Beyond Left and Right

An antidote to political obfuscation

The political landscape is little understood in the modern world. More conservative politicians (viz. Donald Trump) refer to political opponents as socialists when they don't wish to seize the means of production. More "liberal" politicians (what does "liberal" even mean?) call Trump a fascist, when he is quite clearly not. Why are we in such a situation?

Well, I think that the underlying issue comes from using outdated left/right dichotomy and a general lack of understanding of what capitalism, communism and fascism actually are.

Unfortunately there seems to be very very little work done on classifying politics.

Why do we have this seemingly outdated left/right system in place? It goes back to the French Revolution. The reformists sat on the left of the chamber and the monarchists sat on the right of the chamber. There was no nuance. No far left or centre right. Everyone was either for reform or not. This is why, in general, the more conservative elements are considered to be right wing and the more progressive people are left wing. However as time has gone on more political thought has developed and we have struggled to keep up.

I've seen some whacky political charts in my time. Some of the most egregious ones have "conservative" as being mildly right wing, then "libertarian" as more right wing, then "Nazism" and finally "fascism" as the zenith of the right wing. How this makes any sense is quite beyond me. So, we go from conservatism, a mostly free but somewhat restricted political ideology, to an ideology based on freedom, to an ideology based on xenophobia and finishing on an ideology based on spiritual collectivism? Even worst, some place anarchism solely as a property of the left and label it as slavery!? I think the Mises institute would like a word. What is going on here? Can we begin to make any sense of this at all?

One of the most common ways to do this is to introduce a liberal/authority axis. This creates a two dimensional chart where each point represents a position on the left/right axis and the liberal/authoritarian axis. However, as we will begin to see, even this begins to be a problem when we start to classify politics.

Recently, I came across something on Twitter that perfectly demonstrated this. Imagine three children are arguing over who gets a flute and you get to decide who it goes to. Child A says they should get the flute because they can play it and the point of the flute is to be played. Child B says they should get it because they saved up to get the materials and build it. Child C says they should get it because they are much poorer than the other two. Pick your answer and we'll come back to this flute problem quite soon.

The Three Values

The story begins at the French Revolution (this seems to be the central theme here). They had a motto "Liberté, égalité, fraternité". These are fundamentally mutually exclusive concepts - if you have a free society, you do not have an equal nor fraternal society. While we will delve more in depth into this in a moment, for now let's say that liberty generally mapped into capitalism, equality generally mapped into communism and fraternity generally mapped into fascism.

Now, for reasons that should become more obvious soon, if you give the flute to child A, you operate within a fraternal value system. Child B, a liberty value system. Child C, an equality value system.

In this way, the modern world has a tripartite system of politics. Those in the liberty camp, the "capitalists" see both the fascists and communists (and adjacent positions) as being left wing. Those in the equality camp see both the "capitalists" and fascists (and adjacent positions) as being right wing. Those in the fraternity camp see both the "capitalists" and the communists (and adjacent positions) as being left wing.

What? How can this be? This seems at first to be totally and utterly nonsensical, but that is precisely because it is.

Left/right dichotomy does not map at all to the tripartite system that has now evolved. Instead, we should see the political compass has having these three arms, and the modern political compass as stretching across them.

So what is a capitalist? Capitalism is somewhat loosely defined by the private ownership of capital, but this leaves a huge variety of different positions. Perhaps the most "pure" version of capitalism is the Austrian economist who wants the private individual to be unfettered by the state, to trade, innovate and sign contracts without any expectation of "social functions", "social contracts", taxation or regulation. Capitalists want the state out of economic matters entirely, including on matters of currency. Of course, not all those who can be called capitalists are quite so radical in their views on this, but the underlying value is freedom from the state.

What capitalism most certainly isn't, is corporatism. Corporatism is often what people think capitalism is, but really the two positions are quite different. Corporatism allows for the private ownership of capital, the state is still very active in ensuring the corporate operates to fulfil a "social function". Capitalists do not recognise the concept of any "social functions". This third position of corporatism has largely replaced fascism on the tripartite political compass. This isn't to say that corporatists are fascists, or that they are one and the same, but corporatism is the modern equivalent of fraternity after fascism was killed off in the 20th century.

Communism is also largely a dead ideology - few serious people remain who wish to return to the USSR (although, make no mistake, they exist). Communism has quite seriously been replaced by something more democratic in its means - some form of anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism or "democratic socialism". While none of these ARE communism itself, they are, of course, still founded very firmly in the values of equality.

