[LINK] Up Vs Down is the new Left vs Right

One example that always comes to my mind is the 1980s-era alliance between Christian conservatives and a faction of radical-feminists in the U.S., in support of anti-pornography laws. This led to the oddity of radical-feminist Catharine MacKinnon supporting the work of anti-feminists like James Dobson on the Meese Commission.

I can't help but be reminded of this.

See also: Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens being pattern-matched with anti-Arab racists.

I broadly agree with your comment but disagree in one respect.

Ideological spectra don't really make much sense once things get multidimensional.

I wouldn't go that far. The electromagnetic spectrum still makes sense even though light waves differ in more ways than just frequency. And the left-right axis is still meaningful even though there're extra dimensions of political variation, although one has to think carefully about operationalizing the left-right axis, and remember that it explains only, say, 40% of variance in political belief, rather than 100%.

Aren't things already multidimensional?

You seem to be implying that left-right is the natural ideological spectrum. Isn't it more likely that it's just a particular axis that is salient at this time? Is it implausible that another axis will become the center of conflict in the future? What is the left-right axis? Is it (a) the eternal key to all ideology; (b) an axis of conflict that many care about today; (c) the contrast between a pair of alliances that are pretty arbitrary? Is there even a difference between (b) and (c)? Perhaps whether the axis drives the alliance or vice versa?

How can you figure out which beliefs are ideological and which are self-interested?

Finally, I'm not sure if you are making an abstract point, or whether you are talking very specifically about this article and saying that this particular article would be better framed this way.

Let me try that again. You contrast "ideological spectra" with "alliances between interest groups." There seem to be three contrasts. I think it is important to treat them separately. One contrast is one dimension vs many dimensions. A second is the existence of a high dimensional ambient space vs there just being a graph of alliances. The third is the origin of beliefs or policies in ideology vs self-interest. You prefer your description, but if you could only correct one of those contrasts, which would it be?

I quite agree that spectra breaks down when applied to anything nontrivial, but I'm curious as to how you could graphically visualize this alliance structure. The strength of a political spectrum is that it allows for easy visualization and categorization. Great example, by the way.

This is, by the way, largely equivalent to the "Political Compass", and bears a certain resemblance to the "World's Smallest Political Quiz" or "Nolan chart" of libertarian propaganda.

The notion of dictatorship as a property right suggests a useful third axis: concern for political equality. This seems to weakly correlate with opposition to state coercion, although not entirely.

The fact that a sizeable minority of libertarians are anarchists should cast doubt on a model that places them on opposite ends of a spectrum. Also, I think your suggestion that the top right is represents feudalism (if true) would actually make the model even worse, since feudalism is horribly misunderstood by the general public (even more so than fascism, in my opinion).

There seems to be an almost deliberate political mind killing when one has a graph where Stalin and Hilter are on the opposite side of anarchism and libertarianism.