Axis to grind

Scott reminds me of this test to chart out your “political compass” — where you lie on the economic left/right and the authoritarian/libertarian scale. It’s an interesting test, but for me it’s more interesting to see if I’ve “drifted” any.

I last took the test in 12/2001, at which time I was

• Economic Left/Right: -1.13 (slight economic liberal)
• Authoritarian/Libertarian: -3.13 (distinctly, but not radically, libertarian)

Which made me something of a libertarian leftist.

Taking the test again today, I came up with.

• Economic Left/Right: -2.13 (slight economic liberal)
• Authoritarian/Libertarian: -3.54 (distinctly, but not radically, libertarian)

Which makes me a bit more of a libertarian leftist, somewhere around Jean Chretien (ahem). Which surprises me a bit, since I thought I’d probably drifted a bit right, economically — but, then, again, it’s difficult to say how much “margin for error” the test has. I mean, even though it seems to ask a lot of questions, there were still a number of them that felt a bit forced in terms of selecting a binary choice when in fact they could be made into multiple axes of ideology themselves. And it would be kind of interesting to see how they fit some of the answers onto those two axes.

And, for that matter, I can’t say that any of the writers identified in my quadrant seem particularly attractive. (Noam Chomsky?!)

Hmmm. Thinking of how a certain amount of politics has played recently, I wonder if there’s a nationalist/transnationalist axis that would be of value here? That doesn’t necessarily map onto economic left/right, or authoritarian/libertarian.

Still, interesting.