Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeP
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Yes, that’s a pretty good illustration and it highlights
the spatial aspects of the metaphor which seem to me to be problematic.
The model envisages a spectrum ordered from “left” to “right” on which most people’s political positions lie, enabling us to to say things like “B’s views are to the right of A’s but to the left of C’s”. To describe someone’s politics as “extreme left”, then, means that there are few if any people who hold views to the left of them, and “extreme right” is similarly understood. This is all simple and straight forward.
A problem arises, though, when we try to impute a metric in order to talk about , for example, the distance between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, or between someone on the Democratic left and a colleague who is on the right of the party.
Indeed, such a metric is implicated in the very notion of being in “the centre”. The centre must, in some practical sense, be equidistant from the two extremes, but is this mid point defined by the theoretical points on the line, or by the actual positions held by actual people? Am I in the middle if there are equal numbers of people, or equal numbers of policy options, to the left and to the right of my agenda? Or something else …
I want to consider three different approaches to this question; which I’ll dub “theoretical”, “psephological” and “tribal”
The theoretical model arises out of the study of political science, which can be thought of as providing a theoretical framework according to which various political positions are analysed and assigned a place on the line. I think this is the model implied in your diagram, JoeP.
The psephological interpretation is alluded to above. Given a population ordered according to their politics, the political distance between any two people is a measure of the number of people with political views that lie between them.
Because the ordering requires some theoretical understanding of left v right it is easy to mistake this model as just another version of the theoretical model, but there is at least one glaring difference. In the psephological model there is no recognition of theoretical positions that are not actually held by someone, and as a result, there are no wide empty gaps such as appear in your diagram.
in this model, the boundaries between moderate and extreme are necessarily arbitrary. So one could say that the left-most decile are “the extreme left”, and the right-most decile, “the extreme right”. Equally, one could use the left- and right-most quartiles or some other division. But whichever boundaries are chosen, there can be no yawning gap between the extremes and the centre.
The tribal model is based on some class analysis, according to which the poor are in conflict with the wealthy, so that parties and policies can be ordered according to which class interests they favour *. According to this model, a political position is left-wing if it serves the working class and right-wing if it serves the oligarchy.
In the tribal model, the distance between two political positions would be measured in terms of the difference in wealth or household income of the classes served by the different policies/aims associated with those positions.
To be a centrist in this tribal model is to support policies that promote the interests of the middle class. It is in this sense more than in any other I think, that the centre is deemed to be irreconcilable with the left.
*The tribal model might seem at first glance to be equivalent to the psephological model, and indeed, if we assume that everyone's political position is purely self-interested, the two are one and the same. But here's the thing: it is manifestly not the case that every citizen holds views and supports policies that serve only their own class interests. The considerable continuing support for Trump and the GOP are testament to that fact.
Left, Right, and Centre
Linear Mode
