Followup: A Re-Design of the Spectrum
After some thought, I redesigned the spectrum to better reflect some thoughts I had on centralization and power positioning. I also made it easier to read.
Updated to include:
A shorter introduction
More visible labels for the parties
Includes the dynamic shift (with overlaps to detail power sharing under liberal democracy)
Easier to read fonts and fewer notes
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(Note, since it’s already been updated on the main article, that this is the original spectrum chart that I made below. Under that, I put the details of what each position is, which is the same as in the first spectrum chart)
For completeness, I’ve placed 17 positions on this chart. I’ll briefly outline their details (across broad categories) and name a key example of their related systems:
The Left (from far-left to left-wing)
Anarchism — democratic worker control over industry, no centralized infrastructure, mutual communal cooperation; Revolutionary Catalonia, 1930s
Libertarian Socialism — confederated state, distributed administration and communitarian economics; Kurdish Rojava, present day
State-Directed Socialism — centralized state management of worker cooperatives with single-party control; East Germany/GDR , mid-20th century
Mixed Market Socialism — mixing state control and market enterprises, socialistic democracy (i.e. factions of socialism occupying legislature) as the core political program; Vietnam, present day; also referred to as Revisionist Marxism (relative to a Marxist-Leninist ideal of State-Directed Socialism)
Democratic Socialism —like social democracy, but more likely to include structural change for altering the capitalist system, at the edge of liberal democracy; Sweden under Palme; has been associated with the term Eurocommunism/Democratic Communism
Social Democracy — an ultimately market based system with nationalization of some major industries within pluralistic democracy; Finland, present day and many European center-left parties
The Liberal Center (from center-left to center-right)
Progressive Liberalism — a system favoring the expansion of the welfare state, higher taxation, and more regulation, but less focused on permanent structural reform than social democrats; USA under FDR
Modern Liberalism — a system favoring moderated state welfare alongside growth focus for markets, pluralist democracy; Canada, present day or many European centrist parties; has also been called Third-Way liberalism (though, may suggest more overlap with Liberal Conservatism)
Liberal Conservatism — like modern liberalism but with more support for market growth and little to no interest in expanding the welfare state; USA under H.W. Bush or many European center-right parties
Classical Liberalism — a free market focused, government intervention averse approach opposed to collectivist approaches to state and corporate management; Czech Republic under Klaus
Modern Conservatism — a free market focused approach favoring the use of government for promoting growth, alongside reductions in welfare, in a pluralist democracy; UK under Thatcher; some also call it Conservative Liberalism
The Right (from right-wing to far-right)
Traditional Conservatism — like modern conservatism with a greater focus on stressing religion and/or other cultural institutions, more restrictive on welfare/taxation; USA under Reagan; also has been called National Liberalism (Israel) and associated with Paleolibertarianism (USA)
National Conservatism — like traditional conservatism but favoring market intervention to protect national interests and traditions, at the edge of liberal democracy; Hungary under Orban; also called Paleoconservatism (USA)
Liberal Parafascism — an autocratic/oligarchic form of government favoring free markets for trade but restrictive on welfare and labor power, oligarchic; Chile under Pinochet
National Corporatism — like parafascism, but with an added focus on state corporations and pervasive nationalism; Italy under Mussolini; may be called Fascism or National Fascism; not to be confused with neo-corporatism, an organizational framework associated with Rhine Capitalism and the Nordic Model)
Integral Nationalism — like national corporatism but with an added focus on traditional and especially religious institutions to enshrine the regime; Spain under Franco; may include aspects of or even be called Clerical Fascism (as in ecclesial power enters politics, ending the division of Church and state)
Palingenetic Fascism — like national corporatism, but dependent on broad national myth and racial supremacy to enshrine totalitarianism; Germany under Hitler; may be called Nazism
A Few Clarifying Details and A Critical Caveat
So there we are, naming a spectrum that conveys the competition between popular control and corporate control along a linear axis. Now, I’ll make three quick statements on the scale and three clarifying points:
There are systems that are not represented on the scale directly →Some systems pull from many traditions and, by country, vary in terms of where they sit. To solve this problem, I’ve opted to not include them here. This spectrum also excludes the politics of pre-capitalist systems like feudalism or modern conceptions of neo-reaction and/or “social feudalism”. (Though, if someone has the details, I’d love to learn about the politics of a feudal court!)
