The Political Spectrum...

[FromTheLeft]

Is it just me or does anyone else think that our old mentality of the political spectrum is totally shot. Ranging from left to right just might not describe it any more. Thats so 1 dimensional. I want a new 3d political spectrum. I know that I don't fit anywhere on that line anymore.

That is BTW why my name is FromTheLeft, because that is where I defined myself before I realized that it just didn't fit any more.

I am starting to think of it more like a horseshoe. There I am one arm and two legs wrapped around the left side with the other reaching out and touching the right. I will lay down my views and which side I see them on and by rank in their importance to me.

Left:

1) Getting out of the war in Iraq.
3) Educational funding reform for elementary through high school.
4) Fiscal Resposiblity. A balanced budget coming from higher taxes on the top 20%.
5) Full marriage rights for everyone(but I also believe that their should be a limit on the number of times a person can get 'Legally Married', if anyone wants me to explain that please send me a PM i don't feel like getting into it on this thread.).
5) Social Health Care.
7) Social Security staying just the way it is.
9) Pro-Choice with more eduaction to help prevent pregnancies.
10) Welfare Reform to make sure that
1) Welfare Recipents are not cut off ever.
2) Welfare Recipents are made to feel like they are still contributing members of society.


Right:

2) Proper funding for the war (until such time as we can get enough votes to get us out of there completely)
8) Less gun control (with more strict gun registration)
11) Manditory Service for every able bodied american.

So what exactly does that make me? Left or Right? It's just something that I can't answer...

[applegrove]

1. ARE You a FREEPER?

Because I always wonder when someone comes up with a totally new way of organizing us all politically. GOP/neocons are the only ones that have something to gain from that. Liberal policy & Liberal Parties have been King (Queen) in the Western World for the last 200 years. For sure there is an attack on us at this juncture. But you fight that - point by point.. you do not give in and change your basic beliefs just because they consider you their enemy.

The big neocon plan is to find a way to get republicans re-elected. Because republicans represent elites and that didn't translate into votes, they had to come up with something new. They went back to Disraeli (British PM who saw the same problem in mid 1800s). His idea was for the Conservatives to define themselves as the Patriotic Party. That way they take votes from all three classes. Toot the patriotic horn and you just may make the right number of voters to get elected. Liberals at the time were for trade, new ideas & information, equality & open markets (open markets were a threat to established landholders & monopoly holders at the time which is how elites liked to make money).Today - Liberals control the corporations and make sure there is a successful transfer of wealth every generation so that embedded terrorist rich people do not take over Democracies and return it to oligopolies - which are battles they won over the last 500 years and the republicans want to erase.

In my experience the neocons try very hard to get Liberal or the Progressives or the Left to separate from themselves. A psychopath will do that to you to kill your soul and turn you into a malleable puppet or just for fun(watch the movie Sophie's choice to see it done with glee to Meryl Streep's character who was forced to choose the life of one child over the other ... killing her in the process). In this instance the neocons very much want us Liberals to give up our love of the market (anything you make above growing your own food on your front lawn is from the market), to give up your love of the world (internationalism à la UN is a direct threat to the cult of Patriot the Patsy), to give up your love of new ideas and applying the best of them to our lives ... if these new ideas will make things better (we need to embrace reforms & new information as it comes in ie: some welfare reform helps some people move on with life). Following none of these ideals implies that you are anything but to the left or Liberal. You love markets and depend on them every day - you just feel that a corporation is a tool made by man, to benefit mankind and not there other way around. You think the market is really efficient but needs some intervention to make things more equitable. In terms of equality amongst its people - the USA has very powerful elites: right beside Russia & Mexico on the scale (and much worse than European countries or Japan - anyone in the West). And you see that as something that could be worked on. Once you get the ***holes who represent this 'embedded elite' out of office and hog-tied, your intention is to remain Liberal and love markets and see the need for some regulation and love the World and love information (you are Liberal so you like good information - instead of bad information ..Republicans like the bad information).

So as Liberals (neocons stole that word from you already) do not let them steal the Left from you. You are Liberal and you are proud. Be sure they are trying to attack your and corner you into giving up the things you hold dear and the values you have always had as a liberal. All Western Countries are Liberal Democracies: that is how they are described in the political science books of the rest of the world.

