First off, I believe you fall into the trap Jonah Goldberg described within his book, Liberal Fascism, in describing Hitler and Mussolini as "far-right." The Nazi party, after all, was the National Socialist Party. Mussolini was a socialist his whole life. This explains your misjudgment of the communists within the soon to be former Soviet Union as the conservatives. I'll give you credit for noting how there exist any number of far-right pols described by journalists as compared to almost no far-left pols, even though the far-left position clearly outnumbers the far-right within the USA.
Second, using the terms left and right is today no longer descriptive of the state of affairs within the US, at least so far as the right goes. I'll avoid a prolonged discussion of how right moves left, and left moves right, only to say that the left has remained far more leftist while the right has moved, if not to the left, into an area of incoherence. Trump fits almost none of right wing descriptions save for the fact he was run by the GOP. (Because communism dominated the USSR for nearly 75 years does not make adherents to it conservative, rather that there existed then and now damn few ideological conservatives within either the USSR or Russia.) That Trump has changed the GOP remains indisputable, but the question remains, by how much? I would submit that almost no one has been changed by Trump, other than the most mindless of voters. Ask them what Trump stands for and you'll usually get the standard litany of conservative positions which they've long held prior to Trump. Trumpism is merely anti-leftism, even if that is not actually who Trump is. Biden, on the other hand, is merely a grifter made more respectable than Trump, if only by virtue of longevity upon the political scene. Both are clearly dingbats. Neither have what could be described as a vision for the presidency, which we've not seen since at least Reagan, though GW Bush could be given credit for entering office with it and then overcome by events. I'll give you Obama in that regard as well, though he was so strongly rebuked by the electorate it only really shows itself within his disastrous foreign affairs policy. The rest merely wanted to be president as a capstone to a career.
Journalists are in the business of selling newspapers and the profession has markedly declined even by that standard. Given their generally leftward leanings it remains unremarkable that "far-right" has become a ubiquitous, if meaningless, epithet. We'll deal with whence journalism at some future date.
I try to remind myself the Founders anticipated electing a dingbat to high political office, and by all standards the US has done just fine in doing so. Absolutely we could have done far better, which ought remind us only to thank God we live within a republic and not a democracy. As I go about my normal daily activities I'm struck by how little the presidency has affected me, with the sole exception that the spending keeps on climbing, and that the American people do not want to hear about it. I'm sort of over the pre-2016 election, when it seemed the GOP coalescing around finally addressing the entitlement programs which have beyond bankrupted us. The only thing which can now be said is that, with the election of 2020, we'll somehow get what we deserve. It's apparently necessary to descend as far as possible before correcting our course. It'd be nice to have journalists describing accurately the moment, but there exist so damn few left I'm not sure that possible. And that's far more a problem among the small time media pubs than within the big coastal media, if only because small media, much like representative democracy, is the working end of the equation, where ideas and thoughts are born.
I'm in the purple quadrant, as I expected. 4.38 Left/right, and -1.64 social libertarian/authoritarian. So, somewhat to the right of Claire economically, but not far off socially. But I could have told you that already!
I am surprised I'm not a lot closer to Romney. I think that can be explained by the number of issues I didn't feel I understood well enough to give my best answer.
It makes me crazy when the press almost never refers to the American government as the republic that it is. Trump and Biden are close to each other on the Authoritarian scale. Where the test got it wrong is Biden should be way over on the Left side of the right-left scale.
I think the Authoritarian - Libertarian axis is wrong and blocks out a 3rd axis. I would suggest Left-Right, Authoritarian-Decentralizer (can't think of a better word, but there must be one) and Traditional-Libertine. Separate measurements for preferred style of government and preferred social structure.
I scored one box below you on the test. I would not have guessed that.
You could add "MAGA" in all its various forms to the list at the top of the article.
Another irritating thing pundits do is saying something is "destroyed" or "will be destroyed" when what is being talked about is "damage". Over and over they say that the school closures during the pandemic destroyed children's lives when what actually happened is that children's lives were damaged.
Claire, you speak to my heart. Imprecision and the tossing about of labels is rendering these terms meaningless.
I am engaged in a lifelong debate with my German spouse about the meanings of “right” and “left.” He uses them in a very pre-1989 West German way; the political spectrum (in any country) is no longer so, and I doubt that it ever was, to be honest.
Perhaps I’ll have to get my armchair socialist to click through the political compass.
(I was shocked by my score, which put me farther into the green quadrant than I would ever have believed.)
So how does your spouse think of "right" and "left" in a pre-1989 West German way? Is someone like Helmut Kohl in his mind a member of the right. I would BTW argue that Helmut Schmidt was almost a Thatcherite before Thatcher. Yes Schmidt was on the "right" flank of the SPD but his economic policies in the 1970s would have been considered very right leaning internationally prior to Reagan and Thatcher(No price controls, No exchange controls, etc).
Absolutely classic: CDU (Adenauer, Kohl, Merkel, Merz) is “right” and SPD (Brandt, Schmidt, Schröder, Scholz) is “left”. FDP also “right” because it governed with the CDU gor ages. AfD clearly “on the right” while Greens “left.”
Something I have noticed for a while is that the political right as a movement has gotten a lot more "angry" than it was in Ronald Reagan's day. Perhaps this is more a function of Reagan being an outlier to traditional right/conservative thought, there were plenty of angry conservatives prior to Reagan. Additionally, while I know Claire will probably disagree with this but even in Reagan's time Margaret Thatcher was a far angrier politician than Reagan was. One might call modern conservatism in the Western world especially the English speaking world to be far more Thatcherite in temperament than Reaganite.
Suggestion: there is no single third explantory axis, and hoping that there is may be part of the problem. As Max Weber should have said, "All liberal democrats are alike; each illiberal democrat is authoritatrian in their own way?"
