While not perfect, I think the compass is an improvement over simple left-right positioning. Political leanings are difficult to illustrate on a two-axis chart, never mind a single line. To compound things further, people want to break things down by party as if Democrats are left and Republicans are right. That's a terribly misguided assumption. The compass model's Y-axis is authoritarian to libertarian and the X-axis is purely economic.Mr. Glass wrote:In this country we look at politics on a spectrum scale ranging from left to right. In reality that may be all we need, but I've tried considering the issues using a "compass style" form of evaluation. In other words, do we have more than two stances on our country's major issues? Do we possess 3rd and 4th ideas that solidly stand up to the stances of the left and right? If so then yes, one could lean left or right, or "up" and "down". Take gun rights as an example - You're either a card carrying NRA member or you want regulation reform. What would a third party's stance be? What lobbyists would support that stance?
Personally I believe that MOST Americans are Libertarians with either the big "L" or the small "L". "Malleable Centrist" in you will. But since there are no major news outlets identifying with this demographic, we decide which of the two existing parties best describes us. Party narratives also sway the average American voter because the average American voter is simply ignorant or uncaring. I don't mean that in an insulting way - my father never cared because he was too busy busting his ass to take a stance on transgender bathrooms and shit.
Democrats and Republicans are so close to each other in some areas that they often don't even present two different stances on their own. What kind of stance is ending the war on drugs? It's fiscally conservative and socially liberal, which goes in the bottom right quadrant. Where are the Democrat and Republican parties on this? Authoritarian and in favor of continuing to waste our tax dollars on this failed experiment.
The Big L (not Larry Johnson) as a party has issues of their own, but I think more people could get on board with a socially liberal and fiscally conservative stance if it's clarified as, "I mind my business, you mind yours, and our peers should be the driving force of social aid and services rather than a faceless entity like the government." That sounds great in theory, but a lot of people are also assholes, whether through upbringing or jadedness. That's where the idea of helping others because you want to help tends to fall apart. Inevitably, you end up with big money assholes telling little money assholes what to do, and the people who aren't assholes are wondering what the fuck just happened.
The Libertarian party tends to avoid this problem altogether by ignoring that people are lazy and/or shitty. It also has an image problem to the point where a lot of people think the motto of the party is, "Smoke weed every day and fuck everything else." Some people who claim to be libertarians are actually anarchists, and I guess they flock to the Libertarian party because anarchists still need to congregate. Biases and creative editing aside, there was a clip on Samantha Bee's Full Frontal show showing the Libertarian convention where the candidates were asked about whether they believed people should be required to have a driver's license to operate a vehicle. Gary Johnson actually got booed for saying yes. Who the hell boos that?
I agree that a lot of people have better things to worry about than politics. I do as well. Although my comments in this thread imply that I'm pretty invested, I really don't care about politics beyond expressing my frustration with people I know who are too myopic to realize that they are either incredibly biased or incredibly obsessed with narratives that don't actually affect their lives on a daily basis. I've always believed in getting your own shit together before trying to fight for causes of others.
I also believe in researching matters before speaking out on them, so along the lines of dcapodic's thoughts, I find image memes to be an incredibly ignorant means of discourse, but also quite fitting for the slacktivism rampant on social media. It allows people to delude themselves into thinking they're enlightened. It's the cheapest way to act involved, but it's a huge disservice to people who actually want to be more informed. This year is showing me that people actually respect each other's religion far more than each other's politics, which is funny because I used to consider religion to be touchier topic of the two by far.
Ultimately, positions of power are often sought for greed and exploitation. People who have a genuine desire to aid society while still maintaining some level of dignity and self-respect generally aren't seeking to become part of the political system.Mr. Glass wrote:Consider this - Minorities really don't have major financial backers/lobbyist in DC. If they did things would be very different in the inner cities. This is the same reason why The Green party has no real power in DC. Sucks but the rich and powerful make the rules.