The real political spectrum (part 1)

By now it’s almost a cliché to say that the traditional left-right political spectrum is a gross oversimplification. There is ample research, going back decades, showing that political spectrum spans more than one dimension.

In particular, the simplest adequate model to describe the US politics splits the spectrum into two axes — economic and societal:

While it may seem strange to many people, especially those who live under the US two-party system, that “progressive/liberal capitalists” and “conservative socialists” exist in addition to “progressive/liberal socialists” and “conservative capitalists”, studies and polls show that all four combinations are not only common, but, on average, about equally common. This fact has been particularly popularized by the Political Compass. In fact, up until mid-20th century the Democratic party was largely conservative socialists, while Republicans were classical liberals (free market and free society). If that still sounds strange, recall that it was the “pro-business“ Republicans who freed the slaves in the 19th century, whereas the Democrats were the racist ones.

Many authors also acknowledge the existence of the third axis — foreign policy, split between “doves” and “hawks”. In US this axis seems underdeveloped, perhaps because many Americans aren’t very interested in foreign policy, and even when they are, there isn’t much disagreement about it. In some other countries, however, foreign policy may be more important than anything else. In fact, up until about 2010, the left-right orientation in the state of Israel was based almost exclusively on the position regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (in recent years things became far more complex, however).

But even three axes seem to be insufficient to describe the complexities of the political discourse, so more have been proposed. The 8-values test adds the liberal versus authoritarian axis, while 9-axes test, as its name suggests, proposes five additional ones.

However, the reality can be even more interesting, since some of these axes can interact with each other in surprising ways. As the first illustration of this, let’s look at the societal axis only:

At first glance, it looks pretty simple and binary. Conservatives on the Right believe that the rules of society have to be based on time-honored traditions. They are against racial and gender equality, against abortions, in favor of capital punishment, and more. Progressives on the Left believe that rules must be based on science and reason. Their views on the above issues are a polar opposite of those on the Right.

Of course, this is true for the “pure”, abstract Left and Right. Most actual people may be leaning toward one side, but can also accept the position of the other side, at least to some extent, so their actual positions is more nuanced and diverse. But taken to the extreme, the Left-Right dichotomy seems pretty straightforward. Or is it?

Let’s look at one specific issue — same-sex marriage. The Right is against it, because: a) it’s repulsive and unnatural, and b) marriage must be heterosexual because that’s how it’s always been. On the other side of the spectrum, the Left is in favor of it, because: a) science shows that there is nothing wrong or even unnatural about same sex relations, and b) everyone has the right to be happy in their own way and you can’t deny this right just because it offends you or because it goes against your beliefs.

While the pure Right uniformly rejects the Left’s appeal to science, the second argument (the right to be happy) may be acceptable to some on the Right, because tradition doesn’t really deny the right to happiness, so maybe if those “homosexuals” keep out of sight, we can pretend they don’t exist and let them do to each other whatever “perversion” they want. But others on the Right reject this reasoning, because if everyone can do whatever deviance they want, the society itself, they say, would break apart.

Now, let’s assume that the Left prevailed and same-sex marriage became a reality. The next day, a gay (i.e., happy) couple walks into a bakery to order a cake for their wedding (in reality the second event happened before the first, but that’s beside the point). The baker, who happens to be a conservative, refuses. The progressives are understandably furious and want the baker punished and forced to make the damn cake. The Right, who are uniformly on the baker’s side, happily accuse the Left of hypocrisy. Indeed, the Left’s winning argument was about the freedom to do what you want (and not to do what you don’t want to do) even if that offends others, right? The baker didn’t deny the couple’s freedom to get married or even the freedom to have a cake (and eat it too), since there are plenty of progressive bakers around the town, who would be more than happy to oblige. So really, those on the Left demand punishment only because they were offended, and that’s a textbook hypocrisy. Some on the Left realize the contradiction and are ready to back down, but others respond that the baker’s behavior is more than just offensive — it’s corrosive to the law and the society itself. If every homophobe is allowed to discriminate based on sexual orientation, the laws become meaningless and the society itself would break apart.

