Monday, November 3, 2008

Political Theory Is Not on One Axis

The range of political theory does not reside on one axis: "conservative" and "liberal" as Americans are trained to think. Take a look at the Nolan chart for instance. There are two axes, one for social orientation and the other for economic orientation.
Open your minds.....

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

the Nazi symbol and Russian flag symbol are in the wrong spots. The Russian flag symbol should be where the nazi symbol is, and the Nazi symbol would be slightly right zone since the major corporation in Hitler's time where private, not state owned. The Nazis hated socialism.

Anonymous said...

The National Socialist economic system as implemented by Mussolini and copied by Hitler was based on private ownership in large corporation within a command economy.
The government was the corporations' prime and usually only client.
Fascism is not socialism, it is also not a free market, not even close. It is the collusion between the oligarchy of giant corporations and the oiligarchy that runs the government.
It is what is developing in the USA

Anonymous said...

I know this is an old post but just couldn't let the original comment stand, "The Nazis hated socialism". What do you think Nazi stands for? The full name of the party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or in English, National Socialist German Workers' Party. There are some debated nuanced differences between Socialism and Communism, but essentially they boil down to the same thing - a centralized government that controls the economy (and in turn personal freedom) either by direct ownership of industry and property as in the USSR or by indirect control through seemingly private ownership that is actually dictated to by the centralized government. It is a complete lie that Fascism is "conservative" extremism. In fact Socialism, Fascism, and Communism are all very closely related and are ALL the extreme LEFT of the political spectrum. Like this:

Communism/Socialism/Fascism (Large Centralized Government, no personal or economic freedom) > Liberalism (large centralized government, more personal freedom, some economic freedom) > Moderate (some centralized government, more personal freedom, more economic freedom) > Conservative (small centralized government, more personal freedom, more economic freedom), Libertarian (minimal centralized government, maximum personal freedom, maximum economic freedom), Anarchy (no centralized government, total personal freedom, total economic freedom)

In fact anything to the right of Moderate is incapable of becoming authoritarian simply because it does not allow for the centralized government required. The second a government gets big enough or powerful enough to exert more authoritarian control it is no longer conservative in the context of American politics. I agree completely with the second commenter that the USA is going down a path of too much centralized government and too little personal/ economic freedom. The politicians today who claim to be conservative have completely left true conservative values behind.

Chris Ferrell said...

The last comment is right on the mark.

Large government will always steal freedom and brutalize the dissenter while running the economy to th advantage of the governing elite.