"WHEN FASCISM COMES TO AMERICA IT WILL BE WRAPPED IN THE FLAG
AND CARRYING A CROSS." -SINCLAIR LEWIS

Monday, October 26, 2009

Left vs Right: A Chart Of Extremes

Click the chart to enlarge. It's a fairly comprehensive comparison although being a self-described Libertarian-Socialist I personally don't subscribe to the popular perception that everyone in the United States is either totally on the left or on the right of the political spectrum. I agree with several of the tenets on the conservative end of the spectrum yet most of their core values seem way too extreme and anti-intellectual for me while I agree with most liberal values although several of their core principles strike me as extremely weak and ineffectual. Which I suppose goes a long way towards explaining why I belong to neither major political party.

(via)

2 comments:

Eclectic Radical said...

Interesting chart. It breaks down in trying to be too finely detailed, in my view.

It also makes a pretty fundamental error in that the mainstream of the Democratic Party is a centrist or even center-right coalition rather than left-wing. Likewise, since the end of the Cold War has dampened the enthusiasm of traditional European socialists and since the rise of the Green movement has created a very new and different European left wing, the Labour parties of most countries have moved aggressively to the center and are no longer 'left-wing' at all. Both British 'New Labour' and the Israeli Labour Party's shift to the center as left-wing politics have broken down in that country are prime examples.

one L said...

This chart is extremelt confusing (at first) because the red is the left and the blue is the right. It really threw me off.