The modern world, from one group to another, has a fascination with the set of public policy beliefs held by opposing groups. Political ideology is what separates, joins, divides, and defines cultures. A set of political values is often how a private citizen will create his or her own identity, and how they will decide with whom they will associate.

Throughout this expression of self, most people have a difficult time grasping why someone else might disagree with them. The eternal pursuit of finding the motivations for the other side of the argument often ends in simplistic reasoning that is not necessarily correct. The most common explanations are typically ignorance or malevolence.

This presents a problem when attempting to group or organize political leanings. The largely accepted schematic in American politics is a spectrum that ranges from a community-driven modern liberal, to an individual-oriented modern conservative. This one-dimensional “spectrum view” simplifies and generalizes too much. There has always been debate as to what constitutes somebody to the far right or far left. This also leads to general confusion when deciding what to do with the people who might land in the middle or even off the spectrum entirely. A libertarian could be in the middle when it comes to social issues, but the devotion to freedom places him/her farther to the right than conservatives. Then there is the constant argument between each side as to who has to take responsibility for fascism. Overall, the spectrum view creates a mess.

The time has come to analyze the issue from a different perspective. The isosceles triangle of ideology is designed to explain the motivations behind a person’s political decisions, by organizing them using three core human values. The three values are liberty, equality, and order.

Liberty, in this context, means a focus on individual rights. A strong tendency toward this value would show the ideology believes that each person deserves to be as free as that person can be. Characteristics of such a government would be being limited (or non-existent), and unconcerned with the economic and social life of a private citizen.

Equality is a firm belief that the goal of government is an absolute level ground between all people. It is the idea that persons should have equal opportunity, equal outcomes (in wealth, for example), or both. Common trends of this government would be power, omnipresence, and organization. This is to institute the level ground that is essential to the advocates of this value.

Order is the concept that government is put in place to deliberately control the people, so as to run a society in an efficient and effective manner. Traits of this government are power, coercion, and often oppression.

The start is to assign these values onto each point of the isosceles triangle. Order and equality are closer to each other than liberty, since there is a good amount of policy overlap between these two values, and there is the common theme of sacrificing the individual for the group. My thesis is that every political ideology will fall at a certain point in the triangle defined by these three values, with a closer distance to a value signifying a larger focus on that value in that specific government.

However, each point is effectively unattainable. A point of perfect freedom, order, or equality is completely unrealistic in actual application. In this case those would be a perfect form of communism, fascism, and anarchy. The will always be some form of disparity between people and a desire to rise above the rest, so absolute equality cannot be reached. There is a human tendency to organize its own societies into groups and install rules and laws, so absolute freedom cannot be reached. Lastly, there will always be some form of dissension and revolution in a society that would strive for absolute order.

Another purpose of this organizational method is to demonstrate the inherent inadequacy that all political ideologies face. It is a common fallacy, and a means of grabbing votes, to assume that a society can have absolutely everything in terms of liberty, equality, and order. The sad truth is that there must be a sacrifice of the other two ideals to serve the third. One cannot occupy different spaces on the triangle at the same time.

A problem arises when discussing the ideology of many politicians. Political demagogues do not seem to fit into the triangle in any practical way. A want for money and a want for power are not points. However, these wants are not ideas of how to govern society. Instead, they are ideas on how to govern self. A true demagogue holds no ideology. In any case, the values professed by these politicians simply reflect the values of their constituents. They appropriate those values in order to gain powerful positions. The beliefs they may or may not privately hold fall inside the triangle, but their desire for money or power does not.

In general, the purpose of the triangle is to prove a point to the so-called “pragmatists” of the world. Everyone, with the noted exception of demagogues, has an ideology. The sooner that is admitted, the better. This is not, by any means, meant to silence any political argument, other than the argument of where to group the specific ideologies. It is, however, meant to encourage the world at large to actually admit bias in arguments, and then to move on from that point. With all the cards on the table, there is no choice but to argue with fact and logic.

I will be posting further to elaborate on this theory.