With fellow bloggers St Ouennais and Nick Palmer both having been kind enough to reveal their positions after taking the assessment questionnaire on The Political Compass, Clameur de Haro can hardly refrain from showing his own.
Attempting reverse analysis here is an inexact science, because the answers do not have corresponding scores on each of the axes, but for what it's worth, CdeH guesses that on the Authoritarian - Libertarian scale, the scoring from his antipathy to excessive state power and legislative restrictions on personal freedom is probably pulled back a little by the scoring from his support for a robust stance on both defence and the protection of the family as the principal societal unit.
But - wouldn't it be interesting and revealing if we could persuade all States' Members to take the test - and then publish the results so that we can all see exactly where they stand? Do any of them have the cojones to take up the challenge?
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6 comments:
Interesting to see that all three of us have approximately the same score on the authoritarian/libertarian scale.
I would have said that I was more conservative than my score indicated. I was brought up in a "middle class" Tory blue house, reading the Daily Express. I became more socially minded in a non-typical way. When I was 16 I worked out that our current type of civilisation was not sustainable and determined myself to have a go at solving the problem.
I came to see that the right-wing way of solving some defined problem worked after a fashion but only because it ignored so many other important facets of life like sustainability of resources and energy and justice to the majority. I saw that the left-wing way could work if we had the hive mentality of social insects but trusting barely evolved chimps to make socialism work was expecting too much and endlessly supplying peoples' ever expanding "needs/greeds" was not sustainable either.
I adopted some leftish ideas because they were necessary to solve the whole problem. I have become more collectivist whilst staying irritatingly (to some) individualist. Team players can achieve goals but mavericks create goals and are the source of most creativity.
Actually, I only really commented above because I intended to say what a cracking idea it would be to get all States Members to take the test. I got a bit distracted.
p.s. Unfortunately, some members would need quite a few of the questions explained to them - slowly
Nick - in your 2nd paragraph above, you have hit on something on which you and CdeH would be in total agreement: with the possible exception, that is, of the need to add "....and in words of one syllable".
CdeH is in the throes of finalising construction of a version on which local scores could be displayed - only the three of us on it so far, but he wonders how, with some wider dissemination, we can get a bit of a bandwagon rolling?
Waste of time finding out where T le S stands after this latest EU bombshell. I hope he knows what the gentlemanly thing to do is.
I've just done mine now. I did feel that some of the questions did not allow enough precision.
A simple (and relatively non-political) example would be smacking a child - I would say it may be ok but that does depend on the level of the smack, and it could be abusive; I've known children being beaten with their father's slipper, which is clearly not right. What does one answer to a question which does not allow that degree of nuance - which can be extremely important?
So I wouldn't take it too seriously, especially as it probably can't cope with distributism on its scale.
Equally someone might think democracy was good because it is the best system for a free people, or it is the best system for constraining leaders who are flawed, and may not wish to give up power without force, because it allows non-violent removal of leaders.
So a tad simplistic, methinks.
Oh, and I come out in the same box as Ghandi, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela.
I did the Political Compass quiz some time ago, and found it very American in its frame of reference. Thus, I scored as far left as Tony the Prof, when I am used to thinking of myself as a very moderate right-winger clinging to one-nation-conservatism.
Mind you, I think the whole left-right scale has drifted rightwards in recent years. The definition of "centre-left" Wikipedia had when I looked is my views in a nutshell, while supposed moderate left-winger Tony Blair was too much of a Thatcherite for my taste.
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