2016 Candidates According to the Political Compass

[pbrower2a]

1. We are all becoming much less lenient toward crime. Just think of gun control -- President Obama has made mostly right-wing arguments against assault rifles, massacre clips, and unsavory people facing lax background checks. We are getting much less sympathetic toward sex offenders and domestic violence.

I took the test and I found myself where I am -- but that was because many of the questions asked about my attitudes between science and superstition and on due process of the law. The test did not ask me about meth labs, child sexual abuse, or domestic violence. If the question had been asked, "Is crime strictly the result of economic distress or of personal moral failure?" I would have given an authoritarian answer.

The conservative answer is of course "moral failure". Economic distress may push people who would otherwise avoid crime into crime, but one must recognize that a comparative few people commit the bulk of crime. Such is reality. Most people in the ghettos do no crime.


2. We have found that some parts of humanity utterly hate America and it is not because of our economic system. We can easily get authoritarian attitudes toward terrorism -- right?

[pbrower2a]

LOL -is this from the European perspective?

Probably. Christian fundamentalism (whether Protestant or Catholic) is far stronger in America than in Europe. Socialism is about as much a political epithet as fascism in America. The extensive welfare state that has something for everyone is more strongly developed almost everywhere in Europe than in America. America remains a cultural suburb of Europe, but it has been exempt from the political traumas that destroyed the last traces if feudal organization and attitudes.

This is the Political Compass' assessment of current governments in the EU:

Whoops! Maybe that is all too simplistic an answer on my part.