Honestly I wish the political compass was actually useful. It would be a nice heuristic if it had any basis in reality. Instead it is a red herring, or worse. Many know this already.

However because I am forced against my will (authority 🤬) to engage with it, I will now talk shit about the fucking cumpiss here.

The sin of the cumpiss:

The greatest flaw in the political compass is without a doubt the fact that half of the compass relies on the Authoritarian vs Libertarian binary. This binary is more than foolishness. I would argue that it is a component of neoliberalism and its ability to produce de-mobilizing ideologies which actually reinforce and reproduce neoliberalism.

Leading up to the neoliberal era imperialists relied on the devolpment theories of modernization. You gotta maintain labor discipline, you gotta get your technology up, promote individualism, be western, accumulate capital (you need IMF loans so be sure to get into debt please), and get those liberal institutions that Jesus loves so much up and running.

Importantly, use the state to do this, but within reason, you still gotta be libs of course, but the state is a great tool for this. All of this is connected, so if you start on one place (promote individualism for example) then it will intuitively and naturally spread into another aspect (forming liberal institutions).

In effect, this model just fucking steamrolls over the peoples and cultures of the world and drew them into dependency and exploitation. Neocolonialism basically enforced by your own government.

Now this next part important. After the west corrupted the “post colonial” governments and left the people justifiably pissed at their governments, they pivoted. Neoliberalism is like a response to the reactions against the post WW2 modernization theory. Oh so you don’t like the government now?? Well how about yall just privatize and deregulate?? Who needs the government anyway? It must be part of the problem! There is a lot more to the rise of neoliberalism that I am ignoring but it’s quite possible to just see it as a weaponized distrust of government that came from imperialists enforcing liberal development models accross the word.

The point is that general “anti-government” sensibilities (libertarianism) are, in part, more popular as a result of bourgeoisie development models. It’s why anarchism is not only underwhelming as a path to revolution, but arguably part of the problem. It is a perfect de-mobilizing ideology because it lauds libertarian (cough liberal cough) ideals while attempting to resist capitalism and thus the authoritarianism it opposes.

Back to the cumpiss: western “analysis” (deragotry)

Neoliberalism is usually placed in the authoritarian right. But we can see how libertarianism, the bottom half of the cumpiss, is actually part of neoliberalism as a demobilizing ideology that helps perpetrate the totality. Neoliberalism of requires both authoritarianism and libertarianism to function! How can a fucking 4 quadrant cumpiss ever fucking show this?!?!? It cant!

If this is true then how can neoliberalism exist as both authoritarian and libertarian? But in fact, this contradiction is evident in how neoliberalism is enforced. Labor discipline (read class warfare) is still a mjaor point in neoliberal models, but this can’t really be enforced without the state. So the same state that neoliberalism seeks to undermine because government is the problem, is actually still needed. So some hypocrisy is actually encouraged and built in. (it’s a grift)

So in order to use the political cumpiss you have to begin by saying that development models, ideologies, and the actual practices differ wildly and actually demand hypocrisy. Otherwise none of it makes any sense.

How is this acceptable??? The answer is “analysis.”

It is baked into western thought to dissect, seperate, and categorize things. This is “analysis.” By removing the context, the relationships, connections, and contradictions between everything, analysis will create ideology that does not line up with practice. Yet this is how western epistemology believes is the best way to understand the world.

“Analysis” (derogatory) is what leads us to want the political cumpiss in the first place. It’s why, deep down, I wish that it was a heuristic that actually helped us understand politics. Luckily Marxism is more able to take a totalistic view that can see things in context, relation, contradiction etc, than other western views might and so it is more intuitive for the marxist (or non liberal) to be put off by the cumpiss, even before reading On Authority or getting into more explicit politics and class analysis (not deragotry 😜).

The needless and unhelpful seperation and isolation of things and ideas is what I believe drives people to treat ideology as they would candy in a candy shop. Believing somehow that through the sheer magic of their objectivity and “analysis” the liberal can merely decide the candy that looks most appealing (like the nazi in The Last Crusade) without the context and relations that are just as crucial to understanding nature as are its divisible parts.

Ultimately we can’t do this if we want to understand the world and craft useful models that can explain it.