More substantially, if you think that we're at a point of inflection or breakdown of a previously stable equilibrium, wouldn't you expect a degree of chaotic experimentation as political innovators look for new avenues? A single common differentiator seems unlikely on the face of it. (Just don't say "paradigm shift", that's even poorer form than "to impact", which apparently emerged in English literature in the 16th century as a verb long before it was nouned)
(I landed about where I expected, central south-west around (-3,-3) )
Yes, I was thinking the same thing: We should expect some radicalism--some chaos, as you put it--since clearly a previous equilibrium has been destabilized. And radicalism is not always a bad thing: I'd be happy to see genuinely new ideas from a politician, so long as they're good ideas: We could use them. I'd love to see a president, for example, lead the effort to create new institutions to replace the UN Security Council and other postwar institutions that appear incapable of making order out of chaos. That would be radical. I'd love to see some radical thinking about reining in our tech oligarchs. Or constitutional reform to the end of preventing Congress from being hijacked by the insane asylum.
Of course these models are imperfect and of course you can't precisely map every single liberal democrat on a graph. The value of creating a better model, though, is to gain more information about our fellow citizens' political instincts and beliefs. Modeling this in two dimensions gives us a fuller portrait of what the test subject believes than simply asking, "Are you on the left or the right?" And I suspect three dimensions (if the third axis were properly chosen) would allow us to predict, pretty well, what candidates the subject is apt to support, what political initiatives would appeal to him, and what he might or might not find politically tolerable. I don't think the simple left-right distinction does that well at all these days.
1. Definitely yes to new ("radical") solutions to new or re-emerging problems - not least post-austerity economic stagnation in Europe. But this is an important part of the Liberals vs Caesars debate for me - the failure of "traditional" liberals to go beyond the same old fixes and come up with convincing solutions to these problems gives electorates good reasons to look elsewhere (Personal hobby-horse: Popper's Open Society was meant to be superior to closed/authoritarian models *because its openness would generate better technical, social & political ideas* allowing it to pull ahead - can we really see this outside of narrow tech in the last 20 years?)
2. We do need a more sophisticated model of political preferences, but doesn't your re-Caesarian thesis suggest it's still way too early to tell? If pervasive web technologies have ushered in an epoch characterised by hyperscale network economics (eg Facebook) and an upending of the previous settled dynamic of the cultural infosphere (eg... Facebook again), with a new political class racing to catch up, then we don't even know what will stick, let alone how to taxonomize it.
As an example, I can't help feeling the "Trump Reaction" is more last gasp of the old than first sign of the new. A legacy media celebrity whose strongest appeal is to a shrinking disaffected demographic - that'll run in the resentful '20s but not much beyond. After Trump incinerates the GOP, someone younger with a full head of hair and more sense than Vivek the Clown will show up pushing some new nationalist proposition free from overt authoritarian trappings, and perhaps a new pattern will emerge? Until then, who knows...
This exegesis on liberal democracy, best expressed in the US Constitution, is brilliant. It should be required reading in Western news rooms, not that any journalists will pay attention: the argument challenges "the narrative." I was just reading a piece by George Will, "The Consciousness Project," which was published in National Review (alas, hidden behind the paywall) - I'm sure you've read it, and your arguments are very much in alignment. (He grounds his case in natural rights; you don't use the term, but the root and branch of your positions overlap nonetheless.) Your definition of "liberal democracy" defines classical liberalism quite nicely, and I believe most Americans accept its premises, even if we couldn't articulate it very well. Unfortunately, those responsible for keeping the public informed and aware of the implications of same are failing miserably at their job, as you note. That, along with its downstream ramifications, is the true threat to the nation, along with the probable nominations of a narcissistic megalomaniac and a cognitively impaired geriatric with little will, wisdom, or instinct to protect and defend liberal values. (Thank God neither were President on December 7, 1941. Most of us would be speaking German, if they were, and you and I wouldn't have been born.) FWIW: my Political Compass score placed me in the middle of the Right-Libertarian box. I know: you're shocked, shocked.
I disliked the Political Compass questions. They were slanted to discourage people from supporting liberty in general and economic liberty in particular.
We need a pithy term for what you call liberal democracy. The original meaning of the word democracy was direct rule by the citizens assembled. Examples include the Athenian Assembly and New England town meetings. The original meaning of the term has _not_ gone away. You hear it when people such as David Axelrod describe minority obstruction as tyranny of the minority. The new term should strongly imply playing by the rules, and the fact that victory and loss are only temporary.
The Framers distrusted democracy. They feared a tyranny of the majority. I think that unfettered majoritarianism is a prime feature of any flavor of populism. We originally described our federal government as a constitutional republic, with an elected legislature and executive. Calling it a democracy was semantic judo by the Evil Party. The Stupid Party fell for it.
The chief difference between Joe Biden and DJT is that the former is a conventional nose-to-the-trough career Democrat promoted far too high, and DJT is in it for the ego boo. Neither cares much for the rules. Biden is less risky, because he at least pretends to follow them.
Firing an arbitrary half of the federal government is indeed a radical proposal. Anything more judicious would require a bureaucracy of its own, probably recruited from the federal government.
We have grown the federal government, particularly in domestic policy, far more than is good for us. The efficiency and effectiveness of any organization are inversely related to the length of the management chain and the complexity of its mission.
Clear, simple domestic policies cannot fit everybody in the USA. Attempts to tailor policy to fix that pose their own problems. James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers #62:
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow."
Our electoral college is one example of an “anti democratic” mechanism. It requires that our chief executive get support from most of the country. The Senate is another. Most of the critics of these want unfettered majoritarianism . We can see the results of that in our state governments. The large urban centers tend to mistreat the rural areas.
I thought the rest of the paragraph explained my reasoning. Apparently it did not.
