Like some undead creature from a B-movie, the festering Political Compass refuses to lie down and die.
I have not changed my views of this daft test one jot. Hand me another sharpened stake.
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Political Compass. Oh gawd, not again…November 8th, 2003 |
 17 comments to Political Compass. Oh gawd, not again… |
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The premise is strong, the execution is weak…okay, maybe pestilential. That Left and Right, Libertarian and Authoritarian axis might once had a claim to relevance, but one of Pournelle’s points when he made the thing was that it was changeable. In light of 9/11, many political views that could once be publicly espoused by otherwise rational people would never be taken now.
For this test to be conducted with any pretense of objectivity, it needs to be much larger, much better written, and updated much more often. As written, it mostly indicates how well you can be pigeonholed by pretentious twaddle.
I’m a sucker for these kind of tests, personality tests, so on and so forth. I just like to see how leading the questions are and whether or not I end up being the way I think I am.
While the questions on this one were extremely leading and biased, I was surprised at how accurate it was in portraying my political compass. More surprisingly was finding out that there is absolutely no one of geopolitical leadership import in my little corner. Milton Friedman was the only one (a nonleader), and he was even to the right of me, but not by much.
Does that make me a “true” individual? (quit your snickering…) Then again, maybe I don’t need no damn leader.
Besides, it’s just one of “those” internet tests that really don’t mean a thing, so I don’t take it too seriously.
The test refuses to acknowledge that the left-right axis (which in this case pertains solely to economic policy) is itself a measure of authoritarianism. There is no such thing as an antiauthoritarian socialist!
Alan: There is too. Some ancaps are socialists – meaning, they want to persuade people to live as socialists by choice.
Living in a commune by choice is a lifestyle choice, not a socialist political system. If you refuse utterly to use force to prevent the full several ownership of the means of production by others regardless of your own wishes for their use, then you are a libertarian-of-some-ilk regardless of the fact you wear a Che tee-shirt and live in a Kibbutz, but you are not a socialist really. You can call yourself a socialist but it just ain’t so in meaningful way that real world socialist states have used the word.
It is to an extent a semantic point but it is not unimportant if words are actually to have any actual meaning and we are not to descend into Orwellian Doublespeak . Calling yourself a Hippopotamus and living next to a river might make you a bit hippo-like in a jocular sense but that does not actually make you a hippopotamus.
No, Perry, it’s perfectly possible for someone to be a libertarian and a socialist – if the “libertarian” bit comes first. The result is an evangelical rather than statist/martial form of socialism.
Having looked at and taken the test, I agree it’s a daft test.
Firstly, you only have the options of agree or disagreeing (perhaps strongly) with a question. There’s no “don’t care” or “don’t know” option.
Secondly, many of the questions seem heavily loaded to me, and some of them seem to have precious little to do with politics, whilst some which have political implications do not to my mind have a clear relationship with either of the proposed axes. E.g. a belief in astrology, or a lack of such belief, need have nothing to do with your political views. “Religion and morality are closely linked” is downright ambiguous as to whether it is a normative or descriptive statement. “It is a waste of time to try to rehabilitate some criminals” is probably empirically true but there is precious little you can conclude from it about penal policy.
Thirdly, ISTM an overall odd selection of questions.
Interestingly, if you go through the quiz without answering any questions, you end up bang on the centre.
I ended up about a third of the way towards the libertarian axis from the centre and third of the way towards the right from the centre of the left/right axis. I.e. classed as libertarian right. I was most surprised to see the liberal democrats be the only British party to fall into this quadrant! ISTM they’re more statist than Nulab… How they placed the Lib Dems or the other parties I dunno.
The World’s Smallest Political Quiz does a better job, thought it too seems flawed to me.
The clustering on their diagram is interesting. I’d like to see how the test works out on a proper random sample of the (American, it would probably have to be) population.
If the distribution is still clotted and diagonal, then we should probably conclude that it just isn’t very useful even in its own terms: the two purported dimensions aren’t independent. At the risk of evoking the spirit of Charles Copeland, I’d point out that Hans Eysenck did some rather more rigorous work to show a factor he called “toughmindeness” is independent of conservatism. He was still heavily criticised.
A map to locate concentrations of views in some ideologically coherent, topologically appropriate, political space would be useful and interesting, but not a trivial exercise. The polling organisations would love to be able to do it. They’ve spent millions trying. On the other hand (Perry’s valid objections to their malformed, biassed questions aside), the political compass people are just playing at this, and show no sign of having tackled, or even thought about, the methodological problems.
Regarding socialist libertarian, a few points…
1. I think Marxism and libertarianism contradict each other, so that a true hard-line Marxist/socialist/whatever can’t be called a libertarian.
