The Broken Compass
Remagnetising Politics
I hate political discussions. Most of them turn into contrivances about why something is left/right/problematic/degenerate and therefore good/bad/cringe/based/woke/whatever.
Most people believe in these labels. They accept that political beliefs fall along a spectrum (or spectra) when they say things like “I’m a social liberal and an economic moderate” or “I’m economically left and socially progressive.”
There may be some truth in this, but to identify your political beliefs like this is to tacitly accept that everything can be boiled down to a few dimensions. This is a loss of nuance, a simplification. It’s like categorising trees based solely upon how tall they grow.
We do a lot more of this than is good for us. We begin to see left/right as the political reality itself, rather than a mere description of it. And when descriptions are oversimple, they distort more than they clarify.
If you believe in the objective reality of left vs. right, you fundamentally believe political beliefs can be measured like you measure distance with a ruler.
So why don’t we just drop left/right terminology altogether? In its place, I propose the centimetre as the unit of political fanaticism. Our silly reductionism would be much more obvious when we said things like: yeah bro, I’m about 1cm libertarian and 3cm progressive…
Binary thinking and oversimplifications must have always existed. Still, I can’t help but wonder if the political compass has something to do with just how prevalent this is in political discussions.
The political compass asks you a few questions. Based on your answers, it plots you on a two-dimensional chart, next to politicians, parties, and thinkers. One axis of the chart describes whether you are economically left vs. right (communist vs. libertarian). The other describes whether you are socially left vs. right (liberal vs. authoritarian).
Here’s what that looks like, with actual examples from www.politicalcompass.org:
According to these charts, Winston Peters in 2020 was 2cm away from being literally Hitler on the authoritarian axis. Both he and Judith Collins led parties more authoritarian than Robert Mugabe, notorious bleeding-heart liberal, who turned his country into a one-party state with arbitrary land seizures. From my cold dead hands, Judith.
The questions are also ridiculous. One asks you whether you believe in astrology, with a positive answer being linked to authoritarianism:
There is a psychological linkage between determinism and authoritarianism. The astrology believer may hold very liberal social views in other areas, but this does not alter this more authoritarian aspect within his or her cluster of attitudes.
Yeah, nah.
If this all sounds absurd, it’s because it is. The political compass is not useful for measuring the relative distance between beliefs nor for describing their absolute positions.
Today you can find lots of criticisms of this website, so maybe I’m taking it too seriously. But this thing was everywhere back in the day. I encountered it online when I started hanging out on the internet in… 2003? It was also shown to me by a teacher in college in 2011. The website even has a page filled with the gushing praise of journalists: “A way out of the political woods”, “The map of political faith”, “May give young people a better understanding of the core concepts”.
Everyone that was thinking about politics knew of it. And simply because of this mind-share, I can’t help but wonder if it’s had some kind of lasting influence on how we frame politics. For laypeople like myself, it offered an understanding that was easy to grasp and superficially plausible.
This is all speculation. We’ll never know for certain. What gives me little hope though is that we still cling to these charts, even as we recognise that they’re not actually telling us anything useful. Our response to them is never this one sucks, let’s stop doing these but this one sucks, if only we had better questions, or different dimensions…
In the run up to the 2020 election, political scientists from New Zealand collaborated with Canadian data scientist company Vox Pop Labs to build Vote Compass. You answer questions about policies and political beliefs and it dumps you on a chart next to the parties in the election.
Here’s what it looks like if I answer neutrally to every question:
The first curiosity is that answering neutrally to everything doesn’t put me in the middle of the chart, as you might expect, but somewhere in the top right. But there are many other shortcomings to this test, a few of which I’d like to discuss in more detail.
The first one is the position of The Opportunities Party (TOP). Their major policies include:
an overhaul of our electoral system, including the establishment of a formal constitution and an upper house
flattening the income tax and introducing a land tax
paying a universal basic income which would replace a good chunk of our current needs-based welfare payments
Compared to what National and Labour usually offer up, these are all huge policies with enormous ramifications. They also blend some elements traditionally seen as “left” with some traditionally seen as “right”.