These values are the foundation upon which all modern politics since the French Revolution takes place. This point can not be overstated.

So why has the left/right political stance lead to so much confusion? Simply because when represented visually they do not square off. The traditional left/right (or commonly with the addition of a second authority/libertarian axis) is in Cartesian coordinates. The three values politics is actually represented by is essentially polar coordinates. Converting between the two systems requires a great deal of knowledge and tact. The trouble really begins when people attempt to place fascism on the left/right spectrum. Where should it go? Is it left wing, or right wing?

Most journalists these days seem very confident that fascism is a right wing ideology, this is, of course, for political ends, and not backed by any serious thought. Let us first establish that communism is obviously left wing. What are the characteristics of communism that make it left wing? It believes in equality, the opposition of competition, value of the group over the individual and no inherent recognition of hierarchy or class. Let us also establish that capitalism is right wing. What qualities does it have that make it right wing? It believes in freedom, embraces competition and punishment/reward, values the individual over the group and does not inherently recognise a class system*. Let us now attempt to place fascism. Well, fascism rejects equality in favour of competition, just like capitalism. Fairly right wing, no? And yet fascism also values the goals of the group over the individual, a staunch left wing position. Finally, fascism does recognise an inherent class system - an antithesis to both the left and right! As such, to a left winger fascism is totally and utterly right wing and vice versa. The left/right spectrum is simply incapable of mapping the tripartite nature of modern politics.

The trichotomy of politics is not at all new, however. There are many examples of a trichotomy system throughout the world, here in the UK we have the Monarch, House of Commons and House of Lords. In the United States there is the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial. These are primarily cosmetic and superficial for our purposes. What is most interesting is the three estates of Medieval Europe. The first estate was the clergy, the second the nobility and the third the peasantry**. At different times and different places the tree estates were slightly different, and had a different relationship with one another. What is the relevance here to the trichotomy? Well, we can clearly see the development in that thought to now.

Where does this leave us? Well, the first thing we should start to recognise is that political discourse will never be fixed so long as these misunderstandings persist. The second thing we should aim to do is broaden our political minds - there is a whole world of political thought outside of this triangle and yet the cultural impact of the French Revolution has solidly placed everyone inside this trichotomy. There is a whole world of politics outside of this freedom-equality-fraternity framework, however, most people can not imagine this. There is also within this freedom-equality-fraternity framework a small section somewhere between freedom and equality with little fraternity that constitutes mainstream politics in Western countries.

Measuring Politics

This all begs the question - if the two axis compass and the trichotomy leave out huge tracts of political thought, how do we actually measure political thought?

I don't want to mince my words here - the left/right spectrum and the developed four quadrant system that is commonplace nowadays is useless. I seek a totally new type of political spectrum. This political spectrum will need to have the following properties

1. Based on an accurate understanding of political theory within the realm of the political theories themselves, that is, understand the political ideology as it sees itself
2. Not be based on empirical surveys of individuals as this is prone to all kinds of bias
3. Rationally iron out contradictions between political ideology
4. Contain enough scope to accurately demonstrate sizeable distance between ideologies that are only semi-related
5. Correctly identify and place ideologies that exist outside of the trichotomy

Some work began on this in 1950 with Leonard W Ferguson. He analysed political values using ten scales: birth control, capital punishment, censorship, communism, evolution, law, patriotism, theism, criminals and war. He analysed these factors empirically and found three fundamental values behind determining all of the ten factors. The values were religiousness, humanitarianism and nationalism. The work was exploratory but has some serious flaws. The first and most major flaw is that it is based on empirical evidence and not a theoretical political philosophy. One might initially think this is superior but it is in fact very deficient. The reason is simple - particular aspects of an ideology can shift over time and values between individuals swing wildly over time. For example, to be a "conservative" at some time probably meant to not believe in evolution. The Republican party probably looked pretty progressive in the 1850s when it was trying to oppose slavery, but now it is considered to be quite anti-progressive.