The USA is not technically a democracy. We have a constitutional republic. There are many things that government is forbidden to do, no matter how many people want it, without going through a deliberately cumbersome process which gives reasonable assurance that it has widespread support. That process misfired dramatically when we passed the 18th amendment, but we eventually fixed it.
Have you never been wronged by the result of a majority vote? We don’t want a democracy. We want liberty under the law. We want the freedom to do as we choose with reasonable confidence that we will remain unmolested. Government is merely a tool for that purpose. The US federal system was, until recently, the best ever invented. Don’t mistake the tool for the objective.
We need a new, pithy term to describe what we want, because the word democracy leaves the door open for unfettered majoritarianism.
Thank you Claire for taking an interest in political word definition. I have had the same complaint for several years. I have a similar complaint about Gender activism. It steals existing words and changes definitions. I am willing to sit down with a linguist and Gender activists to work on creating new words for their ideology. This would resolve much societal conflict about Gender.
I think Jonathon Haidt of NYU is creater of political compass test. I scored almost bulls-eye center but slightly south and slightly west, near 2022 French candidate Hidalgo. I think I know problem with test accuracy per Trump/Biden grid locations. (1): If someone else took test as surrogate for Biden and surrogate for Trump, then outcome is “John Doe’s opinion of Biden/Trump.”
(2): I had difficulty with some questions, which I resolved by predicating question on condition X. But, next test subject may predicate same question on condition Y.
Fantastic article. I see a similar conflation of terms describing the left: progressive, liberal, woke, socialist, communist, radical, far-left, left etc.
"A normal right-wing politician respects the rules and norms of liberal democracy, and prioritizes these rules over policy outcomes, whereas a far-right politician does not. (This distinction also applies to the left and far-left)."
By this definition would you agree that the Biden Administration is far-left? There's extremely good evidence of past and present violations and intent to violate the 1st ammendment (see Michael Shellenberger among others). They apparently have very little respect for the free speech that characterizes liberal democracy. Nor for that matter do most western governments these days. Most explicitly Ireland.
"nor... do most western governments these days..."
Parochial/peripheral thought: the US First Amendment (and the debate it now occasions) are outliers in broader Western democratic terms. Here's the text of Art 10 of the ECHR (confusingly linked to Art. 11 of the EU Charter):
"1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
The qualifications are immediate and quite broad. Does that mean most European countries (like Ireland) aren't really liberal? That's not how it looks to most liberals here, who I think are sanguine about unavoidable tradeoffs between rights to free speech, privacy ("family life"), security etc. Bottom line for me would be: I can cope with government intervening in what it sees as a crisis of public safety, but not with it censoring information about what it did so we can't hold it to account. (FWIW the current UK government is also alarmingly illiberal, but it's even more spectacularly ineffective, limiting the actual harm done.)
These are slippery slopes but I don't think they can be avoided in practice. A lot of the "But how dare you - First Amendment!!!" debate in the US sounds to me like a fight for the narrative (usually about Hunter Biden, it seems), not a broad, good faith pitch for freedom. (This is distinct from the narrow legal question of whether the first amendment was violated in any particular case - it may well have been; but it may also be a blunt instrument.)
More seriously - I think it's interesting at least that this really isn't seen as a big deal in Europe (the Irish fuss is a headline about Musk and Trump, not about the Free Speech Ireland movement).
There is somethign totemic about the First Amendment that doesn't appeal to those who don't have it. I don't *think* that's because they are all illiberal at heart. I may be wrong...
If you watch Matt Taibbi’s testimony before Congress, you’ll see a surreal moment where a congresscritter refers to “legitimate journalists”, implying that he wasn’t.
Yes, what WigWag said. Shellenberger's rights weren't violated, but he has done a lot to spearhead how the Biden Administration has violated them. Including directing social media companies to engage in censorship on their behalf. Which is clearly illegal, because the government cannot accomplish through private means something they are forbidden to do themselves.
I would be very interested to hear your response to Owen. Who’s a bigger threat to democracy; MAGA Republicans in the United States or Leo Varadkar and his colleagues in Fine Gael (and their coalition partners) in Ireland?
"Writing on his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, Mr Musk said the proposed legislation was a "massive attack against freedom of speech".
The businessman has more recently said he would file a legal action to "stop" hate speech laws in Ireland.
Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar offered a blunt response.
"He cannot just challenge a law in the courts and certainly not one that isn’t even a law yet," Mr Varadkar told the Sunday Independent., external
“I suspect he doesn’t know what he means and is just showboating.”..."
Tom, it’s not just Ireland that’s slowly but surely rejecting liberal democracy; it’s your country as well.
Apparently you can be arrested in the UK for merely standing and silently praying near an abortion clinic if where you’re standing is within the confines of an exclusion zone. Women arrested for praying silently; it’s a great look.
The question has been raised whether J.K. Rowling has engaged in hate speech for merely doubting that trans women are actually women and not men.
Tommy Robinson may be despicable but should he have been arrested for merely showing up at an antisemitism demonstration in London?
Like the United States and Ireland, the UK is slowly but surely forgetting what liberal democracy is all about. It’s not Trump or Orban or any of the other nefarious figures the press is always complaining about who should be blamed. The people who need to be held accountable are elite leaders who should know better but don’t.
Owen can speak for himself but what I believe he is saying is that Shellenberger has extensively documented how the Biden Administration has violated the First Amendment not that Shellenberger has himself been a victim.
Another Substacker, Mike Taibbi, who has collaborated with Shellenberger, was invited a few months ago to testify before the House Committee on the Weaponization of the Government. Literally at the exact time he was testifying, two IRS agents showed up at his house unannounced “to discuss” a tax matter. The corruption of Joe Biden and the threat to democracy he represents far exceeds the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump.
The truth is that American democracy is strong and really isn’t threatened by Trump or Biden. It’s not really democracy Trump opponents are worried about, it’s the threat to interventionist policies that they adore despite an unprecedented level of failure of these policies. As they collapse on to their fainting couches worrying about the health of democracy, it’s becoming increasingly clear by the polling that tens of millions of Americans aren’t fooled by their juvenile passive-aggressive act.
