Thursday, August 16, 2007

I Just Found Out I'm a Stalinist


Via Crooks and Liars, I came across this political map that purports to show where the presidential candidates stand on a grid with two axes, authoritarian/libertarian and communist/neoliberal. I was surprised to see that all the candidates except Kucinich and Gravel were clustered in the upper right quadrant as business friendly authoritarians. Even Ron Paul was in this cluster. So was Hitler. Romney appears to be the most Hitler-like.

I followed the links to the site of Political Compass and took the test myself. I came out as a collectivist authoritarian in company with Stalin. I reckon that the test is seriously flawed, not least by an apparent assumption that agreement or disagreement with a premise means that the test taker supports government action to make it happen or keep it from happening as the case may be. For example, I agree that globalization should benefit individuals more than multinational corporations, but I don’t propose to make this happen by force. And I could see where someone might think that fornication was immoral but would not propose to do anything about it. I don’t see that having an opinion on a lifestyle issue necessarily means that you want to impose that opinion on others.
But who am I to argue with science? I reckon I'll go start a famine somewhere.
UPDATE: Good news! It turns out that the graphic I was looking out was not my personal score, just an exemplar, so I might not be a Stalinist after all. I'll have to retake the test and see if I still hate it. Meanwhile, I would like to extend my sincere apologies to any kulaks and other peasants I may have purged during my Stalinist episode.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Heh...

Out of sheer boredom I tried it. My score is 6 south from the middle, sitting on the dividing line between "left" & "right". Unintentionally accurate on their part really -- hell, I've already called myself an "anarcho-centrist" before.