New Year, New Me: How Politics Can Change in One Year
INTRODUCTION
About a year ago, I decided to start archiving my various political compass results to track how my politics change over time. I thought it would be an interesting project, something of a digital time capsule of my ideological alignment. Well, a year has passed since then, so I thought it would be interesting to compare my 2020 results with the results from 2019. Then I will analyse them and try to explain why they’ve changed over time.
RESULTS
First, let’s get the boring stuff out of the way: the graphs and all that. If you want, you can skip ahead to the analysis and discussion. Anyway, here’s my Political Compass results for 2019:
And here are the results for 2020:
And my Spekr results for 2019:
And for 2020:
My Nolan Chart results for 2019:
And for 2020:
8values results for 2019:
And for 2020:
9Axes result for 2019:
And for 2020:
Lastly, my Politiscales results for 2019:
And for 2020:
ANALYSIS + DISCUSSION
Now that’s a lot of data! To make things simple, let’s break things down into three key take-aways, what they mean, and why these shifts might have happened.
POINT #1: Drifting Away From The Left
The first thing I noticed is that in both the standard Political Compass and the Nolan Chart is that it shows me drifting away from the left and towards the centre. Oddly, the Spekr chart shows the opposite, but it seems to be an outlier in this case. This process has been going on for a long time, and although I don’t presently have a copy of my 2018 Compass Results, I can confirm that this is a noticeable trend.
When I started getting into politics, I was very hard left. I briefly considered myself a communist at one point. My entrance into politics was the works of Michael Moore, who is very left-leaning. Over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with Moore’s work for various reasons, including:
- Lack of basic research in Fahrenheit 9/11
- The manipulative editing in Bowling for Columbine
- The anti-white chapter “Kill Whitey” from Stupid White Men
- Everything about the trainwreck that was Fahrenheit 11/9
But anyway, my drift towards the centre is likely caused by the fact that the left is not right about everything. They are right about a lot of things, but not everything. The same is true of the political right.
The most effective form of political praxis is drawing the best ideas from both the left and the right rather than blind adherence to one side.
POINT #2: Drifting Away From Libertarianism
In the standard Political Compass, Spekr, Politiscales, and 8Values, there seems to be a slight shift away from libertarianism. I do still consider myself a left-libertarian, but I do agree I’ve become dissatisfied with the current state of libertarianism. Libertarianism has nothing to say about the perils of automation and the decay of Western culture. In fact, contemporary libertarianism seems to do nothing but accelerate these problems.
Libertarianism still has its uses. Free markets are generally good for society (though do need some regulation, such as the Australian Consumer Law), and the idea of free speech is one of the best concepts that humanity has come up with. These concepts and the benefits that come with them are the products of libertarianism. The libertarian stance on drugs is also useful, if Portugal is any indication.
POINT #3: On Human Nature
According to my PolitiScales, I’ve become more of an “essentialist”, as opposed to the previous result which placed me roughly in the middle. This is ironic because I do believe the nature/nurture split to be roughly 50–50, but whatever. I suspect part of this comes from my recent investigations into the heritability of IQ, the variation of IQ across populations, and the importance of sexual dimorphism, amongst other things. Interestingly, at the same time, I’ve accepted that the environment plays a larger role in sexuality than I previously expected.
The implications of this do not have any impact of how I treat individuals. Group differences do not necessitate discrimination or bigotry (apart from obvious cases, such as males competing against females or disabled athletes competing against able-bodied athletes. There’s a reason we don’t let those happen). So before anyone accuses me of racism/sexism/etc., let me say it louder: ACKNOWLEDGING AVERAGE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GROUPS IS NOT AND DOES NOT LEAD TO BIGOTRY.
CONCLUSION
That pretty much sums up everything important I wanted to say about my results. Obviously, there are many more things I could discuss, but these are the areas most meaningful to me. I will post a follow-up next year to see how I’ve changed in another 365 days. I hope you found this interesting and/or informative, and if you have any questions or inquiries about my results or beliefs, please feel free to contact me via Twitter.
