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More musings on the Political Compass

As I have had a couple lengthy e-mails asking me to explain my hostility to PoliticalCompass.org, I thought I would do so in a new post.

My big problem with PoliticalCompass.org is that it makes inherently statist and left/right valued assumptions to which there is no appropriate answer unless you share those assumptions, making the test fine if all the world fitted neatly into the left/right, socialist (US=liberal)/conservative continua… but the world just ain’t that simple.

Although they claim to provide a more sophisticated representation of political views than the crudity of left and right, they in fact strip away some of the true issues that differentiate statists and anti-statists. At best they differentiate one form of statist from another, separating social democrats from communists from conservatives. If you think you can usefully differentiate an agorist or anarcho-capitalist libertarian from a minarchist libertarian from a Kritarchist libertarian using the political compass tests, you are sadly mistaken.

I would argue that as the very meaning of their ‘libertarian’ axis is badly flawed, if they tell you your political coordinates are x,y, as they have no real understanding of what one of the four axes represents, the test and thus the coordinates on the ‘compass’ it generates, are highly suspect, to put it mildly.

There is no such thing as voluntary collectivism when applied to an entire society, which means ‘collectivist’ libertarianism does not accept several liberty and thus is not libertarian at all: if you live collectively on a kibbutz, one day you may decide it was all a big mistake and just say “screw this crap” as you walk out the door. If the other people in the kibbutz use force to stop you leaving, it is they who are the criminals… try doing that in a collectivist society (which in reality means a collectivist state) and you will find that the door to a non-collective existence is in fact a prison cell or a chimney. If the test can only work for ‘some people’ then the test itself is of dubious value if the idea is to be able to represent the totality of modern political beliefs in a succinct way. Given that ‘libertarian’ is on one axis, it seems perverse that the test does not ‘work’ for most self-described libertarians whilst at the same time ‘working’ just fine for violence based collectivists who call themselves socialist libertarians, like Noam Chomsky. But a violence backed command economy run at a local level is no less tyrannous than a violence backed command economy run from a centralised state: libertarianism without liberty? Oxymoronic. This test tells you nothing about the range of actual libertarian thought but reveals a great deal about the people behind PoliticalCompass.org.

Rather than defining ‘libertarian’ by the values actual libertarians hold, they are defining ‘libertarian’ by values people on the statist left and right ascribe to ‘libertarians’ based on what statists of all ilks regard as axioms that are beyond debate. As those axioms are in reality rejected by almost all libertarians, clearly the questions asked are pointless at best and misleading at worst.

I do not think the very concept of PoliticalCompass.org is itself flawed, just its execution. In all fairness I do note that since I initially savaged the test back twice in 2001, they have indeed refined it somewhat, though leaving the objects of my derision largely intact. Perhaps if they actually had some real libertarians helping them draw up the questions, as opposed to faux libertarian socialists, the concept might even work.

Just take the first question:

If globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations

Clearly the question is framed in such a way that I am supposed to define ‘humanity’ as being in opposition to ‘trans-national corporations’! If I do not accept there is even a dichotomy, I cannot answer the question at all. It may be easy to define ‘trans-national corporations’, but what exactly is meant by ‘humanity’? Peasant farmers in Guatemala are no doubt what the framers of PoliticalCompass.org had in mind.

What may surprise some is that I do indeed regard some ‘trans-national corporations’ as really quite toxic organisations to ‘humanity’ not because they are trans-national or corporations but because they use their money and influence to get states to distort and politicise trade in their favour. Yet I wonder if small information technology enabled but enthusiastically trans-national companies with HQ’s in Russia or Croatia are what they had in mind, rather than large banana companies with HQ’s in the United States? Are these companies in opposition to the general weal of humanity? Somehow I don’t think so, so how exactly do I answer such a question?

13 comments to More musings on the Political Compass

  • Start with the Basic Question and then move on from there. How about much simpler and direct quiz?

    1. Should government intervene in your private and economic life in order to modify your behavior?

  • I had my own reservations regarding the way this quiz is put together – ironically because I felt it favoured libertarianism unduly. But your posts on this issue certainly clarified what I had in mind.

    The whole idea they propose that left-right is just about economics is very stupid, though. It has far more to do with attitudes to authority, tradition, morality, punishment, reward and change than economics. But even if you accepted that a supporter of the free market is automatically right-wing no matter his views on other issues, a far better alternative scale would have been “Individualism —> Collectivism” rather than “Libertarianism —> Authoritarianism”. This would have allowed people to be classified pretty informatively without the problems of contradictions like “libertarian socialist” inherent in the PoliticalCompass.org test. It would also have avoided problems inherent to so many who support particular ideas associated with libertarianism or authoritarianism. For example, is someone less of a libertarian if he wants to ban abortion because he views it as an assault on the individual rights of a human being? Is a communist who opposes drug laws ONLY because he thinks they are useless more of a libertarian than someone who supports them ONLY because he feels they are effective? I can’t see how anyone whose views are uncoloured on the particulars of those two issues could answer ‘yes’.

