The political spectrum - left vs. right

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I have had been dissatisfied with the idea of the political spectrum for a long time. Taking a person's political ideas and placing them somewhere on a line necessarily distills them down to a single variable. There is a world of information lost when you try and fit whole philosophies into that model. I couldn't even find my house if all I had was one number (Lattitude? Longitude? Distance from where I stand?).

I'd like to hear thoughts on what the world is really like and what dimensions are important in predicting how closely different people will agree.

Personally, I like the Nolan Chart: a square with axes of personal freedom and economic freedom. It shows nicely how fascism and socialism fit close to each other with very limited freedom overall. It also places libertarians separate from conservatives, avoiding the puzzling label of far-right for people who believe in a lot of "leftist" social freedoms.

What do you think?

I'm not much of a fan of the baggage associated with spectrum labels. Considering the whole thing is only reflecting the seating arrangement of the French legislators at the time of the revolution... I also like this chart
Spectrum

Here it is. The fundamental divide between what we now term Left and Right:

The Left view government as the single-most, in most instances only, driver of social value and change. Therefore, at the insistence of government, the Left view the people as the conduit to the government's changes. The government directs the lives of people to suit the government-mandated ends. In short: the people exist to serve the government.

The Right view government through a very limited prism. The government is there to provide what the masses need, basic healthcare, schooling, policing, armed forces protection, institutions to aide in economic recovery and the setting of central interest rates. Nothing more. Anything else a citizen wants, a citizen may have if he or she has the economic backing to do so. Simply, and why the Right is always seen as pro-business: the government serves the rights of the people to make of their lives what they so choose by facilitating individual choice and achievement, not by limiting it.

Well?

The two charts are similar though not identical. Even that is going to be a bit over simplified.

The pervasiveness of the conventional political spectrum is ridiculous in my opinion. I don't like the Nolan Chart, either (but it would much better if that was the norm rather than the simple left-right line). If I had to label myself on a political spectrum I'd use the Political Compass, which has four broad areas: left-authoritarian, right-authoritarian, left-libertarian, and right-libertarian. That probably best represents, very simply and generally, the way I tend to parcel the different political viewpoints.

There isn't any model that's without flaws, though. None of them are going to be able to accurately show the relationships between all political systems - there's too much diversity for that. In fact, it's silly to talk about whether such models are accurate (or correct, or whatever) or not, because when you consider how political systems fit together you have to assign importance to all the issues, and that's subjective. For example, I know a deep ecology style anarchist who views most talk of freedom vs authoritarianism as irrelevant. For him, there's not a major difference between, say, anarcho-capitalism and Stalinist communism. That's not because he's wrong about what 'anarcho-capitalism' and 'Stalinist communism' conventionally refer to. Rather, it's a consequence of his general worldview.

With that in mind, it's pointless to try to figure out a model that works for everybody. Instead we should say that the choice of which political spectrum on which to place yourself is one of way of expressing your political beliefs and showing how those beliefs relate to others' beliefs. It tells us something about what issues you consider important and how you evaluate other systems. There isn't a wrong or right model.

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