“I wondered the other day if democracies can survive when the electorate falls below a certain level of competence...”
Claire’s question is precisely the wrong question. What she should be wondering is whether democracies can survive when the competence of our elite ruling classes fall below a “certain level of competence.”
In fact, there may not be a time in the past hundred years that Western nations have been governed by more incompetent leaders. Dubya, Obama and Biden are all responsible for the current abysmal state of the world. Despite an interlude of competence during the Trump Administration, it wasn’t enough to fix what those other “leaders” broke.
What score do we give the last several British Prime Ministers? Could a French President be weaker or less consequential than Macron?Does he have even one accomplishment to his name other than being the most despised French politician of his generation?
Scholz is literally a nobody. Germany has collapsed on his watch. His predecessor did more to destroy Europe than any German leader since the 1930s.
Stated simply, it’s not the competence of the electorate, it’s the competence of the political class that Claire should be questioning.
It’s true that they were all elected in free and fair elections (except maybe Dubya) but the fact that these were the political leaders that the system delivered up as alternatives says a lot about how broken that system is.
Claire also bemoans the threat to democracy posed by Trump but, as usual she gets it exactly backwards. It’s Biden who’s the threat to democracy, Trump unlike Biden would be democracy’s savior.
It’s Biden who’s violated the First Amendment (the single most important cornerstone of American democracy) by having the FBI and other governmental agencies badger and intimidate social media sites into censoring free speech. It didn’t matter whether the speech was true like the Hunter Biden lap top story was; Biden used the Government agents to insist that the story be killed. There are so many other examples; too many to mention.
It was Biden who turned the judiciary into a weapon to use against his political opponent. He’s destroyed the credibility of the judiciary in the process. It’s not just Trump. Most recently, after the Democratic Mayor of New York City criticized Biden’s immigration policies, the Biden Justice Department started a criminal investigation into whether the Mayor took an illegal campaign contribution from Turkey. It’s hard to imagine anything more trivial especially given the timing.
Then there’s the fact that the Biden Justice department is prosecuting Trump for his behavior with classified material when it is clear to anyone who’s sentient that Biden did exactly the same thing. That’s hardly equal Justice under the law.
Biden is making a mockery of the judicial process. It’s hard to imagine a bigger threat to democracy than that.
Millions of illegal immigrants are flouting the law and pouring over our southern border. Biden is issuing them work permits and certain Democratic cities including New York and Oakland are contemplating allowing these illegal residents to vote in local elections. Are we supposed to believe that these policies promote American democracy?
Trump is likely to save American democracy. Who knows if American democracy can survive four more years of Biden?
Of course it’s doubtful that Biden himself can survive four more years. How dumb do you have to be to believe that Trump is a bigger threat to American democracy than the dimwitted Kamala Harris?
Rubbish. Well written, but rubbish all the same. Trump is the savior of no one, least of all democracy. Such a statement is either grossly ignorant or intentionally inflammatory and it renders the rest of your post untrustworthy.
I’m glad you thought it was well-written. Not only is Biden a bigger threat to liberal democracy than Trump because of his First Amendment violations and his abuse of judicial process but he’s also a threat to American freedom in general. Biden is trying to coerce Americans into buying electric cars that they simply don’t want and incredibly, without evidence, he thinks gas ovens and furnaces need to be banned.
Coercing Americans into buying cars and appliances that they don’t want may not exactly represent a threat to liberal democracy as we know it, but it does represent an outrageous and unnecessary abridgment of freedom.
Trump may not be a demigod of democracy, but if he’s elected, Americans will be more free and democracy will be safer.
You're seriously telling me that you think Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than the guy who tried to overthrow an election? Who tried to stage a coup to stay in power?
Are you seriously telling me that a surly group of tennis-shoe clad, unarmed civilians were perpetrating a coup? That doesn’t pass the laugh test. Given the preliminary evidence that federal agents were in the crowd potentially inciting inappropriate behavior and given the recently released video showing Capitol police inviting or at least acquiescing to the demonstrations in the Capitol building and it proves by a preponderance of the evidence that the whole thing was a great big nothing-burger.
I think Biden won narrowly during the last election just like Trump narrowly won the previous election. But it was perfectly reasonable for his supporters to be suspicious. Do they allow early voting in France, Claire? Can voters in your home away from home deposit votes in unsupervised lock boxes? Do voters in France have to present ID to vote?
The suspicion that the election wasn’t Kosher may have been wrong but it was far from unreasonable. You do know, don’t you Claire, that the United States has a history of questionable elections?
First off, I believe you fall into the trap Jonah Goldberg described within his book, Liberal Fascism, in describing Hitler and Mussolini as "far-right." The Nazi party, after all, was the National Socialist Party. Mussolini was a socialist his whole life. This explains your misjudgment of the communists within the soon to be former Soviet Union as the conservatives. I'll give you credit for noting how there exist any number of far-right pols described by journalists as compared to almost no far-left pols, even though the far-left position clearly outnumbers the far-right within the USA.
Second, using the terms left and right is today no longer descriptive of the state of affairs within the US, at least so far as the right goes. I'll avoid a prolonged discussion of how right moves left, and left moves right, only to say that the left has remained far more leftist while the right has moved, if not to the left, into an area of incoherence. Trump fits almost none of right wing descriptions save for the fact he was run by the GOP. (Because communism dominated the USSR for nearly 75 years does not make adherents to it conservative, rather that there existed then and now damn few ideological conservatives within either the USSR or Russia.) That Trump has changed the GOP remains indisputable, but the question remains, by how much? I would submit that almost no one has been changed by Trump, other than the most mindless of voters. Ask them what Trump stands for and you'll usually get the standard litany of conservative positions which they've long held prior to Trump. Trumpism is merely anti-leftism, even if that is not actually who Trump is. Biden, on the other hand, is merely a grifter made more respectable than Trump, if only by virtue of longevity upon the political scene. Both are clearly dingbats. Neither have what could be described as a vision for the presidency, which we've not seen since at least Reagan, though GW Bush could be given credit for entering office with it and then overcome by events. I'll give you Obama in that regard as well, though he was so strongly rebuked by the electorate it only really shows itself within his disastrous foreign affairs policy. The rest merely wanted to be president as a capstone to a career.
