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09philj
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09philj
2,825 posts
Jester

Given the success and usefulness of this thread, I decided to make a similar one for politics. What are your political beliefs and why, and also what political party you vote for, or would vote for if you could. Note that due to conflicting views as to what left and right wing are across nations, (Obama is right wing from my perspective, but not from others) taking this test would help, so we have an objective measure. Here are the scores for a variety of world leaders:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/images/internationalchart.png
and mine:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/facebook/pcgraphpng.php?ec=-6.88&soc=-7.28
I'm pretty left wing left wing, as a result of a combination of my wish that everyone should be free to have the chance to succeed combined with my view that without government support to create a more even playing field, this won't be the case. Being right wing is, in my view, for the selfish or naive.

Unfortunately, the UK electoral system is biased towards parties that get a lot of votes in localised areas, so voting for my ideal party of choice, the Greens (the only party in the UK to even get into the same quarter of the chart as me), would essentially be wasted in most of the country. Thus, I would probably vote Labour, because they're the biggest party which is more left wing, but not much. (Their leader is Ed Miliband, shown on the above chart. He is quite close to the main right wing leader, David Cameron.)

  • 31 Replies
gaboloth
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gaboloth
1,612 posts
Peasant

I can see why most of the European and Western leaders place so far into the right, but in my opinion they're a lot higher in the authoritarism/anarchism scale than they should be. After all, developed Western countries are places where freedom of opinion, expression, and political participation are widely recognized and respected in most situations, and where everyone has the chance to distance himself from the mainstream, estabilishment-endorsed way of life basically as much as he wants.

If I think of what an anarchist revolutionary from the 18th century had to look forward to from a revolution, I'd think of things like the abolishment of an estabilished moral code effectively enforced by the state and the police, tolerance towards minorities and innovation, room for free self-expression and for a free public political debate: all these things are essentially given for granted by our modern democracies, and all an old school anarchist would have to wish if he lived now would be the abolishment of the political representation system.

So, the way I see it, there's no reason to place our democratic leaders so high in the authoritarism scale, and so close to where fascism would be: doing that would mean ignoring all the progress that has been done up to this day to turn societies that were only democratic only in a strict political way, like for example Great Britain in 1870 or so, into societies that are deeply, culturally and ideologically tolerant and democratic.

also my score was 3.0 leftist, and 6.8 anarchist:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/yourpoliticalcompass?ec=-3.00&soc=-6.80

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