this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Paternalism vs liberty. Tell me more. I haven’t heard of this comparison before.
The full spectrum is really more like “authoritarian vs libertarian”. Political policy should really be split into two different spectrums. On one spectrum, you have financial policy. On the other, you have social policy. The two normally get lumped together because politicians campaign on both simultaneously. But in reality, they’re two separate policies. So the political spectrum should look less like a single left/right line, and more like an X/Y graph with individual points for each person’s ideology. Something more like this:
collapsed inline media
On this graph, as you go farther left, the government has more ownership and provides more, (and individuals own less because the government provides more for their needs). As you go farther up the chart, social policy gets more authoritarian. So for example, something on the far right bottom corner would be the Cyberpunk 2077/The Outer Worlds end-stage capitalist where megacorps inevitably own everything and have their own private laws.
Once you separate the two policies into a graph (instead of just a left/right line) it becomes clear why “small government” doesn’t necessarily correspond to “fewer laws” when dealing with politicians.
I assume "Republican" on this diagram is not used in the contemporary American sense. Otherwise it would be somewhere up in that little grey cloud.
In any case, official US politics takes place entirely within the top right quadrant, and UK politics seems to have retreated there too. Canada is in danger of getting up there as well. And we don't have any mechanism to vote our way out of that box, so change will have to come from action outside of electoral politics.
The precise location of individual points really depends on personal biases, but I agree that the “Republican” point is wrong on this chart; Pretty much all of America’s political discussion takes place on the right side of the graph.
I think it's being used in the traditional sense, not the contemporary American sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republicanism
That's a political compass, and it's still missing several political axes.
I guess one potential axis would be 'stagnation', in the sense that social mobility between classes stops changing. That could be anything like straight up caste systems, or informal stratification from wealth getting locked up by the 1%. I hypothesize, that such an axis would be a measurement of how 'elderly' a society is becoming. When politics become too locked in due to unchanging political critters, the ability for a society to recognize and properly act in a situation becomes compromised.
My parent, they lost mental acuity and flexibility with the years, alongside their bodily agency, and have become quarrelsome. IMO, such dementia is what we are seeing in a aging America and the UK.
How did neo-liberalism make it to the left?
I didn’t bother actually checking the individual points, because I was simply using it for illustrative purposes. The actual location of the points is largely up to interpretation, based on personal biases and viewpoints. For instance, plenty of .ml posters would likely object to calling Leninism highly authoritarian, or lumping it in with Maoism. But this particular compass does both of those.
So you made this one? I mean, this is the foundation of political compass memes, and I don’t think it should be dependent on personal biases, otherwise I would be pretty pointless. Like, the position of neoliberalism exactly contradicts the point you were making before about the left/right axis, where the state owns more on the left and less on the right. That neoliberalism is advocating for a state that owns nothing and provides for no equity is a fact and not up for interpretation. So in the end it just seems like a sloppy political compass meme and isn’t very helpful.
Around our local voting season there's actually a online test to check which parties are more aligned with the person values and it puts things into a graph like this. It's very useful