Journalists are in the business of selling newspapers and the profession has markedly declined even by that standard. Given their generally leftward leanings it remains unremarkable that "far-right" has become a ubiquitous, if meaningless, epithet. We'll deal with whence journalism at some future date.
I try to remind myself the Founders anticipated electing a dingbat to high political office, and by all standards the US has done just fine in doing so. Absolutely we could have done far better, which ought remind us only to thank God we live within a republic and not a democracy. As I go about my normal daily activities I'm struck by how little the presidency has affected me, with the sole exception that the spending keeps on climbing, and that the American people do not want to hear about it. I'm sort of over the pre-2016 election, when it seemed the GOP coalescing around finally addressing the entitlement programs which have beyond bankrupted us. The only thing which can now be said is that, with the election of 2020, we'll somehow get what we deserve. It's apparently necessary to descend as far as possible before correcting our course. It'd be nice to have journalists describing accurately the moment, but there exist so damn few left I'm not sure that possible. And that's far more a problem among the small time media pubs than within the big coastal media, if only because small media, much like representative democracy, is the working end of the equation, where ideas and thoughts are born.
I'm in the purple quadrant, as I expected. 4.38 Left/right, and -1.64 social libertarian/authoritarian. So, somewhat to the right of Claire economically, but not far off socially. But I could have told you that already!
I am surprised I'm not a lot closer to Romney. I think that can be explained by the number of issues I didn't feel I understood well enough to give my best answer.
It makes me crazy when the press almost never refers to the American government as the republic that it is. Trump and Biden are close to each other on the Authoritarian scale. Where the test got it wrong is Biden should be way over on the Left side of the right-left scale.
I think the Authoritarian - Libertarian axis is wrong and blocks out a 3rd axis. I would suggest Left-Right, Authoritarian-Decentralizer (can't think of a better word, but there must be one) and Traditional-Libertine. Separate measurements for preferred style of government and preferred social structure.
I scored one box below you on the test. I would not have guessed that.
You could add "MAGA" in all its various forms to the list at the top of the article.
Another irritating thing pundits do is saying something is "destroyed" or "will be destroyed" when what is being talked about is "damage". Over and over they say that the school closures during the pandemic destroyed children's lives when what actually happened is that children's lives were damaged.
Claire, you speak to my heart. Imprecision and the tossing about of labels is rendering these terms meaningless.
I am engaged in a lifelong debate with my German spouse about the meanings of “right” and “left.” He uses them in a very pre-1989 West German way; the political spectrum (in any country) is no longer so, and I doubt that it ever was, to be honest.
Perhaps I’ll have to get my armchair socialist to click through the political compass.
(I was shocked by my score, which put me farther into the green quadrant than I would ever have believed.)
So how does your spouse think of "right" and "left" in a pre-1989 West German way? Is someone like Helmut Kohl in his mind a member of the right. I would BTW argue that Helmut Schmidt was almost a Thatcherite before Thatcher. Yes Schmidt was on the "right" flank of the SPD but his economic policies in the 1970s would have been considered very right leaning internationally prior to Reagan and Thatcher(No price controls, No exchange controls, etc).
Absolutely classic: CDU (Adenauer, Kohl, Merkel, Merz) is “right” and SPD (Brandt, Schmidt, Schröder, Scholz) is “left”. FDP also “right” because it governed with the CDU gor ages. AfD clearly “on the right” while Greens “left.”
Stop me before I begin shouting.
Something I have noticed for a while is that the political right as a movement has gotten a lot more "angry" than it was in Ronald Reagan's day. Perhaps this is more a function of Reagan being an outlier to traditional right/conservative thought, there were plenty of angry conservatives prior to Reagan. Additionally, while I know Claire will probably disagree with this but even in Reagan's time Margaret Thatcher was a far angrier politician than Reagan was. One might call modern conservatism in the Western world especially the English speaking world to be far more Thatcherite in temperament than Reaganite.
Thanks - interesting and on point again.
Suggestion: there is no single third explantory axis, and hoping that there is may be part of the problem. As Max Weber should have said, "All liberal democrats are alike; each illiberal democrat is authoritatrian in their own way?"
More substantially, if you think that we're at a point of inflection or breakdown of a previously stable equilibrium, wouldn't you expect a degree of chaotic experimentation as political innovators look for new avenues? A single common differentiator seems unlikely on the face of it. (Just don't say "paradigm shift", that's even poorer form than "to impact", which apparently emerged in English literature in the 16th century as a verb long before it was nouned)
(I landed about where I expected, central south-west around (-3,-3) )
Yes, I was thinking the same thing: We should expect some radicalism--some chaos, as you put it--since clearly a previous equilibrium has been destabilized. And radicalism is not always a bad thing: I'd be happy to see genuinely new ideas from a politician, so long as they're good ideas: We could use them. I'd love to see a president, for example, lead the effort to create new institutions to replace the UN Security Council and other postwar institutions that appear incapable of making order out of chaos. That would be radical. I'd love to see some radical thinking about reining in our tech oligarchs. Or constitutional reform to the end of preventing Congress from being hijacked by the insane asylum.
