Thanks to the deepest scourges of Reddit, the political compass has become a meme in 2017. As shown below, the original compass is meant to accurately depict where a person or organization would land.
For instance, one meme featured a Russian hat in authoritarian left, a Nazi officer's hat in authoritarian right, a hippy headband in libertarian left, and a cowboy hat in libertarian right.
The reason it's become a meme is
I, like others, have known for a while that this graph is not accurate, but I couldn't place why. All I knew is that my placement on the graph, libertarian right, didn't fully make sense. Yes, I was on the right side, but I was also libertarian.
Something didn't add up. The chart represents the government power spectrum and the ideological spectrum on y and x axes, respectively. But why does it treat government power as being a separate entity from the ideology? Far-left regimes enforce their ideas just as much as far-right regimes enforce their ideas, unfortunate as that may be.
Note: I say left, not liberal, because those are two different terms. I identify as a neo-classical liberal but I in no way identify with the political left.
Libertarianism as an ideology is based on individual freedom as an alternative to people being ruled by a government that does not accommodate their desires or even their needs. As one gets closer to the purest form of libertarianism, unsurprisingly, the individual wishes to exert less and less control over others via the government.
Now you may begin to see what a more accurate chart may look like. Control and ideology do not belong on separate axes: they are directly related. The more far right a person is today, the more power they wish their party organization to have, and the same can be said of the left.
While it may seem inaccurate to say the political left ultimately wishes to exert control over others via federal government, unfortunately it's become quite clear that the organizations and major parties now categorized as leftist want exactly that. Socialized healthcare, centralized government, centralized education, and even suppression of dissenting ideas on left-leaning campuses have all regrettably given the indication that freedom of the individual has fallen several rungs on the priority ladder of the left. This is to say nothing of those on the far-right, I might add.
So this brings us back to the headline you came here for. What should this new political compass look like? Just that: a compass. A circle. At the very center of the circle is true libertarianism, and on the edges of the left and right side are the most extreme, sparcely held views. The top could frankly be whatever issues are relevant, since issues of more specific policy change from decade to decade.
In conclusion, we must understand the nature of the political power spectrum in order to better understand each other and ourselves. Misinterpreting one another's views leads not to an intelligent symposium, but intellectually spinning our tires in the mud. I'm not telling you what to think, only that maybe you can think a little more clearly this way.
