A Better Political Compass
We’re hurting ourselves in our confusion
Welcome to The Burn
This is a little black spot where I want to smolder away on politics, psychology, propaganda, culture, book & movie reviews, and probably a whole host of things.
In a past life I was a wildland firefighter to pay my way through university. After a fire has burned its way through the forest, everything is quiet and still, waiting for the living things to return. It’s black, with drifts of white ash and bright red hot spots. That's the burn - a surreal place that never lasts long. Burns start charred but clean, and get messy quickly as flora, fauna, and firefighters all start making their way back into the aftermath of a blaze. This Substack will be messy as well, but the rough plan is to focus on one goal (start writing again) and one question: What happens when mass movements begin to heat up?
I hope you find it a pleasure to burn
Most people are familiar with the political compass below.
It's outdated, which is not the same as being wrong. Left and Right define our political conflicts and cultural conversations even more than they used to, but is the widening gap between our two tribes best characterized as an economic argument? People are not cutting off family members and canceling their coworkers over differences in opinion on taxes and free trade.
The Y-axis needs a closer look as well. Authoritarian vs Libertarian is described as the social scale, but do we really use these terms to help classify people? Outside of the US, libertarian has very little meaning, and authoritarian is used to either describe hostile foreign powers or to insult political opponents; no one in the upper “authoritarian” half would ever use it to describe an ally. When we look at the current culture war, with all its podcasts, essays, and online tribal camps, this compass isn't much help. This compass is a holdover from the “end of history,” where everyone thought that liberalism had won the day, democracy was ready to be exported around the globe to eager recipients, and all we needed to do was be more libertarian, or at least anti-authoritarian. Hence, this chart from politicalcompass.org
There are a few interesting things to notice. The first is that while plenty of highly authoritarian countries are plotted out, there are no highly libertarian ones. The second is that the entire bottom left quadrant is empty. While the people behind this compass may have been able to find some examples to negate these two observations, the fact that they didn't (or couldn't) tells us a lot about the utility of the scale. The map is larger than the territory. Now, while there are certainly plenty of individuals who would fit down towards the ultimate end of libertarianism or somewhere within the bottom left quadrant, the fact that there are few countries is of some note.
Interestingly enough, here are the major AI LLMs plotted on the compass.
The map remains larger than the territory but now in reverse, and the ideal begins to reveal itself in turn. Check out the following from the Political Compass About page while remembering that the Political Compass was started in 2001 (the emphasis is my own).
“Our essential point is that Left and Right, although far from obsolete, are essentially a measure of economics. As political establishments adopt either enthusiastically or reluctantly the prevailing economic orthodoxy — the neo-liberal strain of capitalism — the Left-Right division between mainstream parties becomes increasingly blurred. Instead, party differences tend to be more about identity issues. In the narrowing debate, our social scale is more crucial than ever… We believe that, in an age of diminishing ideology, The Political Compass helps a new generation in particular to get a better idea of where they stand politically — and the sort of political company they keep.”
Unplug and ask yourself, are we really in an age of diminishing ideology? I certainly don't think so. Down the rabbit hole, in this little burnt-over corner of the internet, we find the following truth self-evident: this is an age of ideological expansion. This is perhaps the most important red pill, which can be taken by both left and right: progress out of the end-of-century consensus is possible.
Political Compass V1 has liberalism demarcate the Y axis. All that is meant to be discussed is the speed upon which we arrive at the supposedly inevitable end state of neo-liberal capitalism. In this sense, we can see both left and right as two cheeks of the same backside, creating the paradigm that has defined the right for decades now, where “conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.” Especially if all the AIs are in agreement that the libertarian left is the optimal quadrant! But why would people ever settle for inevitability?
Dostoevsky explains our second self-evident truth.
Even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!
People won't be played like piano keys. Bedlam is preferable to boredom.