Of course these models are imperfect and of course you can't precisely map every single liberal democrat on a graph. The value of creating a better model, though, is to gain more information about our fellow citizens' political instincts and beliefs. Modeling this in two dimensions gives us a fuller portrait of what the test subject believes than simply asking, "Are you on the left or the right?" And I suspect three dimensions (if the third axis were properly chosen) would allow us to predict, pretty well, what candidates the subject is apt to support, what political initiatives would appeal to him, and what he might or might not find politically tolerable. I don't think the simple left-right distinction does that well at all these days.
1. Definitely yes to new ("radical") solutions to new or re-emerging problems - not least post-austerity economic stagnation in Europe. But this is an important part of the Liberals vs Caesars debate for me - the failure of "traditional" liberals to go beyond the same old fixes and come up with convincing solutions to these problems gives electorates good reasons to look elsewhere (Personal hobby-horse: Popper's Open Society was meant to be superior to closed/authoritarian models *because its openness would generate better technical, social & political ideas* allowing it to pull ahead - can we really see this outside of narrow tech in the last 20 years?)
2. We do need a more sophisticated model of political preferences, but doesn't your re-Caesarian thesis suggest it's still way too early to tell? If pervasive web technologies have ushered in an epoch characterised by hyperscale network economics (eg Facebook) and an upending of the previous settled dynamic of the cultural infosphere (eg... Facebook again), with a new political class racing to catch up, then we don't even know what will stick, let alone how to taxonomize it.
As an example, I can't help feeling the "Trump Reaction" is more last gasp of the old than first sign of the new. A legacy media celebrity whose strongest appeal is to a shrinking disaffected demographic - that'll run in the resentful '20s but not much beyond. After Trump incinerates the GOP, someone younger with a full head of hair and more sense than Vivek the Clown will show up pushing some new nationalist proposition free from overt authoritarian trappings, and perhaps a new pattern will emerge? Until then, who knows...
This exegesis on liberal democracy, best expressed in the US Constitution, is brilliant. It should be required reading in Western news rooms, not that any journalists will pay attention: the argument challenges "the narrative." I was just reading a piece by George Will, "The Consciousness Project," which was published in National Review (alas, hidden behind the paywall) - I'm sure you've read it, and your arguments are very much in alignment. (He grounds his case in natural rights; you don't use the term, but the root and branch of your positions overlap nonetheless.) Your definition of "liberal democracy" defines classical liberalism quite nicely, and I believe most Americans accept its premises, even if we couldn't articulate it very well. Unfortunately, those responsible for keeping the public informed and aware of the implications of same are failing miserably at their job, as you note. That, along with its downstream ramifications, is the true threat to the nation, along with the probable nominations of a narcissistic megalomaniac and a cognitively impaired geriatric with little will, wisdom, or instinct to protect and defend liberal values. (Thank God neither were President on December 7, 1941. Most of us would be speaking German, if they were, and you and I wouldn't have been born.) FWIW: my Political Compass score placed me in the middle of the Right-Libertarian box. I know: you're shocked, shocked.
I haven't read it, no: And because it's behind the paywall, I may not be able to, but perhaps you could share the URL?
Sure. The piece is an edited version of a speech Will delivered in September to the members of Princetonians for Free Speech, an event co-sponsored by the university's James Madison Program. Here's the URL: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/12/the-consciousness-project/
Thank you for the kind words.
I disliked the Political Compass questions. They were slanted to discourage people from supporting liberty in general and economic liberty in particular.
We need a pithy term for what you call liberal democracy. The original meaning of the word democracy was direct rule by the citizens assembled. Examples include the Athenian Assembly and New England town meetings. The original meaning of the term has _not_ gone away. You hear it when people such as David Axelrod describe minority obstruction as tyranny of the minority. The new term should strongly imply playing by the rules, and the fact that victory and loss are only temporary.
The Framers distrusted democracy. They feared a tyranny of the majority. I think that unfettered majoritarianism is a prime feature of any flavor of populism. We originally described our federal government as a constitutional republic, with an elected legislature and executive. Calling it a democracy was semantic judo by the Evil Party. The Stupid Party fell for it.
The chief difference between Joe Biden and DJT is that the former is a conventional nose-to-the-trough career Democrat promoted far too high, and DJT is in it for the ego boo. Neither cares much for the rules. Biden is less risky, because he at least pretends to follow them.
Firing an arbitrary half of the federal government is indeed a radical proposal. Anything more judicious would require a bureaucracy of its own, probably recruited from the federal government.
We have grown the federal government, particularly in domestic policy, far more than is good for us. The efficiency and effectiveness of any organization are inversely related to the length of the management chain and the complexity of its mission.
Clear, simple domestic policies cannot fit everybody in the USA. Attempts to tailor policy to fix that pose their own problems. James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers #62:
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow."
"We need a pithy term for what you call liberal democracy."
What's wrong with "liberal democracy?"
Our electoral college is one example of an “anti democratic” mechanism. It requires that our chief executive get support from most of the country. The Senate is another. Most of the critics of these want unfettered majoritarianism . We can see the results of that in our state governments. The large urban centers tend to mistreat the rural areas.
I thought the rest of the paragraph explained my reasoning. Apparently it did not.
The USA is not technically a democracy. We have a constitutional republic. There are many things that government is forbidden to do, no matter how many people want it, without going through a deliberately cumbersome process which gives reasonable assurance that it has widespread support. That process misfired dramatically when we passed the 18th amendment, but we eventually fixed it.
Have you never been wronged by the result of a majority vote? We don’t want a democracy. We want liberty under the law. We want the freedom to do as we choose with reasonable confidence that we will remain unmolested. Government is merely a tool for that purpose. The US federal system was, until recently, the best ever invented. Don’t mistake the tool for the objective.
We need a new, pithy term to describe what we want, because the word democracy leaves the door open for unfettered majoritarianism.
Decent spot to be I think. Though I have to catch myself sometimes, I do have a tendency to entertain authoritarian solutions to problems.
