no government at all. All the way left and all the way libertarian is communism as Karl Marx envisioned it.
The key is finding a balance in government, and most people will find themselves somewhere near the center, but will vote to an extreme to avoid the other side gaining ground.
It basically just visually show your overall political opinion. It is divided into four areas (libleft, libright, authleft, and authright).
Libertarian (usually part of the two bottom areas) means that you believe the government should have less power and the people should be able to do what they want to do (either that’s absolute or not).
Authoritarian (usually part of the two top areas) means that you believe the government should have more power and the people should not be able to do what they want to do (although they might retain some rights or just not have any).
Left means that the government should intervene in the economy more (more regulations and control) and/or private property (owned by someone who is not part of government) should not exist or exist to an extent.
Right means that the government should intervene in the economy less (less regulations and control) and/or private property should exist.
Combined Libertarian or Authoritarian (which are social policies) and Left or Right (which are economical policies) and you would get LibLeft, LibRight, AuthLeft, and AuthRight.
In mathematics, a two-dimensional graph is a way of representing the relationship between two different variables. In the case of the political compass, the two variables are social liberty, and wing “handedness” (left or right). Social liberty refers to how much freedom individual people have, wing handedness refers to how much freedom classes have (i.e. left-wing prioritizes the working class, right-wing prioritizes the owning class).
Personally, I don’t think the political compass is the best way to understand political positions, so it’s not that big of a deal if you don’t get it. If you think about it, both variables are just different kinds of hierarchy: social liberty is about how much other people can tell you what to do in your personal life, wing handedness is about how much other people can tell you what to do at work. It’s unusual for those two positions to be significantly different in real life governments.
If you want a video, [this one](https://youtu.be/zJr4rZazQy4) explains the concept of how it works, some reasons it’s not the most accurate but gives a vague idea of where different beliefs fall into the chart if you’re interested in that part
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