Idle history long enough, and someone will come along to rev the engine, if only to hear things get louder. It wouldn’t matter if you could prove to people that neoliberal capitalism really is the best form of government beyond a shadow of a doubt; they would reject it as an endless stretch of sameness is ultimately intolerable. Francis Fukuyama acknowledged at the end of The End of History that late-stage liberalism would have challengers; he just thought that none of their refutations would pose a serious threat.
But what would a compass that takes the possibility of that refutation into account look like?
First, I don't think everyone but the Liberals are mad. Now, let me provide some other clarifications and reconceptions necessary to understand Political Compass 2.0. We must also understand this compass as intra-western, charting people's positions within the West, helping us make sense of our neighbors, as opposed to foreign nationals outside the liberal paradigm.
Left & Right
The names remain the same, but this dimension should no longer be characterized as an economic argument but rather a moral and social one. We build our social tribes around a shared morality, and our identities stem from tribal affiliations. Below is an image from Jonathan Haidt’s (
) must-read book The Righteous Mind, charting out the differences between left and right in terms of their moral foundations, creating two very different social tribes at its tails: the left tribe, which values caring and fairness above all, and the right tribe, which cares about these two foundations as well, but also factors in Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.
The easiest way to understand the difference between these two tribes is by their acceptance of hierarchies. The left wants to dissolve hierarchies, and the right wants to make them ironclad, or at least understands that they are inevitable. The farther out to the left one goes the more concepts like equity and statements like “from each according to his ability [the moral foundation of Fairness], to each according to his needs [and now Care]” start to make sense. This reveals the flattening of the hierarchy, where all are equal in their responsibilities and requirements. The farther out to the right, the easier it gets to rank people by any quantitative metric and statements like “One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” seem irrefutable. Moral foundations are trickier to distill from right-wing quotes, as the right balances all five elements in a roughly equal distribution. Still, authoritative statements that take the form of universal laws about natural orders code heavily right, as do appeals for subsumption to religious sanctity or the purity of a body politic, such as “You must sacrifice every thought, every ideology for the good of the nation and for the serenity of our fatherhood.” In both these right-wing statements, however, the hierarchy is clear: the strong over the weak, the nation over the individual. At the far end of the right, the Sanctity of the hierarchy is most important, and its Authority must be respected with total Loyalty.
Progressives & Conservatives
Here, things get more complicated because it requires reformating outdated conceptions of common words. Typically, when people talk about progressives today, they mean someone who is far-left, while a Conservative is anyone who is center-right. This provides more confusion than clarification while also tilting the terminology in favor of the liberal bottom left quadrant. If progressive means left, then isn't the right, by definition, regressive? Much like an authoritarian, a right winger would never refer to a friend as “regressive.” Also, how can liberals be opposed to conservatives if what the conservatives are trying to conserve is… liberalism? There also remains the open question of what exactly progressives are trying to progress to…
In our new paradigm, progressives are people who are focused on new possibilities for the future, while conservatives are people who want to return to or retain the past. Realize that neither of these two modalities actually differentiates whether someone is on the left or right wing. There are many left conservatives who wish to return to those halcyon days of end-of-history liberalism, just as there can be right-wing progressives who want to upend liberalism and replace it with monarchies, network states, theocracies, and all sorts of other possibilities (progressives on both the left and right are more challenging to classify based on one standard idea because their new ideas are myriad and evolving unlike the conservatives already articulated position). This makes our new Y-axis an Innovation Scale, rather than a social one. Progressives attempt to create new ideological alternatives while the conservatives try to preserve the established order. Again, neither of these two modalities dictates whether someone is left or right-wing.
It is worth pointing out that innovation is not good in and of itself, as most experiments fail. At best, it is necessary when circumstances demand evolution or extinction. This is to say that neither the progressive upper half nor the conservative bottom of Political Compass 2.0 is “right,” just as neither the left or right sides are correct simply for being left or right. This is a compass that can’t tell you where to go.
