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The Anti-Candidate's Position on THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM: CONSERVATIVE, OR LIBERAL?

Is the Anti-Candidate conservative or liberal?

Yes.

That is, the anti-candidate is conservative on some things, and liberal on other things. So far as we can tell, the anti-candidate is conservative and liberal on all the right things.

Several years ago we developed a political model with our good friend James Galt-Brown (before he became a PhD-type, even), after he observed that the farther you move along the political spectrum on one issue, you often end up on the other end of the spectrum on some other issue. At the time neither of us knew of the work of Professor Clinton Rossiter, a Political Scientist of some note (he has a Wikipedia page, so that's something), who also put forth an idea like this. I think the twist we added (below) was original.

Here's an example: the farther to the left (as defined in our time) most people go on the issue of personal freedoms (e.g., the freedom to choose to abort a baby, the freedom to engage in various minority modes of sex), they usually end up in favor of restricting other personal freedoms (e.g., the right to keep and bear arms). As another example, many of the same people who argue strongly in favor of the freedom of speech and of the press also favor restrictions on some types of speech (e.g., explicitly Christian speech).

It is clear that political parties, also, change in emphasis over time. Consider how the pro-slavery Democratic Party and anti-slavery Republican Party of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras morphed into the pro-affirmative action Democratic Party and anti-affirmative action Republican Party of recent years.

Here, then, is the idea: What if, then, the political spectrum isn't a line that stretches outward toward infinity on either end (like the electromagnetic spectrum), but rather a line that folds back into itself to form a circle? (Slides 16-20 of this presentation show variations of a "circular spectrum" derived from the aforementioned Rossiter.)

And here's our twist on the idea of tying the ends of the political spectrum together: what if the societal pendulum -- that imaginary pendulum that swings through time as the population changes and world events influence societal norms and decisions -- doesn't swing back and forth along a straight-line continuum but instead swings inside that circle, like a Foucault Pendulum? And just as a physical Foucault Pendulum demonstrates the rotation of the earth, a political Foucault Pendulum would show the procession of society through periods of different political emphasis.

It makes the final result much more complicated, does it not? And much more interesting.

"That government is best which governs least." -- Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience" (often attributed to Thomas Paine)

Governing least ... we'd be happy to.

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March 2010

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