2. If we define socialism as a theory advocating government ownership of the means of production, then any private ownership of said means would in effect be a mixed economy. Perhaps an advocate of currently-practiced European socialism could be a libertarian, but not if they advocate making it illegal for private individuals/companies to own or control the means of production.
3. If we define socialism as a system without private property, i.e. where private property is effectively outlawed, then that strongly goes against libertarian principles.
Seems to me that modern socialism is more about increasing government regulation and taxation then it is about eliminating private ownership. In that vein, I don’t think that advocating either of those two necessarily excludes you from being a libertarian, but “real” socialism, i.e. utopian Marxist socialism, is a very different thing from libertarianism, and cannot be defined as a possible subset of it. (An idealized libertarian society would allow the existence of socialist groups, but simply living in a libertarian society does not make someone a libertarian)
To put it another way, socialism restricts freedom by taking away choice. The more you move in that direction, the fewer claims you have on the title ‘libertarian’, IMO.
About the compass, I think it’s alright. Most people seem to fall in the quadrant they expected. However, I think the main benefits, regardless of how accurate the damn thing is, are that it provides a single standard that different people can be compared against, and presents the results in a visual way which is easy to comprehend.
It’s useful to be able to quickly identify people’s political views, whether for the purpose of finding a new blog to read, or for deciding how much salt to take with some stranger’s opinion. Such a system, as inaccurate and clumsy as it may be, also facilitates coordinated action between likeminded individuals for the benefit of themselves and the other members of their group.
Julian: that is only socialism if you bend the meaning of the word well beyond the point of making it meaningless. If a person can simply opt out and engage in free exchange of their own means of production without being coerced, it ain’t socialism, it is just a bunch of people freely acting together collectively. Like a company, for example.
I’m a mostly conservative, somewhat libertarian American. It put me almost exactly in the same place as Tony Blair!
It’s a bunch of hooey!
Perry: If a person can simply opt out and engage in free exchange of their own means of production without being coerced, it ain’t socialism
It’s certainly a schism from orthodox socialism. What these people believe as I recall is that voluntary communes are good and that they will under a stateless system demonstrate their own superiority to equally voluntary capitalism. People would join, uncoerced, having seen the better standard of life etc. Eventually everyone would be voluntarily socialist because it’s a better system.
I personally consider this total bunk, but it does match the criteria for “libertarian socialism”.
Then we will just have to disagree, Julian. I suppose if they explicitly reject any use of force to deny people several ownership even if they deny it within their commune, they could indeed be libertarian. But bending the meaning of socialism, which denies the legitimacy of several ownership all together (and therefore self-ownership) just makes the word ‘socialist’ meaningless.
This whole left libertarian thing has always bothered me. Sorry but I figure that rights either inhere in the individual or are creations of the state. If the state creates them it is jusified in juggling them between individuals, if they are actually ours then they can be given, stolen or sold, but not transfered. Within the context of a commune within a state, even they wouldn’t merely give away their labor to someone outside of their commune, would they. If the would be communists excercise their right to control their own labor (albeit as a group) they couldn’t then really be called communists could they?
That aside, the test puts me in an odd spot. Apparently one cannot be a social conservative and a libertarian at the same time. Hmmm.
I’ve used the term “socialism” to define two different concepts: state ownership of the means of production, and state ownership of the means of charity – welfare statism. Is the latter definition accurate?
I think the only really meaningful definition of socialism is “a political system in which the means of production are collectively controlled”… the extent and means by which this is done gives you the ability to ‘hyphenate’ the form of socialism (for example communism takes direct ownership via confiscation whilst fascism and modern democratic socialism assert control via a mixture of regulation, cooption of big business and outright confiscation).
In theory if society was entirely made up of ‘Socialist New Man’ and was thus in complete agreement that several property was an abomination, there would be no need for coercion to prevent the emergence of several property, and thus it would be possible to be a ‘libertarian socialist’. This is how Marx et al saw the ‘withering away of the state’ once the dictatorship of the proletariat had done its work sweeping away the old order. Baring such a re-wiring of the human psyche on a scale hitherto unseen, the only way to prevent several ownership is by force (i.e. laws) and I regard claims to the contrary as deluded at best and most likely disingenuous (for example when the term is used by that well know apologist for the genocidal Khmer Rouge, Noam Chomsky).
Yes, I suppose just as it is conceivable for a monkey randomly pressing keys on a piano to play a complete line from Mozart, such an adjustment of the core human psyche coming to pass is also conceivable… but in any meaningful sense I think the notion a socialist system could be established by consent and social pressure, let alone maintained in such a way without the continuous use of force against those who try to exert ownership over the means of production, has been well and truly falsified, thus making the term ‘libertarian socialist’ a fallacy.
Oh oh! It’s those sharpened stakes again. Did you have a nasty experience in a previous life? Or was it watching Conan the Barbarian that started this fascination with pointed sticks…. ;o]