I think there really is a political spectrum, but it has little or nothing to do with the smoke-and-mirror battles involving the labels in current use. The spectrum has more than two dimensions, and it has umerous attributes...these are a few.

1. Tolerable rate of change: the spectrum goes from anarchy (total unpredictable change) to rabid defense of exactly what used to be.

2. Compassion: Spectrum runs from "loving everybody all the time and doing nothing", the useless brotherhood of the unsuccessful commune, to loving self and own friends to the point of exclusion of disadvantage of all others, the anti-social attitudes of some highly priveleged or snobbish..

3. Government Purpose: Ranges from none to the architect of social life.

4. Fiscal Sobriety: Anarchist spendthriftery to obsessive retention of cash and a horror of any debt.

5. Criteria of Human Respect: At one end, a respect of any human being as a basic condition; at the other, respect only of those who acheive prominence, preferably with wealth, or for corporations.

6. Willingness to commit violence on others: ranges from a refual to harm another human being to extreme militarism with specious rationale or none.

Most of the notions we have of liberalism start at the center of these curves and extend by small gradient steps in the general direction of the anarchic extreme; most of the notions we have of conservatism start near the center and extend toward the more controlling.

But I think there is at least one if not several other axes that wuld need to be identified and measured before you could truly have a political map of personalities and positions. Part of the confusion in the hustings is because the actual dimensions are sort of conflated into one quick-speak label, which is cognitively sort of like having only two directional words in your vocabulary, such as "left" and "right" and then trying to explain three-dimensional space. Difficult.


A