    BUT even if the N/S axis became Individualist/Collectivist it would leave out all sorts of other issues such as attitudes to foreign policy, to law and order, to European integration and so on – all issues that would require assessment to understand someone’s politics properly.

  • Julian Morrison

    Charles Hueter: that is not the basic question. The basic question is: should there be a coercive control infrastructure at all? (more basic than even “should there be a state” because some seemingly non state things are control infrastructures, eg the local democracy of “left-anarchism”)

  • Huh? The only useful definition of ‘the state’ I’ve ever been able to find is “that entity that claims to have a right to coercion”. If some left-anarchist says there’s some local entity that can force me to do things then that is the state (or ‘a’ state). It just seems to be falling into the socialist, choamsky spewing worker-babble to accept anything that claims to have the ability to use force as anything other than The State.

  • Also, Julian, I think the question is so leading as to produce contradictory answers among most people.

    “Question one: should government intervene in your private and economic life in order to modify your behaviour?”

    “Hell, no! Mah behaviour is mah own business! Same goes for everyone else.”

    “Question two: do you support higher taxes on companies that pollute the environment and criminal laws against incest?”

    “Hell, yeah! We need to put a stop to shit like that!”

  • Ted Schuerzinger

    Does anybody know where to find a transcript of the “Yes, Minister” polls that Humphrey uses to show how you can get 60% of the people to support *anything*? 🙂

    I don’t even remember which episode it was in, and a Google search gives too many hits.

  • veryretired

    The reason these political quizzes are so meaningless is that they are based on a faulty assumption about the so-call “political spectrum”. The common usage is a range of political and social beliefs that run from fascist on the far right to communist on the far left. This is a false choice in two very specific ways.

    First, it places the believer in freedom in a vague “center”, a land of shadowy compromises and shifting positions. This is very popular in the media and among political pundits who see all political questions as some type of game or race. The shorthand allows them to make all sorts of seemingly profound comments about the “drift to the left (or right)” of some candidate, or the need to “move to the center” to capture the votes of some mythical and unknowable swing group which is said to hold the fate of the nation in its hands. The balancing act, according to this theory, is what combination of leftist controls and rightist controls will attract the number of voters sufficient to win an election. The utterly incomprehensible and unprincipled political landscape we see around us is in part the result of people trying to structure the political issues of the moment to fit this false analogy.

    Secondly, the most dynamic political and economic theory in the history of cultural thought, that of liberal democratic capitalism, is blurred into an vague, disconnected series of ideas about government here, and business over there, and how society should function described in some old books we keep on the top shelf of the school library because no one really reads them any more. It is a bizarre and eloquently pointed aspect of our culture and educational system that a person can go through dozens of years of supposed quality education and never be required to read and critically analyze the basic principles of the American experiment in governance as a specifically potent political philosophy. There are courses all over the place on every collectivist theory imaginable, reverently discussing the intricacies of Marx and Marcuse and whoever the latest darling of the deconstructionists happens to be. But from elementary school to doctoral dissertation, the ideas that have truly revolutionized the meaning of government, i.e., that all power is derived from the consent of the governed, that rights are actually inalienable, that property may be owned as a right not subject to the whim of the local warlord, are not studied as an elegant and coherent theory. At best, there is a cursory and often skeptical overview of the Revolution and the Civil War, a few anecdotes, and, in true multiculturist fashion, some derogatory comments about the selfish viewpoints of dead white men.

    It is necessary, and critically important in this period when many seemingly powerful “isms” have collapsed due to their own internal errors, to clearly articulate the nature and validity of liberal democratic capitalism as a coherent political philosophy. This model of social, economic, and political organization must be clearly placed on one end of the spectrum of potential organizing principles for society, and the range must be clearly labelled to show the movement away from the freedom thus represented through the various modern political classifications of conservative social statist to liberal economic statist to the extreme systems of authoritarian and totalitarian statism so clearly exemplified by the recently deposed Saddam, and the currently active Castro or Mugabe. It is long past due that the political philosophy that has energized and enabled a raw, new society to become the most powerful economic, social, and cultural construction in the history of mankind be recognized as a clear choice, demarcated from the statist alternatives, instead of mushed into a vague set of old speeches trotted out on holidays to entertain the crowd before the fireworks display starts.

  • h0mi

    If someone can explain what these questions are supposed to measure, please do:

    No one chooses their country of birth, so it’s foolish to be proud of it.

    It’s natural for children to keep some secrets from their parents.

