Parties Within the Parties

When it is election time and you are asked to cast your vote, you will see candidates from the two parties that we all know, or maybe one or two from a third party such as the Libertarian party. As I discussed in an earlier post it is only possible for there to be two main parties, but this does not mean there is only two possible platforms of perspectives.

The Political Compass

There was a tool created to measure where your perspective falls in a two by two chart. This demonstrates the variety of individual perspectives within each party. This tool can also be used to measure leaders of our government or others. It is broken down into two dimensions, one measuring your economic view (closer to socialism or free market), and the other dimension being your social dimension (ranging from libertarian to authoritarian). 

Here is the link to take the test yourself: https://www.politicalcompass.org/test 

Authoritarian Right and Left

Believe it or not there are a good amount of people of each party who want more of a authoritarian government. There are also the individuals who whether they know it or not support this kind of government, with the ideals of a stronger and bigger federal or state government. Some extreme examples of people who represented the authoritarian right would be Hitler and Mussolini. Some extreme examples who represented the authoritarian left would be Stalin and Mao. Today you can see these views represented in individuals of the right in the shape of projecting their faith onto others and a strong sense of egocentrism involved in nationalism and militarization. In contrast you can see these views in individuals of the left today with strong views of socialism, extreme re-distribution of wealth, and government sanctions on speech.

Libertarian Right and Left

The other side of the social dimension is libertarian. The libertarian perspective of these two parties is the opposite of the authoritarian. It is safe to assume that this perspective is were majority of Americans fall as majority of the principles are similar to the foundation of our democracy. This perspective in both parties is a concentration on individualism and individual rights. Extremes of this perspective on either side would represent the idea of anarchy, where individuals are able to do as they pleased without any consequence. But a commonality of this perspective would be rule of law opposed to the rule of a single individual. Variation from parties can take shape in the way in which people perceive the boundaries of individualism or the freedoms an individual has with their money.

The economic dimension pretty much consists of some of the ideas I touched up on above about how much money an individual can have, what one can do with their money, how one should be able to obtain money, and in what ways should money be distributed. If any of you would like to know more on this subject I could write a separate blog on the issue.