Back in 2002, I noticed how the differences among people who everyone thought were libertarian broke out over the rights of businesses. Inspired by a SelectSmart quiz I saw in 2001 that included a question on punishing Napster, to separate "libertarians" from "left-libertarians", I thought that maybe we needed was a separation of the Napster stuff from say, Social Security in our political discourse.
In 1970, David Nolan invented the Nolan Chart, which expanded the representation of political beliefs from one dimension (far left, left, center, right, far right) to two dimensions (liberal, conservative, libertarian, authoritarian/populist/communitarian). He separated beliefs on economic issues like welfare, taxation, Medicare, federal/state funding for education, intellectual property, free trade, free markets, management vs. labor and discrimination in hiring practices from beliefs about cultural issues like marijuana, the draft, homosexuality, age-related restrictions, flag-burning, prostitution, gambling, the role of religion in government and the right to speak out against the president. (Gun control was a more complicated issue to fit into the chart.) It was possible to oppose the United States' welfare program and still want people to be allowed to burn the flag, making someone not liberal, or conservative, or centrist, but libertarian.
So my idea was, what about those of us who would like to get rid of Social Security but don't want to punish Napster? We needed a way to separate issues like weleare, Social Security, Medicaid, funding for the arts and taxation from issues like intellectual property, discrimination in hiring practices, union striking, Enron, whether businesses should be held accountable to the environment and Monolithic Corporate Culture. Those of us who agreed with the liberals on corporate issues but the conservatives on fiscal issues were not liberals or libertarians, we were anarcho-syndicalists.
So I wrote an article at Kuro5hin called "Politics in a Third Dimension". Using the Russian word for "eight", to represent the eight endpoints (paleo-conservative, totalitarian, anarcho-syndicalist, liberal, conservative, authoritarian, libertarian, New Labour), I named my chart the Vosem Chart and unleashed it onto the world. I made some fixes, took some advice, and finally it was ready for voting one night. I watched as the number of +1FP votes grew, then went to bed, and when I woke up the next morning "Politics in a Third Dimension" was on top of the front page.
People throughout the blogosphere commented on the Vosem Chart and article and mentioned it. "Kuro5hin is running a good piece on political classification systems. The overview of the field is more interesting than the model proposed," commented one person at
http://onepeople.org/archives/000219.html. Other writings on the Vosem Chart appeared in Italian and Portuguese.
One appearance of the Vosem Chart on the Internet was a Vosem Chart Selector for Americans at SelectSmart, by Sean Teonanacatl. Asking about such questions as the Invisible Hand of the market and female toplessness, Teonanacatl compares your scores for libertarianism, totalitarianism and the other six Vosem Chart categories. He changes the name of the paleo-conservative category to Traditional Societies. The page on results show the most common top match of people taking the test was liberal, while the second most common was anarcho-syndicalist and the third most common conservative. While the test may reflect anarcho-syndicalist biases of the creator just as many Nolan-based tests reflect libertarian authorship, another possibility for the high ranking of anarcho-syndicalist is that anarcho-syndicalists are the most interested in the Vosem Chart and willing to seek out tests on it.
At www.wam.umd.edu/~pbushmil/atomized_rj/2005/02/, someone has this to see about my article cached on a hard drive:
Political Typeology chart
This post is intended to be a companion piece to the previous post. While I was writing that one I remembered a diagram I had seen in Kuro5hin a few years ago.
Politics in a Third Dimension (Politics)
By 3ebnut Sun Jun 15th, 2003 at 01:57:28 PM EST.
