What Is the “Political Spectrum”?

In our current political paradigm, we often use a simple four-quadrant two-dimensional space that represents the broad spectrum of political views. On one axis of this space, we have socially liberal vs. socially conservative. And on the intersecting axis, we have economically liberal vs. economically conservative. This gets us to places where we have people called “libertarians” who are economically conservative while being socially liberal — which is anomalous, supposedly, because the two major political parties, those that between them contain practically 100% of our elected representatives in Congress and the Executive branch, exist almost entirely in two totally different quadrants of the political space. Republicans occupy the space that is socially conservative and economically conservative, while Democrats occupy the space that is both socially liberal and economically liberal.

This is no longer — if it ever was — the right way to look at it. The principal deficit of this model is that it clusters most people in only two opposite non-adjacent quadrants of the space. Those in the libertarian quadrant exist, but they are comparatively rare. Rare, too, are those who are economically liberal and socially conservative. So rare, in fact, that we don’t really have a proper name for them. They are “populists”, generally, yes, and vote what they perceive to be in their personal interest, narrowly defined, without much concern for reason or cold logic. We are dismissive of them because we think they are stupid and contradict themselves without realizing it and because they probably never will realize it.

The fact that quadrants adjacent to the main clusters are sparsely populated doesn’t tell us much about the equilibrium, to whatever extent it exists, between different political views. How does the scale slide in any direction, and how does this inform an individual’s views as he or she defines them? It doesn’t seem likely that all of the marginal representatives of the two main quadrants pass through the same bottleneck on their way to the other side. There has to be something more subtle and complex going on. We need a better explanation for how people come to think the things about politics that they do.

This problem (to whatever extent there is one) might be solved by reassigning the axes of the two-dimensional space to two different variables. We might call one axis liberal vs. illiberal, while we might call the second axis conservative vs. progressive. One might balk at seeing the intersection in this space that leads to one becoming a “conservative liberal”, but that’s only because our current notion of the two-dimensional space doesn’t attempt to go there. To move past this, it is necessary to establish what is meant by “liberal” in this model.

The primary trait of liberalism is not a feature of it so much as it is a bug. This bug is the preference for making decisions and forming opinions on the basis of science, rather than on the basis of other considerations. Liberalism, or its historical antecedents, were not always so reliant on science per se, but this is just because science hasn’t always been so reliable as it is now. We have since gotten to the point with science that we can weed out the bad pieces of it from the good ones. We now reject astrology while preserving anatomy. We throw away ptolemaic notions of celestial movement in favor of Newtonian physics. The liberal instinct is the one that seeks to approach reasoned consensus on what the causes of things are and how to improve them. Their success is in coordinated, concerted action of societies, built on a mutual understanding of what’s right, maximally beneficial, and far-thinking. That this impulse resulted in an embrace of science is only a knock-on effect, but it is a crucially important knock-on effect that helps us understand this inclination in the contemporary context.

It is perhaps not difficult to see how this instinct can contain both conservative and progressive instincts within it. Science is indeed much more precise than it was in the past — we know more definitively — but there are still branches of science with broad areas of disagreement among liberal people who engage in the discourse around it. Social science is one of the largest areas of intellectual endeavor with continuing big open questions. In economics, for instance, there tends to be less tight consensus as there is in, say, chemistry, and the range of opinions this creates contributes to the possibility of people preferring to react much differently to the status quo they see around them.

Conservative liberals are generally pessimistic about what we know and prefer to exercise caution when the risks are high or appear to be high. They see the possibility of overdoing it, of using science to bad ends, of disrupting the situation as it exists. For conservative liberals, a kind of nostalgia often exists for the state of nature, a former Eden, whose beauty was defined by the absence of human influence on its natural development. These kinds of liberals — or factions among them — are sometimes called “neoliberals” but this is a misnomer. There is nothing new — nor has there ever been anything new — about this kind of liberalism. It is the default stance of liberalism because it hedges bets maximally on what is uncertain about our knowledge and our capacity to improve our situation. The enduring popularity of this view is obvious, particularly considering serious lapses and mistakes in our scientific knowledge throughout the ages.

