A Better Model of Political Categories

Don’t let the PEMRs win

Not this one though…

In “The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives” I explained how I believe Progressivism and Conservatism should be considered poles on a separate political axis from Right vs. Left, and how Right-Wing Progressives are therefore a coherent political-philosophical category worth paying attention to. I also promised a follow-up post building out a more comprehensive framework for thinking about political categories more broadly. This is that post.

I’ll keep it relatively brief, though, as this is certainly all a bit of an abstract intellectual exercise. Nonetheless I think it’s still an interesting and worthwhile one, as cramming everything about our politics into Left vs. Right leads to some deep confusion about who is pursuing what ends and why. Moreover, I don’t find any of the various alternative frameworks for explaining political categories that do exist (such as the common four-quadrant “political compass” box chart) to be at all sufficient. In fact they are usually deliberately misleading, as far as I’m concerned. Or at least I just find them all rather irritating.

So, for what it’s worth, I’ve thrown together the below framework based on how I’ve come to think about the political landscape. It is, please note, not a chart. I have rebelled against the political chart! The political chart will be buried by History! I suspect any accurate representation of human political natures will necessarily be too nuanced to easily represent with a nifty graph, as handy as having one is for propagandizing. Instead, since I identify not two, nor three, but four separate relevant axes/spectrums, I’ve drawn inspiration from the famous (and probably mostly BS) Myers-Briggs personality test to provide you with a different model for identifying what we might call political personality types. This should still prove sufficient for propagandizing as you wish. Feel free to take it and make whatever use of it you will.