#politicalaxis — Public Fediverse posts

The Left/Right Political Axis is A Fundamentally Broken Concept

So another fun thing I've been thinking over that affects a lot of the ways I and most other people characterize politics is the left/right political axis. I think a fundamental flaw with conceptualizing politics with a left/right political axis is that this supposedly single axis is actually the collapse of a whole bunch of different axes and so what moving left or right actually entails is really hard to quantify. 

Like take the example of someone who is a ecofascist eugenicist homonationalist TERF. There are probably going to be some people who look at those positions and say 'oh, this person is far right for sure' (me for one) because of the fascism, eugenicist beliefs, nationalism, and transmisogyny (TERFS can be and often are generally transphobic, but they are definitionally transmisogynists). But there are going to be others who think of these positions as mostly cancelling out and so maybe consider this person practically a centrist even though they are quite clearly an extremist. And then there will be some people, like maybe a gas guzzling climate change denialist who is anti-gay and a universal misogynist, who are going to look at this person and probably characterize them as far-left. 

And there's not really any good way to choose weights for any of these things. It's also not really possible to ignore this conceptualization because of how omnipresent it is. But this example shows that you can take the same person, ask three different people to characterize them, and get three wildly different answers. This system is basically operating almost entirely on vibes.

So that's a real mess.