Somebody has invented a test to classify your political opinions, The Political Compass. It defines your politics as your position on two axes, an economic one running from extreme communism on the left of the graph to total free market capitalism on the right, and a liberal/authoritarian one running from fascism at the top of the graph to anarchism at the bottom. This isn’t new, I dimly recall taking the test or a similar one years ago, but an Australian blogger, Tim Lambert, has now prepared a chart of bloggers’ positions on the graph. Here it is. You’ll notice the Ranter down in the bottom left-hand corner – very leftist and liberal. Mind you, I’m not sure I deserve an economic score of
-7.12. That’s ridiculously left, especially as I’m a fairly moderate social democratic type really. The liberality score of -5.85 is about right, though.
What’s most interesting is that there are hardly any bloggers on his chart who aren’t both lefty and liberal. We all appear to be in the same moral stakes as Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, according to the example graph of world leaders on the Political Compass site. Hardly convincing. And why have none of the meat chomping, free marketeering, state shrinking warbloggers shown up? That ultra-liberal right constituency is empty. Lambert thinks it’s because they are too shy to read anything pinko. The survey has been criticised, but there’s another one around. So of course I took that one too.
Left/Right: -7.0998.
Pragmatism/Idealism: -0.0240.
The maximum variation in either direction is +16. That puts me neatly between Charles Kennedy and Tony Benn on the left/right scale, just right of Ken Livingstone, and slightly more pragmatic than either Red Ken or Benn. Now I have to say I think that’s considerably more accurate. There’s a chart of bloggers here for that survey.