Maurice Bryson and William McDill took issue with the single left/right spectrum. I shall simply quote directly from them since their explanation is so perfect: "a simple linear picture of a left-to-right aliment with communism at the far left and fascism or Nazism at the far right, is unsatisfactory in that it neglects the essential similarity between these two extremes, viz, their common totalitarianism. This similarity gives right to a circular model in which communism and Nazism occupy adjacent locations, with "democracy" at an intermediate location on the other side of the circle. Mr McGann quite properly criticizes the circular model for ignoring the possibility of political structures that are more free, or less totalitarian, than existing democratic ones. He then proposes an alternative linear model in which the linear position represents not "left-" or "right-ness" but rather degree of government control, with degree of individual safety as a concomitant value."

Another flaw they point out is that certain philosophies that are quite different tend to become grouped under the left/right linear model. For example, Fascism is considered right wing and so is objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand and the laissez-faire economics of Milton Friedman - all very distinct.

Rokeach created a political spectra based on the values of freedom and equality. As we have discussed, this flawed in two ways. Firstly, it does not include the third fraternal value and secondly it allows for the mutually exclusive freedom and equality values to be held simultaneously. Gerald Rous and Dorothy Lee attempted to verify Rokeach's theory by sampling just four works and ranking how many times key phrases were used in a positive light. I need not explain how this work is bogus: selecting four works you already perceived to fill the four corners of Rokeach's theory and then simply doing nothing but ranking the uses of key phrases is entirely inappropriate as a form of political science method. Furthermore, as I already stated when analysing Ferguson, an empirical approach to political classification is flawed - this is an a priori task.

Bryson and McDill also note that control can be used into ways: to enforce equality (the "left wing" goal), and to enforce hierarchy (the "right wing" goal). There is some extremity where the difference between these is moot: under anarchy there is no government under which control can be applied and under total government control the distinction between equality and hierarchy collapses. These cases are however fringe and when dealing with more moderated societies we require a more precise definitional scheme. Therefore, they postulate the common two axis political compass we are familiar with today. Even their formulation shows a fundamental flaw in that the label they apply to the statists-right is "monarchy, fascism". While technically these two are very similar under this projection of the political spectrum, it is clear, I think, that under a full analysis the differences between classical European Monarchy and fascism are night and day.

Mike Alvarez et al in their "Classifying Political Regimes" begins to tackle this problem. They highlight four key areas in which political classification can be improved

1. A better grounding in political theory;
2. an exclusive reliance on observables rather than on subjective judgements;
3. an explicit distinction between systematic and random errors;
4. a more extensive coverage.

A salient point that Alvarez at all makes is that in the modern world "democracy" has become a catch all phrase to mean any and all societies that are representative, accountable, equal participation, dignity, rationality, security, freedom and so on, and simply lumping a collection of good things together is of very little use. Democracies, strictly, are systems of government in which at least some positions of public office are filled by elections. No such "full" democracies exist - judges, generals and most civil servants are not elected. However, they are put in place by elected officials. Another important point about democracies is that they are systems in which parties lose. This is relevant for places like North Korea. The nation is officially democratic yet the incumbent party hasn't lost an election since the nation was founded despite the active terrorising of the people. This is clearly not a democracy.

Alvarez et al then seek to find several rules and parameters under which to classify a democracy, such as what positions are elected and how. Their work is huge in scope and classifies every nation in the world from 1950 (or the date of formation) to 1990 as a "bureaucracy", "autocracy", "parliamentary", "presidential" or "mixed".

What we can take away from Alvarez is that robust classification systems are possible if we stick to the principles they presented. Again, this was largely an empirical paper which is in this instance I believe appropriate. Allow me to explain. Alvarez et al are dealing with classifying the realities of how a government functions. This is slightly different to our task of classifying ideologies based on how those ideologies are presented in theory. This is its major shortcoming for us, we seek something slightly different.

Taleb in his Principa Politica essay makes a very succinct and salient point. Politics, and especially the tension within politics, stems from two overwhelming different world views: the top down engineering approach and the bottom up complex adaptive approach (or as he describes it "abstract one-dimensional universalists and monoculturalism" and "embedded, uncertainty minded, multiscale fractal localism"). So, from a mapping of the political compass perspective, how do we tackle this? Well, it seems to me that under this formulation "left" and "right" basically become pointless (or rather, they are one way to view politics, but this is a far superior way which gives more information). Bottom up approaches to politics would map very well to Rand's objectivist thought or laissez-faire market approaches. Taleb's point here is totally valid and correct but it's granularity is limited: classifying people into top-down and bottom-up political thinkers just doesn't give the fine detailed classification metric I seek.

