Boxing the Political Compass

Kos in an excellent post today discusses how the Democratic Party may now be a better home for libertarians than the GOP, since the Democrats are doing more of a job of protecting personal liberties than the Republicans are these days. It is interesting to visualize how this plays out in a more sophisticated representation of political space than the traditional one-dimensional left-right line. One such depiction may be found at the Political Compass. (Spoiler alert: if you are at all inclined to take online quizzes, I recommend you go to this site and take the quiz there before reading further).

The depiction at the Political Compass maps political positions in terms of two dimensions. The horizontal axis represents an economic dimension in the traditional sense from left to right, but the depiction adds a social dimension as the vertical axis. Authoritarian positions are at the top of the diagram, and libertarian positions are at the bottom of the diagram. The axes divide political space into four quadrants: the libertarian left (today’s progressives and Greens), the libertarian right (traditional libertarians), the authoritarian left (Marxists), and the authoritarian right (e.g. the territory of the neocon right wing).

I think most people in the U.S. today are arrayed on the diagonal stretching from lower-left to upper-right. There are relatively few traditional libertarians, and even fewer Marxists. But the diagram suggests questions for Democratic strategists. In this era of the PATRIOT act and other such perfidies, has the authoritarian-to-libertarian social dimension become more important to most people than the economic left-right dimension? Is there enough of a bloc of voters who are either libertarian left or libertarian right that the Democrats should reach downwards on the diagram—remaining centrist on the economic dimension, but becoming more libertarian on the social dimension, becoming as Kos puts it, the party of personal liberty? And for the traditional libertarians and the Greens, is it now time for a libertarian-Green alliance?