In Political Compass 1.0, neo-liberal capitalism demarcates the Y axis of Authoritarian - Libertarian. For Political Compass 2.0, however, the progressives are trying to innovate something different from the liberal paradigm, which is being preserved and promoted on both left and right by the conservatives. Now, liberalism defines the X-Axis, where everyone below it is a liberal, and everyone above is post-liberal - exploring the new frontier and trying to create a cohesive new ideology out of various competing ideas and interests.
TLDR: The X-Axis is a Moral Scale based on different moral foundations. The easiest way to understand it is by acceptance of hierarchy, with the far left striving for total equity while the far right strives for a perfect caste. The Y-Axis is an Innovation Scale, with Progressives generating new ideas for the future while Conservatives try to preserve the past. Anyone below the X-Axis supports liberalism, anyone above it does not.
Let’s now examine the four quadrants in some detail to explain this dynamic. Bear in mind that these are scales, so there are gradations of validity within each quadrant to the heuristics and profiles being applied, and simplified ones at that. People have spilled much ink describing just one corner of one quadrant of this compass. There will be some left conservatives who accept some hierarchies, they would plot closer to the Y-Axis. Likewise, there will be right progressives who are less open to innovation than others; they would plot closer to the X-Axis.
Right-Wing Conservative
These are your standard issue conservatives. Represented in the US by the Republican Party (sans Trump), Fox News, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and the Heritage Foundation in America, Right-Wing Conservatives are conservatives as you know and love/despise them, the ones who can’t help but go one about how things just ain’t like they used to be. They are fundamentally liberals, just ones who wish the rate of change to be slower. Many would disagree with this statement, but their inability to slow down or reverse the rate of change no matter how loudly they call on history to stop indicates the true nature of their quadrant (they play the heel) and why they always seem to lose on cultural issues. Reformating the quote from above: Right-Wing Conservatives are just Left-Wing Conservatives driving the speed limit. They place the nation and god above the individual (Pro-Hierarchy) and seek to preserve and protect the American liberal experiment (Anti-Innovation).
Left-Wing Conservative
These are your standard issue liberals. If you consider yourself “politically homeless,” a “centrist,” have ever thought, “I didn’t leave the left, the left left me,” or can identify with the central figure of the following graphic (made by
and shared widely by Elon Musk), you also probably belong here, just closer to the center of both the X and Y-Axis.
Left-Wing Conservatives believe in liberalism and share much of the same moral foundations (emphasizing care and fairness) and end-state goals as left-wing progressives; they would just prefer that change is made within the liberal paradigm rather than at its expense. They are very concerned with being “on the right side of history” which they believe invariably bends towards justice.
By now, liberals have lost most of their institutions to the progressive left wing. Still, they used to be represented by the Democratic Party, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and organizations like the Center for American Progress. Many of them now stagger about feeling as neoconservatives once did - mugged by the reality of their replacement at the hands of the left-wing progressives. They believe in liberty and equality for the individual above all (Anti-Hierarchy) and that liberalism is the best and final form of government as improvements can best be made within its framework rather than outside illiberal challengers (Anti-Innovation).
Left-Wing Progressive
These are the Woke. They are also often called “leftists” or "progressives” by our left-wing conservatives (aka Liberals) to differentiate themselves from them. Left-Wing progressives do not believe in liberalism but find liberals to be useful idiots in supporting their cause of flipping every conceivable hierarchy in favor of those at the bottom due to their ability to prey on shared moral foundations. Much has been written on the emergence of the left-wing progressives, who have replaced the left-wing conservatives in their own institutions (such as the ACLU or at Harvard) and repurposed said institutions to their progressive ends. Like their right-wing progressive counterparts, they do not believe in neutral institutions, preferring that institutions enforce their equity-at-all-costs worldview. They world in terms of friends vs. enemies, waging war on all three other quadrants (as well as within their own) by any means necessary rather than argue their points as both left and right-wing conservatives attempt. Much of their nascent “woke” ideology is incoherent, but this provides them with endless zeal to create a fully articulated and implementable way (Pro-Innovation) of realizing a radically egalitarian state (Anti-Hierarchy).
