Logan Ramsey
News Editor
The people who raise us as children and remember our first moments are also the ones who first influence our beliefs. As a child, I assumed my parents were always right.
Were your parents stout conservatives? Were they compassionate liberals? What if I said either way, they were wrong.
This isn’t because the beliefs that they held and taught you were wrong. It’s because our parents’ generation view political ideology as a scale, the right and the left.
This mode of thought is constrictive to having reasonable political discussion because viewing politics simply through the left and the right over simplifies the issues. When watching mainstream cable news outlets, no matter what side of the aisle they serve, they’re spoon-feeding viewers a narrative that confirms their biases. If the facts don’t support the bias, then they’ll spin it.
Every individual’s political ideology exists on a spectrum, and it’s hard to understand that when you’ve been conditioned to believe there’s only two sides to every issue. To evaluate where your own biases lie, you must first understand the political compass.
As pictured, the political compass is an X-Y axis that attempts to better map a person’s values. Most of the time when people talk about the right and the left, they’re shoving the whole of the political spectrum onto the X line. What the line actually measures is a person’s economic stance, the two extremes of this line being people all the way to the left who view society as a collective, and the right who want an absolute unregulated free market.
The Y line, or the social scale, is perhaps the most important aspect of the spectrum, but it’s also the one we talk about the least. It measures the balance between libertarian politics to the bottom and authoritarian to the top. The two extremes of this are defined as anarchism and fascism. We all fall somewhere between these extremes with our own beliefs and values.
This is a test that everyone should take. Not only should you find where you are on the political compass, you should go to isidewith.com and find out what your views look like compared to the upcoming candidates for office. Neither of these tests are perfect, but together they give you a more complete perspective on where you stand.
The most important thing to understand about this spectrum is that it doesn’t matter how far to the left or to the right a leader is, either could be a fascist. It doesn’t matter how far to the left or right you are. If you believe in authoritarianism you could support a fascist or become one.
Americans don’t commonly understand this and we conflate authoritarianism with the radical left, especially in a conservative state like Idaho. Despite many conservatives calling “the media” biased to the left, I would argue that they’re far more biased against radical left ideas.
If you’re a self-described conservative, hear me out before you stop reading. Compared to other developed countries, the U.S. is a right wing nation. We’re much more religious than the rest of Europe and even our most radical left politicians would be moderates in other developed countries. People call Bernie Sanders a communist, when in all reality he’s about as moderate as a socialist can get.
But I understand where this opinion comes from. I once held the belief that Democrats were secret communists and wanted to take away our American way of life. Now, I shake my head at people who conflate Marxism with authoritarian communism.
The reality is that Karl Marx actually believed the contrary. He believed in a classless, stateless society. Marx would’ve been rolling in his grave if he saw where Vladimir Lenin and then Joseph Stalin took the communist dream.
I spent middle school and high school listening to conservative talk radio, where I was exposed to conspiracy theories about how President Obama planned to seize our freedom, like taking our guns away or our religious freedom. I don’t remember any of the hosts like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity ever specifically calling him a communist, but they didn’t have to. They fed me half-truths, accused him of being a socialist and my brain made the jump. That was their goal.
In the interest of being honest, I’ve included my own Political Compass test results.
If you compare where I stand to prominent politicians, I look incredibly radical. Maybe I am radical, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I refuse to commit to a specific political ideology this early in my life because I know my views will develop and change.
If you’re committed to either party in America’s duopoly, then I want you to stop and ask yourself: is there a chance I’m wrong? Could I be viewing the issues for a limited viewpoint? Would I hold the same values if I viewed media outside of my personal bias?
If more people learned to ask themselves these questions, perhaps we could see outside two bad choices.
