The Left-Right spectrum, an artifact from the French Revolution, is currently aligned with policies towards government spending, or at least thats how the terms 'liberal' and 'conservative' read.
It's a group that is effective enough to still be in use, but it seems superficial. The debate and the spectrum seem to be about something else.
The Revolutionary is generally the furthest to the left that the spectrum goes, and the revolutionary is motivated not by increasing government spending. Rather, the revolutionary is motivated by a driving need for change that must be achieved immediately. Those directly opposed to revolutionaries are the powers-that-be. They exist for the purpose of stability.
And so, the spectrum seems to be drawn from
Rapid, Sweeping Change
to
Ironclad, Entrenched Stability.
Filling in more gaps would allow leave something like this
Revolutionary - Rapid, Sweeping Change ~ A New Order (and/or System) ~ Anarchy
Leftist/Liberal - Change ~ Meaningful Progress ~ Instability
Moderate - Occasional Change ~ Progress slow enough to never be at the expense of stability ~ stagnation
Conservative - Infrequent, if any, Change ~ Stability ~ Detached, Outdated Government
Reactionary - No Change, None, Ever ~ Stability at the cost of all else ~Police State
The have-assed columns here are for degree of change ~ focus of political position ~ accompanying fear/risk
This gets more interesting when comparing two-party and multiple party systems. More on that later, maybe
Monday, July 9, 2007
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1 comment:
Interesting scale, Kelsey!
Of course, there are times when "conserving" the values of the past requires huge, destabilizing change. Outlawing abortion, for instance, would make radical changes in society.
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