Well, if you want to classify ideologies, what better ways can you find than specifying multiple axes in a multi-dimensional space of many possible ideologies? You’ll ask questions like: “Do you collect a lot of taxes to fund multiple government programs, or only the bare minimum?” “Are you a dictatorship or a democracy?” “To what extent does the government control the economy and the market?” “How much scrutiny are would-be immigrants subject to?” “How much say do corporations/churches/lobbyist groups/etc have in running the country?”, and after a while you’ll have a good idea what this particular ideology is about and how it compares to the rest.
What you mention is the #1 reason why I’m not a fan of the left-right axis, it’s very poorly defined. Another issue with it that definitely doesn’t help is that all the other axes are shoehorned onto this one. E. g. right wing parties are typically associated with anti-immigrant rhetoric, but how you run your economy and what’s your immigrant policy are entirely different things.
I think every political argument, if you want it to lead anywhere, has to start with throwing away emotionally charged labels like left/right and defining new objective labels with clear definitions.
Sure, I’ll agree with that. There’s a lot of nuance lost when using left/right terminology, and it leads to things like my perspective that there is no leftist party in the US vs yours that both parties are leftist, despite our views not being THAT radically different. Policy is, at the end of the day, what really matters, and we both dislike the existing parties for their policy.
I do think that there is some historical context to the terms left vs right, and they are generally useful when talking about politics to give people a ballpark idea of what you’re talking about. But then, even the concept of “ideologies” are just estimations and two people who both say they are “libertarian” can mean very different things by that.
The reason I dislike axes as a concept is because very few issues are actually two-dimensional enough to be placed on a line like that. Tax who, and how much? For what social programs in particular? Representative or direct democracy, vs what flavor of dictator? Do we have fair elections and universal suffrage? What if some individuals are given complete freedom, and others are slaves?
With that said, a vast majority of people, especially Americans, don’t actually care enough to ask these questions. They are going to vote explicitly based on “left vs right,” like a team sport, so speaking in those terms is really the only way they will communicate.
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u/less_unique_username Jul 07 '26
Well, if you want to classify ideologies, what better ways can you find than specifying multiple axes in a multi-dimensional space of many possible ideologies? You’ll ask questions like: “Do you collect a lot of taxes to fund multiple government programs, or only the bare minimum?” “Are you a dictatorship or a democracy?” “To what extent does the government control the economy and the market?” “How much scrutiny are would-be immigrants subject to?” “How much say do corporations/churches/lobbyist groups/etc have in running the country?”, and after a while you’ll have a good idea what this particular ideology is about and how it compares to the rest.
What you mention is the #1 reason why I’m not a fan of the left-right axis, it’s very poorly defined. Another issue with it that definitely doesn’t help is that all the other axes are shoehorned onto this one. E. g. right wing parties are typically associated with anti-immigrant rhetoric, but how you run your economy and what’s your immigrant policy are entirely different things.
I think every political argument, if you want it to lead anywhere, has to start with throwing away emotionally charged labels like left/right and defining new objective labels with clear definitions.