Thank you Claire for taking an interest in political word definition. I have had the same complaint for several years. I have a similar complaint about Gender activism. It steals existing words and changes definitions. I am willing to sit down with a linguist and Gender activists to work on creating new words for their ideology. This would resolve much societal conflict about Gender.
I think Jonathon Haidt of NYU is creater of political compass test. I scored almost bulls-eye center but slightly south and slightly west, near 2022 French candidate Hidalgo. I think I know problem with test accuracy per Trump/Biden grid locations. (1): If someone else took test as surrogate for Biden and surrogate for Trump, then outcome is “John Doe’s opinion of Biden/Trump.”
(2): I had difficulty with some questions, which I resolved by predicating question on condition X. But, next test subject may predicate same question on condition Y.
Fantastic article. I see a similar conflation of terms describing the left: progressive, liberal, woke, socialist, communist, radical, far-left, left etc.
Very much so.
Almost dead center. Just off the bullseye or intersection of the axes into Authoritarian Left.
I scored 2.5 on the economic right/left (so a bit to the right), and -0.36 on the libertarian/authoritarian scale (so just a bit libertarian).
That feels about correct actually.
Just about like me, actually.
"These individual rights take precedence over the well-being of the collective."
I don't know Claire, sounds like the far-right might have gotten to you 😉
"A normal right-wing politician respects the rules and norms of liberal democracy, and prioritizes these rules over policy outcomes, whereas a far-right politician does not. (This distinction also applies to the left and far-left)."
By this definition would you agree that the Biden Administration is far-left? There's extremely good evidence of past and present violations and intent to violate the 1st ammendment (see Michael Shellenberger among others). They apparently have very little respect for the free speech that characterizes liberal democracy. Nor for that matter do most western governments these days. Most explicitly Ireland.
"nor... do most western governments these days..."
Parochial/peripheral thought: the US First Amendment (and the debate it now occasions) are outliers in broader Western democratic terms. Here's the text of Art 10 of the ECHR (confusingly linked to Art. 11 of the EU Charter):
"1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
The qualifications are immediate and quite broad. Does that mean most European countries (like Ireland) aren't really liberal? That's not how it looks to most liberals here, who I think are sanguine about unavoidable tradeoffs between rights to free speech, privacy ("family life"), security etc. Bottom line for me would be: I can cope with government intervening in what it sees as a crisis of public safety, but not with it censoring information about what it did so we can't hold it to account. (FWIW the current UK government is also alarmingly illiberal, but it's even more spectacularly ineffective, limiting the actual harm done.)
These are slippery slopes but I don't think they can be avoided in practice. A lot of the "But how dare you - First Amendment!!!" debate in the US sounds to me like a fight for the narrative (usually about Hunter Biden, it seems), not a broad, good faith pitch for freedom. (This is distinct from the narrow legal question of whether the first amendment was violated in any particular case - it may well have been; but it may also be a blunt instrument.)
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
–Benjamin Franklin
Nor, I would add, are they likely to get safety in the long run either.
It's pithy for sure, but I'd like to see his evidence base!
Those who would avoid facing trade-offs to purchase a little purity, will get neither purity nor good terms of trade...
More seriously - I think it's interesting at least that this really isn't seen as a big deal in Europe (the Irish fuss is a headline about Musk and Trump, not about the Free Speech Ireland movement).
There is somethign totemic about the First Amendment that doesn't appeal to those who don't have it. I don't *think* that's because they are all illiberal at heart. I may be wrong...
Violating Shellenberger's First Amendment rights? How?
Shellenburger was one of the three who reported on government censorship in the Twitter files. Matt Taibbi,and Bari Weiss were the other two.
If you watch Matt Taibbi’s testimony before Congress, you’ll see a surreal moment where a congresscritter refers to “legitimate journalists”, implying that he wasn’t.
Yes, what WigWag said. Shellenberger's rights weren't violated, but he has done a lot to spearhead how the Biden Administration has violated them. Including directing social media companies to engage in censorship on their behalf. Which is clearly illegal, because the government cannot accomplish through private means something they are forbidden to do themselves.
There was a recent court case finding that yes the federal government had in fact violated the 1st ammendment. Even the legacy media commented so you know it must be bad. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/08/5th-circuit-ruling-covid-content-moderation/
I would be very interested to hear your response to Owen. Who’s a bigger threat to democracy; MAGA Republicans in the United States or Leo Varadkar and his colleagues in Fine Gael (and their coalition partners) in Ireland?
Not sure I'm connecting the dots: What does Varadkar have to do with this?
To understand what Owen and I are talking about see,
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/banning-ire-in-ireland/amp/
Also here, from the British State Organ: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nj2xzrz83o
"Writing on his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, Mr Musk said the proposed legislation was a "massive attack against freedom of speech".
The businessman has more recently said he would file a legal action to "stop" hate speech laws in Ireland.
Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar offered a blunt response.
"He cannot just challenge a law in the courts and certainly not one that isn’t even a law yet," Mr Varadkar told the Sunday Independent., external
“I suspect he doesn’t know what he means and is just showboating.”..."
Tom, it’s not just Ireland that’s slowly but surely rejecting liberal democracy; it’s your country as well.
Apparently you can be arrested in the UK for merely standing and silently praying near an abortion clinic if where you’re standing is within the confines of an exclusion zone. Women arrested for praying silently; it’s a great look.
The question has been raised whether J.K. Rowling has engaged in hate speech for merely doubting that trans women are actually women and not men.
Tommy Robinson may be despicable but should he have been arrested for merely showing up at an antisemitism demonstration in London?
Like the United States and Ireland, the UK is slowly but surely forgetting what liberal democracy is all about. It’s not Trump or Orban or any of the other nefarious figures the press is always complaining about who should be blamed. The people who need to be held accountable are elite leaders who should know better but don’t.