Which I had saved - it took me a while to to remember where I had seen it and then pry it out of my hard drive. The poster there had taken a graph I had seen before. The Political Compass quadrant typology and had done something I thought quite clever with it; he added another axis. This added an entire new dimension to it. It also fit in with my thinking on this type of chart. In the K5 post he explains it in great detail so I won't go through all that. By way of orientation; though, beliefs - political beliefs lend themselves towards being easily represented by a line between contrasting extremes. The original chart had the tradition liberal - conservative dichotomy understood as the degree of government involvement in the economy, plus another for the presence of government involvement in personal comportment. Generally this arrangement is viewed as a rhomboid allowing left right politics to be read from left to right. Libertarians are pleased to see themselves on top, the bottom quadrant was renamed at some point totalitarian, from populist. This involved no real change. A three dimensional space is created by adding attitudes on corporate rights and power on a third axis. In a society organized as a market economy this is not only valid but likely a neccesary adjustment. When I think about political power I see two essential features about it. First unlike wealth perhaps power is in a very real sense a zero sum game (lester thurow) When you have more, I have less. Collarary to this, it is relative wealth and power that matters, because from this come the secondary powers to compel, preclude, and shape the choices available to others. When politicians talk about "getting government off the backs of the entreprenuer, the businessman, the corporation", I am left a little cold. To me it makes little difference where this power comes from. If it is taken away from government - where at least I have a vote, I know I will see it again, from corporations who do not ask me for my leave or from the workplace, where I spend half my life. It will come from those vectors quite oppressively and I will little to say about it.
If you compare the diagrams in the k5 piece and mine, you will see I made some minor cosmetic changes. I also want to emphasis that the corporate axis is not just pro and anti corporate attitudes but an ameliorating of corporate dominence; by other authority and moral value bearing cultural institutions. Such as religion, philanthropies, the judicial system and the like.
Fig. 3 the three axis Vosem Chart
o-----------------o-----------------o
/ | New Labour / | Authoritarian / |
+.................+.................+ |
| | | | | |
|'Liberal |'Totalitarian | |
| | | | | |
| |--------------+--+--------------+--|
|/ | Libertarian |/ | Conservative |/ |
|............... .+.................| |
| | | | | |
|'Anarcho- |'Paleo-conser- | |
| syndicalist | vative | |
| | | | | |
| o--------------+--o--------------+--o
| / | / | /
+.................+.................+
[ X ] Command v. Laissez faire, Economy
[ Y ] Personal freedom v. Gov't control
[ Z ] Anti v. Pro corporate or cultural institution primacy v. Corp.dominance
Karl Gallagher (Libertarianhawk) has used it in a discussion of the two-party system that prompts half of the eight groups to vote "left" and half to vote "right" at http://libertarianhawk.livejournal.com/4492.html. Anarcho-syndicalist is renamed as anarchist, totalitarian renamed as socialist, and authoritarian renamed, interestingly, as theocrat. I wonder if he had Bush in mind? Anyway, according to Libertarianhawk's observations, liberals, New Labourites, anarchists and socialists are aligned with the left, while conservatives, paleo-conservatives, theocrats and libertarians are aligned with the right. (The back and front were reversed in an http://libertarianhawk.livejournal.com/3418.html earlier post to make it easier to show the pro-corporate boxes, and Libertarianhawk has stuck with this convention.)
And who could forget David Bruhn's article right here at Kuro5hin, "Remodeling the Political Spectrum"? On Jul 9, 2005, two years after I wrote my article, another Bubonican (good name for Kuro5hin posters?) introduced a three-dimensional political spectrum. The first two dimensions, similar to those of the Nolan Chart, are cultural and economic, both of which are viewed as a question of hierarchism vs. egalitarianism. The third axis was the level of political authority wanted to achieve your goals. Those at the front of the chart want citizens to be protected from government militiamen who come to their houses with guns and ask them to show papers; they say "Don't tread on me". As you approach the back of the chart, you get to people who use coups, suppression of free speech, Gestapos and disappearing people to get their way with the government they want (people like Stalin and Hitler). Communists are moved vis-à-vis the Vosem Chart, being culturally permissive (left) on my chart but culturally hierarchist (right) on his.
So let's celebrate, eating some rum cake and drinking some Curaçao.
Or just argue over whether Di$ney has grown too powerful.
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