The Political Spectrum Revisited.

For some time I have been reviewing and mulling over the “Political Spectrum”. An early reference was Wikipedia but I found it wanting in that most of the diagrams summarising the various ideas are two dimensional except for the Vosem Chart. The latter I have to agree with in that we are dealing, from a society perspective, three primary measures: society, economic and government. These can be summarised as describing degrees of Freedom.

It has taken me some time to try and get this in an easy to understand form, but I think I have something that works. What I have done is modified the Vosem Chart idea by setting my 3 axes as being a measure of Personal Freedom, Economic Freedom and Democratic Freedom (the reciprocal being increasing Government control). Then I gathered what appear to be the dominant Political Groupings, created a table and then gave each a subjective score:

	Freedom
Category	Economic	Personal	Democratic
Anarchist	10	10	10
Libertarian	9	9	8
Conservative	6	7	6
Liberal	5	5	5
Social Liberal	3	3	5
Socialist	2	2	4
Fascist	2	1	1
Communist	0	0	1

An Anarchist believes in total personal and economic freedom with no government control. As “Democracy” is all about freedom of personal choice then the situation where there is no government, I give a Democratic score of 10 with Personal and Economic freedom scores also being 10. Libertarians typically are those who understand the need for common services and thus limited government yet still value maximum personal and economic freedom. Classic “Liberal” is typically middle of the road so that is how I scored it. Because “Conservatives” usually want a bit more economic and personal freedom as well as smaller government than classic liberals I scored them accordingly.

One class that has bothered me, and something I have previously written about, is where does Fascism lie? For the last few decades it has been a catchall term for the “alt-right” and the “extreme right” but the “right” is a term firmly connected to those who value maximum personal and economic freedom with limited government. That does not fit with the Fascism of the early 20^th century where personal freedom was greatly limited under severe government control yet with some economic freedom in that individuals outside of government still ran businesses (some economic freedom). Now I understand that why I was so troubled by this problem is that the extreme left (Communists and Marxists especially), in an effort to redirect attention from their cruelty have used successfully “Projection” to apply their flaws on the innocent.

Here is the result in graphical form:

I must point out that I did not intentionally have the “left” side of the graph being populated by those ideologies that favour reduced personal and economic freedom along with maximum government control! But that is how it works out.

Now I admit this isn’t perfect, but it does a better job, I think, that other schemes I have seen. A wild card is that there is a force that corrupts the right leaning ideologies and that is extreme environmentalism. The sad thing is that these people do not look at the Human Race as being a part of the global ecosystem but instead as a blight that needs to be eradicated. Think of Jim Jones and the mass suicide he encouraged his followers to commit at Jonestown in 1978. 

In conclusion I need to make some admissions. The first is that the “Liberal Party of Canada” (LPC) is not “liberal”. It was at one time but has been degrading itself over the years into a group of socialist’s thanks primarily to the infiltration of the Greenies (Environmental Activists). When you get right down to it they have also infiltrated the NDP to the point there is little difference ideologically from the LPC. Ironically the “Conservative Party of Canada” (CPC) now fits the more classic liberal description. That leaves the “Peoples Party of Canada” (PPC) as the only right of centre party in Canada and one that so far has not been corrupted by the Greenies. As I see it the PPC is the best choice for Canada but since when does logic decide the outcomes of “democratic” elections.