Owen can speak for himself but what I believe he is saying is that Shellenberger has extensively documented how the Biden Administration has violated the First Amendment not that Shellenberger has himself been a victim.
Another Substacker, Mike Taibbi, who has collaborated with Shellenberger, was invited a few months ago to testify before the House Committee on the Weaponization of the Government. Literally at the exact time he was testifying, two IRS agents showed up at his house unannounced “to discuss” a tax matter. The corruption of Joe Biden and the threat to democracy he represents far exceeds the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump.
The truth is that American democracy is strong and really isn’t threatened by Trump or Biden. It’s not really democracy Trump opponents are worried about, it’s the threat to interventionist policies that they adore despite an unprecedented level of failure of these policies. As they collapse on to their fainting couches worrying about the health of democracy, it’s becoming increasingly clear by the polling that tens of millions of Americans aren’t fooled by their juvenile passive-aggressive act.
For more on the intimidation of Taibbi, see,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-matt-taibbi-twitter-files-jim-jordan-daniel-werfel-lina-khan-84ee518
Don't forget Bari Weiss of the Free Press.
Claire says,
“I wondered the other day if democracies can survive when the electorate falls below a certain level of competence...”
Claire’s question is precisely the wrong question. What she should be wondering is whether democracies can survive when the competence of our elite ruling classes fall below a “certain level of competence.”
In fact, there may not be a time in the past hundred years that Western nations have been governed by more incompetent leaders. Dubya, Obama and Biden are all responsible for the current abysmal state of the world. Despite an interlude of competence during the Trump Administration, it wasn’t enough to fix what those other “leaders” broke.
What score do we give the last several British Prime Ministers? Could a French President be weaker or less consequential than Macron?Does he have even one accomplishment to his name other than being the most despised French politician of his generation?
Scholz is literally a nobody. Germany has collapsed on his watch. His predecessor did more to destroy Europe than any German leader since the 1930s.
Stated simply, it’s not the competence of the electorate, it’s the competence of the political class that Claire should be questioning.
It’s true that they were all elected in free and fair elections (except maybe Dubya) but the fact that these were the political leaders that the system delivered up as alternatives says a lot about how broken that system is.
Claire also bemoans the threat to democracy posed by Trump but, as usual she gets it exactly backwards. It’s Biden who’s the threat to democracy, Trump unlike Biden would be democracy’s savior.
It’s Biden who’s violated the First Amendment (the single most important cornerstone of American democracy) by having the FBI and other governmental agencies badger and intimidate social media sites into censoring free speech. It didn’t matter whether the speech was true like the Hunter Biden lap top story was; Biden used the Government agents to insist that the story be killed. There are so many other examples; too many to mention.
It was Biden who turned the judiciary into a weapon to use against his political opponent. He’s destroyed the credibility of the judiciary in the process. It’s not just Trump. Most recently, after the Democratic Mayor of New York City criticized Biden’s immigration policies, the Biden Justice Department started a criminal investigation into whether the Mayor took an illegal campaign contribution from Turkey. It’s hard to imagine anything more trivial especially given the timing.
Then there’s the fact that the Biden Justice department is prosecuting Trump for his behavior with classified material when it is clear to anyone who’s sentient that Biden did exactly the same thing. That’s hardly equal Justice under the law.
Biden is making a mockery of the judicial process. It’s hard to imagine a bigger threat to democracy than that.
Millions of illegal immigrants are flouting the law and pouring over our southern border. Biden is issuing them work permits and certain Democratic cities including New York and Oakland are contemplating allowing these illegal residents to vote in local elections. Are we supposed to believe that these policies promote American democracy?
Trump is likely to save American democracy. Who knows if American democracy can survive four more years of Biden?
Of course it’s doubtful that Biden himself can survive four more years. How dumb do you have to be to believe that Trump is a bigger threat to American democracy than the dimwitted Kamala Harris?
Rubbish. Well written, but rubbish all the same. Trump is the savior of no one, least of all democracy. Such a statement is either grossly ignorant or intentionally inflammatory and it renders the rest of your post untrustworthy.
I’m glad you thought it was well-written. Not only is Biden a bigger threat to liberal democracy than Trump because of his First Amendment violations and his abuse of judicial process but he’s also a threat to American freedom in general. Biden is trying to coerce Americans into buying electric cars that they simply don’t want and incredibly, without evidence, he thinks gas ovens and furnaces need to be banned.
Coercing Americans into buying cars and appliances that they don’t want may not exactly represent a threat to liberal democracy as we know it, but it does represent an outrageous and unnecessary abridgment of freedom.
Trump may not be a demigod of democracy, but if he’s elected, Americans will be more free and democracy will be safer.
You're seriously telling me that you think Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than the guy who tried to overthrow an election? Who tried to stage a coup to stay in power?
Are you seriously telling me that a surly group of tennis-shoe clad, unarmed civilians were perpetrating a coup? That doesn’t pass the laugh test. Given the preliminary evidence that federal agents were in the crowd potentially inciting inappropriate behavior and given the recently released video showing Capitol police inviting or at least acquiescing to the demonstrations in the Capitol building and it proves by a preponderance of the evidence that the whole thing was a great big nothing-burger.
I think Biden won narrowly during the last election just like Trump narrowly won the previous election. But it was perfectly reasonable for his supporters to be suspicious. Do they allow early voting in France, Claire? Can voters in your home away from home deposit votes in unsupervised lock boxes? Do voters in France have to present ID to vote?
The suspicion that the election wasn’t Kosher may have been wrong but it was far from unreasonable. You do know, don’t you Claire, that the United States has a history of questionable elections?
Joe Biden has the bureaucracy of the federal government on his side. Most of the government despised DJT.
He needs merely say, once too often, "Will none of you caitiffs rid me of this turbulent priest?"
Remember the efforts of the IRS to hobble the Tea Party movement?
But we are all one in one sense: we are all anticommunists.
I only wish it were true.