I suspect that it’s a mental error to imagine that there’s one ideal ideology to start with.
For example, I think the founding fathers of America envisioned that the federal government would be smaller than the state governments. It’s not completely insane to imagine supporting true libertarians for a federal government and a progressive left wing party for a state government.
But people aren’t that mentally flexible. If they vote right wing for federal government, they will never vote left wing for state government. And so, despite the fact that capitalism can solve certain problems quite efficiently, the fact that it’s utterly unsuited to solve our most common problems like making sure people have basic essentials means that libertarianism is a bit of a dead end, unless people can actually learn to think flexibly.
This is one of the basic reasons why Political Compass Memes is such a bad idea. It encourages people to lock in their political identity, rather than remain flexible, and centrism isn’t the answer, either. We should be trying to use the right tool for the right job.
This is one of the basic reasons why Political Compass Memes is such a bad idea.
No kidding. Not only do people fall on different parts of that two dimensional map depending on context (e.g. different positions on how much government support there should be for the arts versus for the sciences, how much government should regulate guns versus automobiles, etc.), but elevating these two axes above all the other unseen dimensions (ideological purity versus pragmatic compromise or versus consensus seeking, at what point process should yield to substance, the extent to which our institutions should have inertia that resists change, etc.), which causes people to oversimplify political issues into just those two dimensions.
There are many dimensions, and each problem may call for a different solution that would fall into a different place in any given dimension than the solution to another problem.
Prior to the trump era I voted libertarian federal, dem/left for state govt for this reason. The problem with parties at the moment is there’s not just economic policy tied up into them but cultural and societal aspects that have to be weighed.
I suspect that it’s a mental error to imagine that there’s one ideal ideology to start with.
For example, I think the founding fathers of America envisioned that the federal government would be smaller than the state governments. It’s not completely insane to imagine supporting true libertarians for a federal government and a progressive left wing party for a state government.
But people aren’t that mentally flexible. If they vote right wing for federal government, they will never vote left wing for state government. And so, despite the fact that capitalism can solve certain problems quite efficiently, the fact that it’s utterly unsuited to solve our most common problems like making sure people have basic essentials means that libertarianism is a bit of a dead end, unless people can actually learn to think flexibly.
This is one of the basic reasons why Political Compass Memes is such a bad idea. It encourages people to lock in their political identity, rather than remain flexible, and centrism isn’t the answer, either. We should be trying to use the right tool for the right job.
No kidding. Not only do people fall on different parts of that two dimensional map depending on context (e.g. different positions on how much government support there should be for the arts versus for the sciences, how much government should regulate guns versus automobiles, etc.), but elevating these two axes above all the other unseen dimensions (ideological purity versus pragmatic compromise or versus consensus seeking, at what point process should yield to substance, the extent to which our institutions should have inertia that resists change, etc.), which causes people to oversimplify political issues into just those two dimensions.
There are many dimensions, and each problem may call for a different solution that would fall into a different place in any given dimension than the solution to another problem.
Prior to the trump era I voted libertarian federal, dem/left for state govt for this reason. The problem with parties at the moment is there’s not just economic policy tied up into them but cultural and societal aspects that have to be weighed.