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Comment by pseudo0 | Hacker News Reader

Aah come on. Nobody said the Democrats are "adjacent" to stoning women. Sheesh.

From the perspective of a country that is to the left of the Democrats, yes, they appear centre-right.

I'm not sure you've can offer a truly global perspective from which to accurately determine whether the US Gov is left or right leaning, but if I had to predict such an answer I'd say it would tip right.

Edit: okay, did some hunting and found this: https://archive.ph/PjNEF

Check the bubble chart. The Dems are in fact globally left-leaning, according to the Manifesto Project described in the article. But check the relative positions from e.g. a British perspective (since that happens to be shown in the chart). The Dems are to the right of the UK's left-wing Labour Party, while the Republicans are right of the right-wing Conservatives. The overall British perspective of the US would be of a right-leaning country.

I've not looked at other perspectives since I'm in mobile and I've not going to deep-dive the Manifesto Project just now. But I wonder which are the nations which have an "overall" perspective of the US as left-leaning?

I'd say that the spectrum of a typical EU country covers the vast majority of the actual spectrum. You have actual communists on one end and stop just short of actual fascists/nazis/theocrats on the other.

Meanwhile, the US reaches as far right as the EU does, but in the other direction, it barely reaches the middle of the EU (i.e. total) spectrum.

So it's not that Democrats are adjacent to the far right. It's just that they're more right wing than left wing. They're obviously still much closer to the centre-left than they are to the far-right, but they are also further from the left extreme than they are from the right extreme

Wouldn’t the political spectrum be an utter lack of government on one end and tyranny on the other? That being the case, communism, fascism, Naziism, etc. would all be closely related on the totalitarianism side of the spectrum, rather than opposing ends of the spectrum.

The ancient attempt of a 1d embedding of political ideologies is doomed to fail, however anyone tries. It started out in revolutionary France in 1789 to distinguish between the supporters of the king (conservatives, on the right) and supporters of the revolution (revolutionaries, on the left). It was good enough for that, but it's not for very much else.

The most sensible minimal extension (to 2d) that I know of is to distinguish between how much you value personal freedom on one axis and economic freedom on the other. That still leaves out a lot, but is the best indicator of which side you'll likely to end up on regarding most political contentions, given the simplicity of the model.

There are actually two popular models of that kind, the Nolan Chart (example quiz [1], your spectrum is the vertical axis) and the Political Compass (example quiz [2], your spectrum is the secondary diagonal).

[1] https://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/

[2] https://www.politicalcompass.org/

Such a spectrum would not be particularly useful for describing the behavior of politicians or voters. Consider that someone who usually votes for a democratic socialist party might sometimes swing further left and vote for a communist party, or further right and vote for a liberal party. But they're unlikely to vote for a fascist party. This fact is captured by a left-right spectrum, but not by the spectrum you're proposing, which would suggest equal likelihood of such a voter supporting a communist or fascist party.

Well, every model will have some weaknesses and I suppose it depends on what you want to know which one would be better. I know if I had to choose on the basis of one spectrum with whom I'd like to live in the same country, I'd strongly prefer gp's over the conventional one.

Also, btw, the fascist movement recruited much of it's ideological and political concepts and initial core activist base from syndicalist/corporatist socialist circles and was strongly anti-capitalist/pro-socialist and anti-conservative. Benito Mussolini was for a time chief editor of the Italian Socialist Party's newspaper "Avanti!" and member of the party's National Directorate.

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