Some of the earliest academic work I can find on expanding these two axis is in If You Can't Join 'Em Don't: Untangling Attitudes on Social, Economic and Foreign Issues by Graphing Them by David Claborn and Lindsey Tobias which was published in 2015! We seem to be decades behind where we should be on this front. Claborn and Tobias added an extra foreign intervention axis to the already established two axis chart.

First, I must note an interesting and unique way to me that Claborn and Tobias organise the two axis chart. They have a economic freedom and social freedom axis. Low social regulation and high economic regulation are "liberals", low economic regulation and low social regulation are libertarians, low economic regulation and high social regulation are conservatives and high social and high economic regulation are "communitarians" which include populists, socialists, greens and other third positionists. I think New Polymath must do a deep dive on what the hell the term "liberal" actually means.

They did some testing of students of their department and found some independence between the already established economic/social axis and their new foreign intervention axis (of course). This does have a problem of a very limited sample size and type, but for the nature of the research it is still fine. It is certainly an interesting idea to add this third axis, but I can't help but wonder if this should be pushed even further.

I was planning on making my own political compass here (or, at least attempting to delve into it a bit) but that would have made this article far, far too long. Instead, I will move that to a blog to come at a later date.

Current Tests Available

There has been some serious effort made to do this - and the most fruitful seems to come from having multiple axis. Some of these tests have four or more axis, up to around ten or so. This of course can't be graphically represented in once image except for multiple separate axis. While this is unfortunately less easy to understand at a glance, it still has a lot of merit in accuracy. I have even seen one outrageous test that decided to fill out ten different two axis charts!

What are some of the common axis that appear in these reformed tests? The most common one by far is an economic axis - where left means more state intervention and right means less state intervention. There are axis about diplomacy, favouring military intervention or pacifism. An axis regarding justice - should it be punitive or rehabilitative. An axis for liberty vs authority. An axis for tradition vs progress. An axis for immigrants - assimilate or multicultural. Freedom vs security. Globalism vs isolationism. Secular vs religious.

So far, the best political test I have come across is PolitiScales. It has 8 axis. Each of the axis has two opposing views but you can also be neutral (i.e. 38% rehabilitative justice, 31% punitive justice and 31% neutral). It also gives three additional characteristics at the end, like "vegan", "missionary", "monarchist" and so on. All in all, very solid and I think the best efforts thus far to truly measure politics accurately.

Conclusions

Measuring politics is very tricky business. The reason is simple - we are all political. We have our own interests. Researching politics is tricky - there seems to be a whole section of political scientists who maintain that authoritarianism on the left is impossible. I wonder what their political views are. So, a search for a detailed, accurate, historically and philosophically literate and unbiased political grading system seems a massive challenge.

I have been able to summarise the state of political science thus far, and demonstrated its overall massive shortcomings. I have also been able to identify a few online attempts to create political spectra ad hoc. While these attempts are salient, they are also lacking in scope and a grounding in political ideological theory.

Notes and Appendices

* some people will erroneously argue that there is an inherent class system under capitalism based on the wealth of the individual. This is perhaps true in a superficial manner but these are not inherent classes for three reasons. First, this is not discreet classes but a sliding scale of wealth that can change from moment to moment, secondly the accumulation of wealth to increase in these classes is open to all, and finally actual standing does not depend on this wealth.

** an astute observer might question where the monarch sits in this system of estates. The monarch is clearly not a noble, yet presides directly over and on top of them. The monarch is clearly not a peasant and yet derives their power from them. The monarch is also clearly not a clergy and yet derives their legitimacy from them. In all, I would tentatively argue that monarchs throughout history have been most closely associated with the peasantry in an antagonistic move against the clergy and nobility.

References

Classifying Political Regimes by Mike Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, Fernando Limongi and Adam Przeworski

If You Can't Join 'Em Don't: Untangling Attitudes on Social, Economic and Foreign Issues by Graphing Them by David Claborn and Lindsey Tobias, 2015, Faculty Scholarship - Political Science 3.

The Political Spectrum: A Bi-Dimensional Approach by Maurice C. Bryson and William R. McDill, Rampart Journal, 1968

Principa Politica: Politics and Ethics Under Scaling and Uncertainty by Taleb

The Measurement of Primary Social Attitudes by Leonard W. Ferguson, The Journal of Psychology, 1940

Freedom and Equality: Two Values of Political Orientation by Gerald L. Rous and Dorothy E. Lee, Journal of Communications, 1978