Imagine believing that the political compass - a literal right wing propaganda tool - is not only useful, but unassailable
Edit i was almost a more of a lib than normal. link: https://hexbear.net/comment/4012025
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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The political compass* vs. Hundreds of years of political theory - Well neither of us is the sole arbiter of all truth so I'd say its a toss up ๐คท
*latest fad
The fundamental problem is that we've baked these terms into our political dialogue. I like to think I'm fairly well-read, but I'll happily retreat to the "libertarian v authoritarian" short-hand when I'm talking to a normie because I know its a language we both speak.
Sometimes it feels like I'm an Inuit trying to explain snow to a guy down in Texas, who keeps waving a snow cone in my face while shouting "I think I know a little bit more about it than you do, buddy!" But that's hardly a situation unique to discussing politics. You see folks in every industry with nasty cases of Dunning-Krueger.
I think there is something uniquely lib about viewing disagreements over political theory as just differences of opinion between individuals
Edit: additionally i think thats why the political compass appeals to libs, especially in the US. They get to have their own special little point on the grid. All the points are equally valid (its just personal opinion, no one is the arbiter of truth)
At some level, we're all working with incomplete information and limited perspective. That's why you go into historical and material forms of analysis, rather than relying on a silly arbitrarily assembled ideology graph.
But once people have the words "Libertarian/Authoritarian" and "Left/Right" stamped into their brains, it becomes increasingly difficult to have a conversation outside of those terms. So then the graphs do make sense. It really is just Biden and Trump arguing over policies, because these are ultimately the people wielding all the political power. We also know that media regularly transforms the perceptions of the individuals that consume it. And so a media that constantly blasts out a Left/Right dichotomy will inevitably produce the cohorts that it describes.
The political compass then becomes a method of describing modernity. As our history is erased and revised to fit the modern understanding of politics, people connect the dots that they're provided until...
Political education becomes a form of induced neurosis. And I suppose you could describe people inside and outside of said neurosis as having a "difference of opinion" of sorts.
Giving equal weight to LE BOTH SIDES, no matter how absurd one such side is, is another facet of "TO EACH THEIR OWN"