If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past 4 years, then I am sure you’ve noticed that the political conversations in the United States have gotten completely out of control.
Perhaps you’ll start to talk to someone with a different political world view about healthcare. If you’re able to avoid a screaming match, it doesn’t take long for the conversation to shift from this issue to the size of the government, then gun control, then the national debt, then socialism and on and on. There seems to be no end in sight. No compromise. The conversation almost always ends in the same way – left versus right, red versus blue.
This one-dimensional, binary worldview is nonsense and I for one am sick of it, so for a change of pace, this post is going to be about politics, but not in the way that almost every other website talks about politics. This post is all about defining a political worldview with actual depth, and I mean that more literally than I think many of you are imagining right now.
To start off – left versus right is foolishness. Our conversations are stuck in the stone age for a reason – this polarity is made up. This polarity changes with almost every single generation. It is shifting sand, and it is crippling our ability to talk about complex political issues by trying to flatten them into unidirectional labels. Don’t believe me? Look at the current political spectrum:
That’s it.
Healthcare, gun control, privacy, abortion, voting rights, civil rights, water rights, free speech, foreign policy, government regulation, taxes. All of it. Two choices. Pick one.
This political worldview is as dumb as a rock and needs to be thrown in the dustbin of history.
Rather than follow traditional “left or right” ideologies, let’s think bigger, let’s think in more than one dimension.
To start out, I’d like to map my axes around specific overarching political concepts. With that in mind, let’s label our axes
X Axis – This is defined as the distribution of votes.
On one end of the political spectrum we have a dictatorship – only the dictator gets to vote, or at the very least his is the only vote that counts
On the other end of the spectrum we have a pure democracy – everyone votes and all votes count equally – everyone votes on everything.
As a side note I would say that republics fall towards the center
Y Axis – Here we define the distribution of wealth.
On one end of this spectrum we have a purely equal distribution of goods and resources – we can call this socialism (I know this didn’t arrive on the scene until 1848 with Engles / Marx but as a matter of modern parlance I am using it here)
On the other end of the spectrum we have oligarchy – all or most wealth is in the hands of a very few individuals
As a side note I would argue that capitalism (as envisioned by Adam Smith) is near the center
Z-Axis - Finally we have the size of the government
On one end of this spectrum we have a very large government that enforces laws over almost every aspect of society – we’ll define this as a totalitarian state
On the other end of the spectrum we have either no government or a government that has failed so completely that it cannot enforce any laws – we can define this as anarchy
If you map this out – rather than the traditional one-dimensional left right band – we get a political sphere as seen below. Note, you map the political positions INSIDE of the sphere – not on the surface.
To play around with this model, click and drag the graphic below to see the full intersectionality or check out this link.
To try this out on a practical example, let’s sharpen our pencils and take a look at the French Revolution, 1789- 1794. (I’m not a historian so please don’t chop off my head in the comments)
1788 – Prior to the Revolution
To map the society before the revolution, we put a mark between Monarchy and Oligarchy and then move that mark north towards Totalitarianism. Not all the way up, but more north than south.
January, 1789 – Estates-General
To deal with the financial crisis Louis XVI summoned the Estates General for the first time since 1610. The nation began moving away from monarch towards Democracy.
July 1789 – September 1791 - National Constituent Assembly
Social order goes into decline starting with the Storming of the Bastille. We move our political marker south towards Anarchy. We also move the marker closer towards Democracy (Declaration of the Rights of Man, French Constitution of 1791) and Socialism (Abolition of feudal rights, Civil Constitution of the Clergy).
October 1791 – September 1792 - Legislative Assembly
In an attempt to bolster civil order, France adopted the Constitution of 1791 and would attempt to function as a constitutional monarchy, we are still moving towards Anarchy. The King had lost almost all of his power to the elected Legislative Assembly, we again also move the marker again closer to Democracy.
September 1792–1795 - National Convention
Monarchy disappears as an option (briefly) when Louis the XVI is executed, we might try to move our marker closer to Democracy but, war with more than a dozen nations combine with national debt issues and wide ranging acts of violence within the nation (Reign of Terror, Committee of Public Safety) and reduce civil order to an all-time low. We move our marker fully to the southern pole of Anarchy where no measurement of democracy or economics has any value.
1795–1799 - The Directory
The demoralized nation claws its way out of Anarchy into a bicameral legislature. Executive power was divided among 5 directors (hence the name) with a 5-year mandate. We can move our marker just slightly north, out of the Anarchy pole, but not too far because this won’t last 5 years.
November 1799 – The Coups d’etat
Napoleon seizes power after returning from a successful military campaign, we can move the marker back towards Monarchy / Dictatorship, and just slightly above the equator for Anarchy. Since this is well before Marx and Engels, the economy marker will hover between the center and Oligarchy.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this worldview is far from perfect. For example, there may be better labels for the axes. Perhaps someone thinks that a dodecahedron is a better fit. I don’t know, but I’m open to ideas.
I hope, at the very least, this can get the conversation started about the true complexity of the political environment that we are living in and break us out of these shallow one-dimensional political discussions.
Leave your feedback in the comments – I’d love to hear from you.
God Bless!
