Against the Political Compass

If one spends any time talking about politics on the internet, one encounters the “Political Compass”. It can be fun for stuff like political jokes.

But it is not a useful framework for understanding politics.

It is comprable to other toy categorization schemes like astrological Sun signs, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or the Dungeons & Dragons moral alignment system — fun, and maybe a little illuminating when used as a loose vocabulary, but not substantive. D&D complicating Good vs. Evil with an axis for Law vs. Chaos allows cute observations like naming a way that Darth Vader (“bringing order to the galaxy” because he is lawful evil) is different from The Joker (chaotic evil); I have done it myself. But it breaks down if you think about it for long. Heck, nerds will tell ya how it breaks down for Batman. D&D alignments cannot bear real weight because they emerge out of a weird history of fantasy fiction and D&D designer Gary Gygax’s peculiar Christian morality, not any serious moral philosophy.

Likewise, the Political Compass is a toy that emerges from “libertarian” propaganda. It developed from the Nolan Chart, which was explicitly libertarian propaganda.

Libertarians often try to dignify their fringe position by arguing that if one really understands politics there are three basic ideologies — left, right, and … of course … libertarian. (Never mind the distinction from “libs” that leftists insist on!)

Those who value civilization are called conservatives. For them the enemy is barbarism.

Those who value equality are called liberals. For them the enemy is exploitation, that is, the abuse of the free market by the rich or by the many to oppress the poor or the few.

Those who value liberty are called libertarians. For them the enemy is slavery, that is, the abuse of the authority of the sovereign to oppress the citizen.

The Compass goes so far as to give libertarians as much space as liberalism and conservatism put together, despite being a fringe ideology. This enables stuff like surveys that reveal to people “Surprise! You’re really a libertarian!” Propaganda.

The big four categorizations of the Compass are not useful enough, which is why political scientists don’t use it. The axes just don’t bear scrutiny.

When one examines at what Compass boosters mean by its authoritarian-libertarian axis, one finds the fingerprints of the libertarian tendency to collapse all other political ideologies into “statism”, because libertarians dread the coercive power of the state … and ignore different state policies, structurally disparate state institutions, and all other forms of coercion.

Sociologists & political scientists understand authoritarianism very differently from Amount Of State Power. I join them in finidng it important to conceive authoritianism in terms of unencumbered power, without rules, process, accountability, or other institutional limits getting in the way of its exercise. Unencumbered power is the useful parallel which one sees in authoritarian governments, religions, families, and more. It is how the capricious commissars of tsarist Russia, the capricious commissars of Stalinist Russia, and capricious oligarchs of Putinist Russia all resemble one another. It makes the supposedly-minarchist fantasies of many weird far right movements like neoreaction authoritarian: if the “CEO of the country” allows more “economic freedom” but can just singlehandedly issue whatever decrees they want, that is authoritarian. It is what makes the absolute monarchies of the feudal era more authoritarian than modern liberal democracies with greater state capacity: the king could capriciously exercise the power of life and death over subjects at a whim. The antithesis of authoritarianism is not “libertarianism” but limits like institutionalism, proceduralism, and a circumscribed scope to power, as in the rule of law and rights protections of liberal democracy.

Similarly, where the Compass conceives of the “left” and “right” as an “economic” axis, what the heck does it mean? The vibes are socialist-ish and capitalist-ish but mushy. What about that predicts the preferences of shaggy anarchist left-libertarians and hyper-capitalist right-libertarians?

This obscures the the meaning of “left” and “right”. They are a subtle, contested vocabulary, but one can summarize the distinction as reflecting egalitarian versus heirarchical social relations, rather than economic structures — unsurprising since the terms originated before the emergence of either capitalism or socialism! With that framework, one can examine different visions of equality and different heirarchies, making the left-right spectrum is the best simple model of political tendencies available, if one exercises it thoughtfully.