So today, I'll be ranting a bit about politics- specifically, about parties and the political compass, and the issues that those concepts have.
A lot of people nowadays will call themselves either left or right (or liberal/democrat or republican/conservative, based on geographic location). "The Left" is associated with political correctness, gun control, higher taxes and more government assistance for people. "The Right" is associated with no gun control, low taxes, and little government involvement in everyday life. The problem is, that's not how it works. On a political compass, left/right indicates economic policy. The left of the compass is the more socialist side- with high taxes, healthcare, and government regulations on businesses. The right is the more capitalist side- low taxes, no government programs, and few regulations on businesses. Issues like gun control are independent of the left/right axis, so a true political compass is not one dimensional.
This might seem trivial, but it's actually pretty significant. Someone who believes in a free economy is assumed to also want, for instance, very loose gun laws. On the other hand, someone who believes in a more regulated economy is assumed to want very tight gun laws. People take the idea of left and right to mean two distinct sides, and think that supporting one policy associated with one side automatically means supporting all of them. It gets worse, though.
A lot of people will blindly follow politicians, almost religiously, based purely on the inaccurate idea of a 2-dimensional political compass. I've seen countless arguments on twitter about this. As soon as someone calls out a politician, someone will assume they support a politician on the other side and call them out based on that. People seem completely incapable of seeing flaws in a politician who claims to be in the same group, in terms of left or right.
There's one other problem, probably even more significant, with this mindset: there's no good group. Anyone who fits either group is endorsing things that are problematic, and working to polarise the political climate and make it harder for the sides to work together.
There are issues with the left- some policies they support on the matter of political correctness actually go against freedom of speech. Leftist policy also focuses so strongly on helping minorities, that they can take it too far and end up alienating those minority groups.
There are issues with the right, too- they endorse freedom to the point where it can cause problems (for instance, criminals obtaining firearms, allowing hate speech, etc.), and are often accused of being racist, or otherwise biased in their view towards some groups.
But wait- neither of those descriptions fit my earlier definition of left or right. And that's not without good reason. The above problems are actually unrelated to the left/right axis of the political spectrum. They're more to do with the other axis (libertarianism vs authoritarianism). Even then, that doesn't mean anything- all of the issues I listed are unrelated to one another.
There's only one point on the political compass that I would call good- it's the point that an individual will be placed based on their own personal beliefs, and through the use of common sense, logical deduction and knowledge of political science. That point varies, of course, but it is made good by the fact that it was chosen by critical thinking, and not by propaganda or a left vs right mindset. People need to consider issues one by one, rather than just picking a politician in a vaguely similar part of the graph and following them religiously.
Anyways, that's gonna be it for today. If you've got any thoughts on this, please leave a reply- but for the sake of everyone involved, be civil about it. Hopefully you enjoyed this rant!
I was so tempted to call this post "Politics 101", based on the title and day number...