So now we get an interesting picture. Both Left and Right aren’t as monolithic as we thought. Each side has a faction (though probably a minority) for whom the freedom to live as they please is more important and universal than both tradition and progress. More importantly, these factions apparently agree with each other on both issues, over which Progressives and Conservatives would rather tare each other to pieces. Since both these factions value personal liberty more than anything else, while all others value progress or tradition more than freedom, it’s fair to call those factions Liberals. Liberals aren’t a uniform bunch, though. Left-leaning Liberals preach tolerance and peaceful co-existence even with “racists and sexists”, and their motto is “Live and let live”. Right-leaning Liberals don’t see tolerance as a reliable instrument of co-existence and instead prefer physical separation from “infidels and perverts”. Their motto is more like “Trespassers will be shot”. Still, given a polarizing political issue, they use their shared passion for freedom to arrive to the same decisions, i.e., to meet in the center:

But is it truly a center? True “Centrists” are expected to be moderates who stand between the extremes, creating a compromise, a balance of both sides. But our Liberals are more than just a combination of two sides — they have their own unique principle — the desire for individual freedom, and they can be pretty extreme about it, as we will see soon. Moreover, both Left and Right are now at odds with the Liberals, and for the same reason! While the Left and the Right oppose each other, they do agree on one thing, at least in the given model — conformity. They both believe that the rules of society, whatever they are, must apply to everyone, or else “the society will break apart”. In this respect, both Right and Left are polar opposites to our “Centrists”!

This apparent similarity of the Left and Right extremes of the political spectrum has been noted for decades in various contexts, giving rise to the “Horseshoe Theory”, by which a political axis is actually a curved line, making Left and Right edges closer to each other than to the Center:

While this idea is intriguing, it doesn’t explain well why Left and Right are both similar AND opposite to each other. But it does bring up one valuable insight — the political complexities can’t be solved using just one dimension. This brings us back to the beginning of this article, where we saw that political spectrum is multi-dimensional to begin with. But now it looks like even the supposedly one-dimensional societal spectrum comprises at least two axes: constancy (or stability) and freedom. This would allow us to have not just Left and Right, but also Top-Left (progressive liberals) and Top-Right (conservative liberals):

But wait, if Top-left and Top-right agree on both issues above, whereas Bottom-left and Bottom-right disagree with each other, then the Tops must be closer to each other than the Bottoms:

This makes sense, since both “Tops” share a common value, freedom, which neither our Left nor our Right seem to care much about. If we “distill” this value, separate it from other values, we can reconstruct a “pure” Liberal — a person who doesn’t care at all what other people do or do not, as long as it doesn’t infringe upon their own freedom. From such an extreme point of view, the Left-Right dichotomy becomes meaningless, since, from a pure Liberal point of view, conservatives and progressives can coexist without affecting each other. So, the extreme Liberals converge on a single point, centrist from the Left-Right perspective, but on the extreme Top end:

In other words, instead of a binary Progressive-Conservative axis, we actually have a Progressive-Liberal-Conservative triangle:

This figure seems to be biased in favor of Liberals, though. They are literally superior to others, and given the fact that they managed to find a common ground between the other sides on both preceding issues, perhaps they are superior indeed. Or are they?

Let’s look at another complicated societal issue — prostitution. This is actually one of the issues on which Progressives and Conservatives can find common ground without the help from Liberals. For the Conservatives, prostitution is bad because it’s reprehensible and goes against traditional morality. For Progressives, it’s bad because it causes crime, suffering, diseases, and yes, it’s also immoral… from progressive perspective, because it demeans women, and progress is supposed to empower the women, not to perpetuate their abuse. So, the Liberals must be happy that both Conservatives and Progressives finally agree with each other on something, right? Not really. In fact, pure Liberalism is actually in favor of legalizing prostitution. Sure, forcing a woman into sexual servitude is unequivocally bad, but if a woman wants to do this and no one is forcing her, then what’s the problem? If prostitution is properly regulated, then crime, suffering and disease should disappear from this field, just like repealing Prohibition released the alcohol industry from the mafia grip. However, such arguments don’t seem to to sway either Progressives or Conservatives, so prostitution remains illegal in US.

This means that the Top is definitely a third opposing option, rather than some kind of a middle ground. But it’s a more complicated opposition than a simple binary one. In this “trilateral opposition”, each side opposes the other two for the same reason, but also has something in common with each of them individually. Specifically, we may say that Liberals and Progressives are united by Reason against the irrationality of traditionalism, Liberals and Conservatives are united by the desire for constancy and stability against rampant progress, whereas Progressives and Conservatives are united by the desire for conformal homogenous society against the chaos and immorality of extreme liberalism. In effect, we have not two, but three political axes here: Reason vs. Tradition, Progress vs. Stability, and Liberty vs. Conformity. But the interaction between them collapses what should have been three distinct dimensions into just two, or rather one-and-a-half:

Again, this doesn’t mean that the Top is superior in some way. In fact, all the relationships are completely symmetrical, so all three points are completely interchangeable in terms of their position in the triangle.