The scale does not account for social views → this is by design, since — while social views are affiliated with politico-economic positions — I’d argue that social positions can largely be held across the spectrum (i.e. there can be socially conservative state socialists and socially progressive market conservatives, but probably not reactionary anarchists or progressive fascists)
While authoritarianism is associated with positions on the scale, it is not clear just how authoritarian each position is relative to any other → this is key caveat — I did not include this because 1) I felt unable to assess whether the powers of a state bureaucracy or of a state-sanctioned corporate council would be more intrusive (or oppressive) for the average person, 2) in practice, a nation’s history, population, borders, resource distribution, civic institutions, and wealth are key factors in whether a nation is capable of loose governance, so it seems unhelpful to define a structural phenomenon in terms of political ideology, and 3) even in the case of anarchism, it is unclear whether a more localized government is necessarily more freeing than perhaps a more benevolent, larger government. I welcome push back on this last point, but it’s inspired by tales of concentration camps run by the CNT-FAI in Spain (Workers Against Work, Chapter 4).
Additionally, to answer just a few design questions that no one asked …
Classical liberalism is placed to the right of center rather than true center because, given the structural barriers to popular action against organized corporate power (i.e. the challenges of organizing mass groups of the most exploited), I’d argue that a truly centrist position would maintain a minimal degree of welfare and regulations (public schools, food and drug protections, environmental regulations, etc.) In calling for the abolition of those elements, the ideology seems to place the ball in the court of corporations.
While a scale implies a tendency to shift, one key aspect of this spectrum is that, due to constituent aspects of a political ideology (religious affiliation, base of support, philosophical basis, etc.), it makes sense for persons or parties to jump over positions rather than move linearly from one to the next in order. For example, a Classical Liberal party fearing major economic change from a majority socialist administration may skip directly to supporting a single-party structure under Liberal Parafascism.
(With that said, I would argue that given the relative ease of coordination between industrialists — at least when compared with the notorious factionalism in labor organizing — trends a liberal democracy to the right. I do, however, welcome push back on this point since it could be just as well that, because the leading superpower of the last century was liberal capitalist, governments pursuing prosperity, from Russia to China to India, have drifted in line with the Washington Consensus of economic neoliberalism.)
As a final point, I’ll discuss the 3 broad segments of the political spectrum: socialist democracy (A — D), liberal democracy (D — N), and oligarchy (N — R). Here, it’s helpful to draw from a kind of Marxist analysis about the link between economic structures and sociopolitical aspects of society.
In a liberal democracy, where your author lives, the core economic system is based fundamentally on market exchange and the private accumulation of property. This is enshrined in our constitution and, as such, even the most stringent progressive policy enacted in this system could only be a deviation from that fundamentally capitalist system. Thus, I argue that a democratic socialist government and a national conservative government are at opposite limits of this system. The first would be pushing toward mode of production restricting private accumulation and use of resources (ideally, onward into socialism). The second would be pushing toward a mode of production restricting popular incursion on the private use of resources (ideally, onward into an autocratic system).
While I could talk at length on this, I’ll just say that, just like how you cannot vote out capitalism under the constitution of a liberal regime, you cannot vote out socialism under the constitution of a socialist regime and you cannot vote out fascist corporatism under the charter of a fascist regime. This follows from my notion of a dynamic between popular control to mixed control to corporate control of resources, since a complete victory for one side would likely necessitate putting up structural obstacles for the other side (i.e. requiring corporate leaders to be staunch party members at the left and outlawing labor unions on the right). Editors Note: Prop 22 comes to mind. Note that this logic changes once you bring to the table constitutional reform, which could take place through revolutionary or reformist means.
This also is key for understanding the notion of what the socialists in China or Nepal consider a socialist democracy. Consider country A, where a liberal democracy would have a social democratic and a conservative party, and country B, where a socialist democracy might have a state-directed socialist party (often just called a Communist Party) and a social democratic party. To people in country A, country B seems especially undemocratic, as it looks like two left-wing parties and no right wing parties. To people in country B, their economic base makes it so a social democratic party is their more conservative, market-focused party.
Unfortunately, I have less to say in comparing liberal democracy to fascistic oligarchy. Due to a dearth of resources on this topic, I’ll merely say that the uniquely nationalist and fundamentally oligarchic nature of fascist governments probably makes a comprehensive comparison between these systems moot.
I won’t go more in-depth on this here, but its an interesting lesson in how our own political system biases our perceptions of how politics may work in another country.