Right-Wing Progressive
This is the “New Right,” the hardest-to-define quadrant of the four, due to its relatively new prominence. The right-wing progressives include the neoreactionaries, national conservatives, catholic integralists, online semi-anonymous intellectual shitposters, a large portion of the tech industry or Balaji Sirnirvaisan’s “Grey Tribe” (who
and also describe as right-wing progressives) and various other subfactions. All are united in their either skepticism or outright rejection of liberalism, which they see as being, at best, a naively utopian impossibility too easily corrupted by left-wing progressives. Right-Wing Progressives don’t really have any institutions yet but are working on building some that are resistant to invasion from the other three quadrants. They exist primarily on podcasts, X, a few sporadic events, some Substacks, and in a couple of magazines. A few of them sit atop Silicon Valley.The following five points from
explain the basics of the Right-Wing progressive mentality, and are largely shared by left-wing progressives as well.A belief that the socially liberal (left) and economically liberal (right) political parties of the West form a single ideological regime that is responsible for all manner of social pathology.
A belief that there is no such thing as a neutral institution.
A belief that Woke ideology isn’t an aberration of liberal democracy but an inevitable result of its shortcomings.
A drive to proactively assert moral values through the state - individual rights are subordinated to communitarian values.
A belief that an elite ruling class is a naturally occurring phenomenon. They see no point in fighting or mystifying this fact and think we should embrace it and try to ensure our elites are worthy of their station.
Another shared trait between the left and right-wing progressives is their penchant for infighting and purity spirals as they try to distill their intra-competitive ideological claims into a cohesive ideology while also policing their boundaries against liberal interlopers. Unlike the left-wing progressives, right-wing progressives do not find their conservative counterparts to be useful idiots but rather counterproductive idiots. This is because they think that what the right-wing conservatives are trying to conserve is liberalism, leading many in the “New Right” to call for an explicit rejection of the “conservative” label. The right-wing progressives believe that liberalism is by nature entropic, dissolving the natural hierarchies that keep the world spinning on its axis (Pro-Hierarchy), and the only way to prevent inevitable chaos is to create a new method of governance that instantiates a supreme figure like a god, king, ubermensch, or machine, who can stop this (Pro-Innovation).
Wars are always waged over lines. The front is fought in the space between us and them. But when the map is outdated, with the lines not only fading but false, time is wasted separating friends from foes, and friendly fire is inevitable. This new era of culture wars requires a new way of thinking about political cartography. The fog of war cannot continue to hide the shifting territory beneath us. As battle lines are drawn under a smokescreen of new ideas and ideologies, the definitions of the past require an update or at least a re-articulation of who we call what and why.
The latter half of the 2010’s and first few years of the 2020’s were a battle of the left-wing conservatives vs the left-wing progressives. I believe that the latter half of the 2020s and the early 2030s will be a battle of the left and right progressives. If I’m right, things are going to get hot. Only time will tell.
Very interesting reading! I definitely also agree that the original "Political Compass" is outdated and quite biased. There was another attempt made by John Nerst to update the Political Compass, which I also found interesting to read :
https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/01/the-tilted-political-compass-part-1-left-and-right/
https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/25/the-tilted-political-compass-part-2-up-and-down/
This is really good, and I plan to revisit it.
One suggestion is that I think re-appropriating the old terms might cause confusion. It might be better to label the axes of 2.0 differently: something like "innovation" and "tradition" for the Y axis, and "equity" and "hierarchy" for the X axis.
Admittedly, that would make the X axis a little more one-dimensional, but you seem to be using "left" as mostly synonymous with equity and "right" as mostly synonymous with hierarchy anyway.
Again, great piece.