    When you are troubled, it’s better not to think about it, but to keep busy with more cheerful things.

    Abstract art that doesn’t represent anything shouldn’t be considered art at all.

    Making peace with the establishment is an important aspect of maturity.

    Astrology accurately explains many things.

  • No one chooses their country of birth, so it’s foolish to be proud of it.

    Patriotism, nationalism etc. – the more you disagree with this, the more rightwards I suspect you would lean.

    It’s natural for children to keep some secrets from their parents.

    Attitudes to authority – in this case parental. The more you agree with this, the more leftwards I suspect you would be.

    When you are troubled, it’s better not to think about it, but to keep busy with more cheerful things.

    Do you go in for self-obsessive psychoanalysis and a self-centred view of your own happiness? Quite simply, if you view self-gratification as the main purpose of existence, then you are likely to be quite a liberal person and disagree with this. That would make you more leftist.

    Abstract art that doesn’t represent anything shouldn’t be considered art at all.

    Again, left-liberals often have objections to any objective notions of aesthetics or ethics at all – everything is relative to time, culture, opinion etc. So someone with a firm idea of what art is will likely be more right-wing.

    Making peace with the establishment is an important aspect of maturity.

    Again, a measurement of attitude to authority. Do you see student rebellion and so on as a phase in youth or something which all should indulge in? If the latter, then you are likely more leftist.

    Astrology accurately explains many things.

    Do you put some faith in more mystical concepts and ideals – especially those outside the more accepted notions of faith like organised religion? Or are you firmer and more practical? If the latter, I suspect more right-wing.

    Of course, if they count left and right as simply being economic, then they probably put right-wing answers to the above as authoritarian and left-wing answers as libertarian. Which means a patriotic person who hated modern art would be a an authoritarian while a believer in astrology always on the psychiatrist’s coach would be a libertarian.

  • Bwana Dik

    I do think you’re being unfair to ‘libertarian socialist’s’ here, Perry. They, or at least many of them, simply argue that in an anarchist society collectivist modes of organisation would be more popular and successful than capitalist one’s, but they don’t advocate coercion to achieve this on a society-wide level any more than ancaps seek to ban people from engaging in (voluntary) collectivist behaviour.

    They would no doubt say ancaps have a cheek calling themselves libertarian when capitalism is inherently coercive, and could not be sustained without a state (I’m just saying what they’d say!). Robert Anton Wilson, who considers himself an individualist anarchist in the tradition of Ben Franklin, would say this is all a matter of reality tunnels.

    Anyway, the point is, if we’re defining libertarian as freedom from physical coercion, then you can be both a collectivist socialist (in the sense left-anarchist’s use the term) and an anti-state libertarian, at least in theory. In practice, well, I think the 19th century socialist communes pretty much prove how workable it’s not.

    Eww, I just defended socialist’s. I need to go take a shower.

  • Bwana Dik: I think you take far far too soft a view of them. The only place in recent times anarcho-syndicalism was tried out in practice was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Before the Stalin backed Reds exterminated their erstwhile allies it was clear that the anarcho-syndicalists did not see volunteerism as part of the equasion: if you owned property and the common weal of The People nearby (as viewed by the ‘anarcho’ syndicate) was better served by ‘sharing’ that property, then shared it would be when the guys with the rifles turned up. Do you seriously think they would have tolerated a group of capitalists freely existing amongst them and refusing to accept ‘democratic’ control of their property?

    Sorry, but the notion that the anarcho-syndicalists were just kibbutzniks writ large is plain wrong, as ‘democratic’ control of the means of production was never going to be optional.

  • I think the most telling aspect of the quiz is the lean to get you to answer in a particular way, thus assuring you’ll fall somewhere in the libertarian spectrum (or close).

    Try answering the question in a way you would find abhorrant and then see where the graph places you. If you answer negatively to all issues of tyranny, you’ll be on the left. But if you also answer the questions about religion and morality also in the affirmative, it doesn’t know what to do with those answers except to shift it towards Authoritarian. It doesn’t make the distinction between what you think about morals and how you’d impose them on others. I did this just to see what would happen and it STILL places me only 3 dots above libertarian.

  • Bwana Dik

    Perry: Do you seriously think they would have tolerated a group of capitalists freely existing amongst them and refusing to accept ‘democratic’ control of their property?

    Well, no. I was going to say I don’t think the majority of modern left-anarchists agree with the way they acted, any more than Trotskyite Marxists are apologists for Stalin, but then I came across Chomsky saying purely positive things about the Spanish Revolution. That shouldn’t really surprise me.

    Still, with the ‘in theory’ caveat, I think what I said holds true. Indeed, I’ve seen them argue exactly that. And the Political Compass is supposed to measure ideas.