Of course, as mentioned earlier, most people aren’t exactly “purists” or extremists, so they could be positioned not just in the corners of the triangle, but anywhere on its sides between the corners, or even inside the triangle, for those who have a little bit of all three of those groups in them. If we want to account for every conceivable combination of these ideologies, we can split the triangle into 3 zones:

In this model, the true centrists, those who don’t hold allegiance to any particular ideology, would be in the center of the triangle.

But why is any of this important when it comes to politics?

Simply put, a three-way split is more democratic, more constructive, more efficient, and less polarizing than a two-way split.

Consider a typical Left-Right split, most evident in the US two-party system. Let’s say that Progressives, Liberals, and Traditionalists have more or less equal representation among the people (which may well be the actual case). If there are only two parties to choose from, say a Traditionalist and a Progressive, then the Liberals, a full third of the voters, have no satisfying representation. Having no other choice, they become more or less equally split between the two parties, each party having about 50% representation each, with the narrow majority being determined by arbitrary fluctuations among the swing voters, who in this model are likely to be extreme Liberals (Libertarians?). Let’s say that the Right got a small lead in a given election, specifically 52 to 48 percent. Of those 52, 33 are Traditionalists and 19 are Liberals. Since Traditionalists have a huge lead within this party and Liberals have no choice but to follow them due to the “party loyalty” or something like that, same-sex marriage is off the table, even though a whooping 2/3 of the electorate supports it (in this model). In fact, Traditionalists could have it their way with less than 26% of public support. When 26% make the rules against the 74% majority, that’s not really a democracy. This, naturally, extremely frustrates the Left, especially since things could’ve been totally different, if only they could “flip” just a few percent of the voters. So, the next time they must be more aggressive, decry the Right as “deplorables” or something. Of course, this situation is totally symmetric and in the next cycle the roles are likely to be reversed, creating a self-feeding loop of political polarization and mutual hatred, until, ironically, the society really does start to break apart under all this effort of keeping it together. By the way, an equivalent scenario would have worked the same way, if the two parties were Traditional and Liberal or even Progressive and Liberal, so these problems aren’t the fault of any one of the three groups.

But what if there were three parties of equal size, instead of just two? Then, we should get the results outlined in the examples above. Progressives would “win” LGBTQA+ marriage and the war on prostitution, Traditionalists would “win” the war on prostitution and the right to deny service to “homosexuals”, while Liberals would get the freedom to deny service based on ideology and the freedom to marry whomever you want. Notice that everyone thus achieves a whooping two thirds of their goals, and, importantly, every decision is passed by a whooping 2/3 super-majority! Even more amazingly, no one in this scenario had to compromise on anything! Every party voted exactly as its voters wanted it to and kept 100% of the promises it could possibly keep. All this despite the fact that no party even comes close to a majority, having only 1/3 of the representative power.

Sure, the above three issues (same-sex marriage, freedom of speech, and prostitution) were cherry-picked to achieve this perfectly symmetrical and optimal result, and even that assumes that those issues are of equal importance, which isn’t necessarily true. But, given a wide enough array of atomic (i.e., truly binary) societal issues, it stands to reason that, ultimately, they will coalesce into something approaching the 2/3 “win” for everyone.

In my previous article I suggested a “proportional compromise” as a better model of democracy than the “tyranny of the majority”. But if the above “tri-sectional” split really provides a way to satisfy everyone in most cases, and to satisfy everyone equally, and to make this happen without any compromises, then it’s obviously a much better system than the “proportional compromise” and much easier to implement too.

Moreover, with our electorate split more or less evenly between three parties, the elections should become far less toxic. There is little point trying to portray “the other side” as an evil enemy, because: a) there are now two very different “enemies“, so you’d need two separate campaigns with twice the cost, b) even if you convince voters to abandon “them”, these voters might just go to the other “them”, in which case your effort is wasted, c) it wouldn’t get you absolute majority anyway, because you’re too far below 50% for that, d) you’ll need both of the other parties to fulfil 2/3 of your goals, so it’s a bad idea to antagonize either of them, e) it’s now clear that you have something in common with both of “them”, so portraying “them” as absolute evil backfires on you, it implies that you are partly evil yourself.

And all we need to achieve all this is to allow a freedom to vote for an ideology best suited for every voter, since this tri-sectional split seems to be more natural anyway, as described in the examples above.

But what about other political axes, like economy or foreign affairs? Could they also form such triangles and provide us with the same “everyone wins 2 out of 3 times” scenarios? Or perhaps only the societal dimension is complex enough to require more than two sides? Spoiler alert — the answer is yes — every conceivable political axis (and even problems beyond politics) have at least 3 positions, each being both the combination and the opposite of others. And even that’s not all. There are political positions that go beyond the triangle, creating even more complex forms. But that’s a story for another time.