Liberal:

- good information
- pluralities
- civic leadership
- security for the vulnerable
- internationalism
- markets & trade (something the 200 elites/conservatives resisted at every turn because it meant that a middle class would emerge and the wealth would be spread and there would be more money to go around to all people)
- science
- regulations to help markets work transparently & serve the people they were created to help: human beings
- freedom
- religious freedom
- destroying embedded hatred so all people have a kick at the can in the economy
- War is bad unless defensive & pre-emptive (in reality - not when they dream it so)
- multilateralism
- using tools such as universal health care when 'market anomalies' make them both more equitable & more efficient than the private system (again good information)
- science applied to reduce unwanted pregnancies including 'reversible operations for men'. Basically everything
should be tried to make abortion rare.
- representative government again
- strict anti-propaganda laws
- intervention programs when embedded elites & corporations become so selfish that they start to interfere in the electoral process in order to destroy the democracy
- staying in Iraq until some semblance of security is reached - cause 'we broke it'. all European nations & the UN agree at this point - Iraq is owed a trained army and strong democratic structures since the USA started it

[FromTheLeft]

2. Thank You...

...for that history lesson. I have to admit that I never even thought about the origin of our political spectrum as we now know it. I am young, not to far removed from college, and trying to understand how to apply that which has been taught to me for my years in school. Everything politically was always put to me in left and right, from Communism to Facsism.

Unfortunaly that is one of my generations paradigms, we don't know how to few the political world with out thinking of a large sea-saw where you are perched at some point along the way. I am trying to buck that notion which would hopefully lead to a personal world where I don't see the distinction, but I am not there yet.

Maybe that is part of the problem, but maybe it is part of the solution. If we can, I hate to say it like this, but play their game but with our rules. They have spent so long building up negative steriotypes about the Left and Liberals and Democrats...that we now have to spend as much time fighting the stigmas as we do running campaigns when we wish to get elected. The answer is in redefining how we veiw politics. A new view gives a fresh chance to define the right and wrong in the minds of the voters.

If you know any good books on the origin of the political spectrum please let me know. And I will be looking up Disraeli tonight.

[applegrove]

3. Try keeping up with all the political articles in Arts & Letters Daily

They publish the best articles from around the world on all intellectual things. (The article on Disraeli and the birth of New Conservatives was where I myself found out about much of the history I told you about. Written by a neocon themselves I believe and telling for their vanity blatant try to rework the 20th century to fit their model of what makes a good conservative). Also if you can make a habit of reading the Economist. That is the big political economy newsmagazine in the world and it is not America centric. A little dry but gives short articles on various countries and regions the world over.

I don't know the names of the greatest historical political writers but I would look up on Amazon for anything about the birth of the Enlightenment and see what the reviews say. Cause the Enlightenment is the real source of Liberalism (and neocons hate it - just like they hate good information getting to the masses). And go to a second hand book store near your college campus and try and grab an old 'history of politics' textbook for cheap. It will give you the basics.

Other than that find a political site or go into the archives of things like the New Yorker for the definitive article on Political Economy. I don't know all the history either - but I do worry that the GOP machine is purposely stealing issues from Liberals in order to remake the political parties to suit their neocon dreams. And you just don't let that happen. Since I am so interested in studying this stuff myself these days - I try and print off at least 4 interesting articles a day from vairios places in the Internet and read them.

Also you can go to a discount bookstore that sells first run books that didn't sell. You may be able to get 10 timely books for $50 bucks. It really depends on your budget. And there is the old library trick of going to the political science section and leafting through untill you find the right pile of books on politics that are 1) often lent (thought that may be hard to read these days) 2)classics (there is an awful lot of information in the background of an old book in terms of the state of mind of the author and the people he is writing too & the norms of the day. The older the book - the thicker this type if information 3) anything that picks at your interest.

Go to a book that documents the best periodicals on Political science (something international). Then find the top 5 bounded publications. Hopefully they will still be in book form on some floor. Got to the books and open them one by one and choose 5 or so of the periodicals actually directed at political science ore the years. Not something I have done - but would if I didn't have the background in Liberalism that I have. You should be able to find periodicals that specifically answer the questions you have.



That list was a list I would say should be Liberal.

IMHO that is what I have done, would do.

[CatholicEdHead]

4. Not a linear but circular feature

Somewhere I saw a political stance graphic set up in a circle. In that if you go REALLY far left and REALLY far right, you end up in the same spot with pretty much the same totalliarian opressive outcomes. It can come about from the top down and bottom up if you let the systems go to the extremes.

[B0S0X87]

5. That's the way my history teacher described it

Stalin (the extremely far left) and Hitler (the extremely far right) were virtually the same.

[applegrove]

7. The fight for all democracies is in the Middle. Liberals have to maintain

their stance and not get fooled into making room for the facadists (just made the word up). Those ture Conservatives who facade to be multiclass when really they only pander to get elected and then remake their world in their elitist image. (Most conservatives are not nearly as dangerous as these neocons/gop/rovbots. In fact most would be called Liberal by any definition older than 50 years).

[Selatius]

6. It's a 2-dimensional plane, as far as I look at things

It is sufficient in helping me describe the world.

The x-axis measures economic policy. The y-axis measures whether you prefer a stateist solution or a libertarian one (authoritarian vs. libertarian) to the problems of society. The higher you are, the more authoritarian you become. Conversely, the lower you are, the more libertarian (or anarchist) you become.







You can take the test to see where you land:

http://politicalcompass.org/