TOP describes itself as “radical centrist”, a vision of politics which values pragmatism, expertise, and evidence. It wouldn’t be too wrong to call it rule by academics and civil servants; their proposed constitution, for example, is the one written by legal scholar (and ex-Prime Minister) Geoffrey Palmer.
This is not unlike the political style of some European countries, such as Portugal or Italy, where it is common to select ministers from professors, businessmen, teachers, unionists, and researchers. At the time of writing, about 50% of the cabinet in those two countries are independents with no previous political experience.
TOP also has echoes about it of the New Zealand Liberal Party. They too believed in the primacy of a land tax, which existed in some form until 1990, when New Zealand’s economy underwent a broader restructuring. They also had a rather flexible stance towards ideology, while still being rooted in the broader movements of 19th century liberal radicalism.
Vote Compass conveys none of this. Forced to stick a label on it, TOP is apparently basically the same thing as Labour. Yet in both ideology and praxis, Labour and National are arguably far more similar to each other than either is to TOP. As Marama Fox once put it: “red undies, blue undies; same skidmarks.”
Where the political compass had authoritarian/libertarian, Vote Compass has progressive/conservative. At first you may think this captures a real cleavage in society based on moral issues like abortion, euthanasia, and marijuana, but again it lacks nuance. What if you’re for some of these but against others? What if you support some, but only in specific circumstances? What if you support some in theory, but don’t like proposed legislation?
One of the most important factors in social politics in New Zealand is the conscience vote. This tradition, still very much alive in both major parties, has it that an individual is free to vote in accordance with their own personal beliefs on certain social or moral issues; it’s not the party as such with a stance on these issues, but the individuals within it. Again, Vote Compass can’t express this.1
And what about New Zealand First? While eternal leader Winston Peters is undoubtedly a social conservative, his MPs have been a mix, and the party’s policy has been, for a while now, that conscience issues should be put to a public referendum. When this hasn’t happened, the party has voted as a bloc against the legislation, on principle.
All of these objections and clarifications should help us realise that a political compass is always going to grossly simplify matters. Choose different axes and different questions, get different answers. The outcome tells you very little about the political reality and almost nothing about beliefs or history. If you see two dots on opposite ends of the compass, all you can really infer is that they’re unlikely to form a coalition with one another.
As a voting aide, the political compass is only useful in the aggregate, which is to say, when it avoids actually telling you anything concrete about reality. As a description, it is reductive, showing only a few tensions which soak up too much of our thinking. These labels become a proxy for real political discussion: What are your values, stranger? Who are your friends and enemies? Are you left or right, based or woke, authoritarian or liberal? Are you with me or against me?
Politics becomes this aimless pastime of drawing and redrawing categories and boxes. Political discussion becomes the mere act of shoving things into one box or the other, so we know whether to applaud or condemn it. At no point do we stop to discern what is actually being talked about, which would require us to look to our history, society, law, culture, economy - those things which give politics its substance.
A broken compass can be worse than nothing. If a compass is demagnetised, you might confidently follow it into the wilderness. In that case, you should throw it out.
Next time you have a political discussion with someone - especially someone you disagree with - try explaining your views and understanding theirs without trying to fit them into a left/right, progressive/conservative, us/them box. Instead of repeating arguments you’ve heard elsewhere, give concrete examples and specific reasons drawn from your own life. I guarantee it’ll go better than you think.
We are slowly losing the conscience vote. It started with the Greens, who have never had moral conservatives in their party. NZ First later adopted a policy whereby conscience issues were to be put to public referenda. And while both major parties still honour the conscience vote, moral conservatives are now much more likely to be found in National than Labour, whereas there used to be decent amounts in both parties.