Progressive liberals, on the other hand, are confident in the lessons of science to improve the lives of humanity and even for the planet and beyond. For them, science isn’t just a way of illuminating how the world works but also for making it work better. Science for liberals is an engineering project — not just mechanical engineering but social engineering — at least a rational, modest, and well-formulated kind of social engineering. It would be unfair, though, to think that progressive liberals overstate the promise of science or fail to realize its limitations. On the contrary, progressive liberals are free to admit to lapses of and disagreements in our scientific knowledge, but the progressive liberal response to this is very self-evident: more science. Only by experimenting and acting to confirm our hypotheses, they argue, can we really learn definitively what the situation is and how we can improve it.

Now we have to figure out what happens when we move beyond the confines of liberalism. What happens when conservatives don’t care about science, undermining the main project of liberalism? When science and reasoned approaches are no longer forming opinions about politics, then what becomes the driving force? Human emotions, raw tendencies and passions are the real engines here. We see ignorance and disregard of history, apathy regarding natural and biological tendencies, and a total disregard for consensus, preferring to accept the possibility of conspiracy to the possibility that something counterintuitive our worse yet — strange — might be an accurate description of the truth. Among both the liberal and illiberal varieties of conservatism, conservatism itself may also be expressed in differing strengths. There is no guarantee that one kind of conservative’s aesthetic preference for a certain stage in the past might be further back in time than the next conservative’s. Nevertheless, whether or not that conservative espouses violence as a means to exercise influence is very likely indeed a reflection of his attitude towards science and consensus-building.

Likewise, when a progressive stops being liberal, we can see a symmetrical outcome in a new quadrant of our two-dimensional space. Ideology takes hold. Orthodoxies are promulgated and reinforced. Dissenters are made pariahs instead of discussants, and change from the prevailing norm becomes increasingly difficult. Without the freedom of real scientific inquiry, mistakes are not acknowledged, let alone corrected. Structures ossify and rot, leading to degeneration and general systems failure. There may always be a clade of true believers, and these are the progressives for whom intellectual aesthetics and abstract themes always hold primacy to any other concern — even material ones, such as public welfare, safety and peace. The real disagreement here is in what constitutes “progress”. The further extremes on this axis tend to have a more abstract and distant-reaching notion of that principle than those closer to the origin. This leads to social engineering not as controlled experiment but as revolutionary fantasy.

The adjacency between illiberal progressives and illiberal conservatives is also porous. Again, the main motivator across the axis is aesthetic in nature. This is the realm of personal preference, idiomatic and particular. It may be difficult to see the adjacency between, say, Mussolini and Mao, but the leaders of illiberal movements are seldom if ever ideologically adjacent, as the level of commitment to ideology or a ruling principle necessitates a level of personal preference towards an aesthetic that is closest along the spectrum to a local median or average, a preponderance of sentiment. And these local medians, obviously, need not be anywhere near each other on the conservative-progressive spectrum. Nevertheless, those who are attracted to these movements and who are also not the most visible or important contributors to them may very well be distributed anywhere along this axis, preferring the past to the future, the far future to the near future or the far past to the recent past in whatever expression they see fit.

My hypothesis is that if you took everybody in any given society and placed them on a point in this two-dimensional space, the distribution would be relatively even — or, at least it would be a lot more even than the distribution in our current two-dimensional model. We would almost certainly, at any rate, not get nearly all of our clustering in two quadrants that were directly opposite one another. The benefit, one would hope, would be to better understand the dynamics that inform political opinions in different societies and aid us in building consensus around how to frame political debates and arguments in the most accurate and clarifying way possible. It would be to support an aim not inconsistent with science: to better describe the world as we know it, to whatever extent we are capable of doing so.