Destination: Socialism

December 24, 2020  By Allen Gindler 

  

In a recent article, I stated that the U.S. lacks an influential right-wing party, and our two major parties — Democrats and Republicans — are left and center-left, respectively.  That is, the perceived rightness of the GOP makes sense only relative to the Democratic party.  It is refuted if one considers the actual policy carried out by Republicans for the last one hundred years.

First of all, it is necessary to clarify what we understand by the left-right political spectrum.  A political spectrum is a system of qualitative comparisons of different political philosophies.  There are plenty of approaches in compiling the political spectrum based on various factors, dimensions, axes, and cardinal points.  Most often, political spectrograms differ significantly from each other, and it seems that each of them describes an entirely different reality.

Recent developments in the analysis of political philosophies, based on a multi-disciplinary approach utilizing set theory and mathematical logic in a framework of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), started to remove the ambiguity in understanding a political spectrum.  The study identifies three main factors that influence the political spectrum polarization: attitude to private property, degree of individual freedom, and the scale of wealth redistribution..........To Read More....