Tuesday, 15 February, 2005

Political Typeology chart This post is intended to be a companion piece to the previous post. While I was writting that one I remembered a diagram I had seen in Kuro5hin a few years ago. Politics in a Third Dimension (Politics) By 3ebnut Sun Jun 15th, 2003 at 01:57:28 PM EST. Which I had saved - it took me a while to to remember where I had seen it and then pry it out of my hard drive. The poster there had taken a graph I had seen before. The Political Compass quadrant typology and had done something I though quite clever with it; he added another axis. This added an entire new dimension to it. It also fit in with my thinking on this type of chart. In the K5 post he explains it in great detail so I won't go through all that. By way of orientation; though, beliefs - political beliefs lend themselves towards being easily represented by a line between contrasting extremes. The original chart had the tradition liberal - conservative dichotomy understood as the degree of government involvement in the economy, plus another for the presence of government involvement in personal comportment. Generally this arrangement is viewed as a rhomboid allowing left right politics to be read from left to right. Libertarians are pleased to see themselves on top, the bottom quadrant was renamed at some point totalitarian, from populist. This involved no real change. A three dimensional space is created by adding attitudes on corporate rights and power on a third axis. In a society organized as a market economy this is not only valid but likely a neccesary adjustment. When I think about political power I see two essential features about it. First unlike wealth perhaps power is in a very real sense a zero sum game (lester thurow) When you have more, I have less. Collarary to this, it is relative wealth and power that matters, because from this come the secondary powers to compel, preclude, and shape the choices available to others. When politicians talk about "getting government off the backs of the entreprenuer, the businessman, the corporation, I am left a little cold. To me it makes little difference where this power comes from. If it is taken away from government - where at least I have a vote, I know I will see it again, from corporations who do not ask me for my leave or from the workplace, where I spend half my life. It will come from those vectors quite oppressively and I will little to say about it. If you compare the diagrams in the k5 piece and mine, you will see I made some minor cosmetic changes. I also want to emphasis that the corporate axis is not just pro and anti corporate attitudes but an ameliorating of corporate dominence; by other authority and moral value bearing cultural institutions. Such as religion, philanthropies, the judicial system and the like. Fig. 3 the three axis Vosem Chart    o-----------------o-----------------o  / | New Labour    / | Authoritarian / | +.................+.................+  | |  |              |  |              |  | |'Liberal         |'Totalitarian    |  | |  |              |  |              |  | |  |--------------+--+--------------+--| |/ | Libertarian  |/ | Conservative |/ | |............... .+.................|  | |  |              |  |              |  | |'Anarcho-        |'Paleo-conser-   |  | |  syndicalist    |   vative        |  | |  |              |  |              |  | |  o--------------+--o--------------+--o | /               | /               | / +.................+.................+ [ X ] Command v. Laissez faire, Economy [ Y ] Personal freedom v. Gov't control [ Z ] Anti v. Pro corporate or cultural institution primacy v. Corp.dominance 10:52:54 PM    comment [];trackback [];

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2005 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 3/02/05; 18:56:52.