The US political spectrum is usually depicted as a left/right line, with Liberals on the left side and Conservative on the right, throwing Moderates in in the center and everyone else plotted somewhere on the line - which is a woefully inaccurate system for describing politics in the modern area.
The Left/Right graph makes common sense, certainly - the US has a two-party system, so it makes a certain amount of sense that any representation of it would have two sides. And it is also simple, and we do like to keep things simple. But doing this greatly distorts what the two parties really are.
Each party is actually a coalition of many disparate groups who are only loosely bound together inside the party’s philosophy. Those groups tend to come and go from the parties over time, changing as the politics of the day changes. And as those groups come and go, the change in members naturally changes the overall political philosophy of the party.
But — it has been argued — even if the nature of the philosophy of the two parties might change over time, there are still only two parties, so there is still only only a need of a left/right representation of them, even if the nature of what makes up "left" and "right" changes over time.
And that’s where the errors start to creep in.
First, the more minor point. Because of the winner-takes-all structure of the US political system, US politics doesn't really support having any more than two major political parties. Usually, after a few elections, any major third parties that might have arisen are either absorbed into one of big two, or they break one of the big two and replace them.
However, for those brief times that three major parties have been in existence in US politics, the Left/Right line does very little to explain the nature of the political debate of the time. Most often, in order to force the three-way debate onto the rigidity of the Left/Right line, the third party's philosophy is plunked down somewhere on the line, thus declaring it to be - for instance - a party of the Right, but not so Rightwards as the regular party of the Right, even though doing this very likely does nothing to illuminate the nature of three-way debate.
Actually, doing that to the third parties probably isn’t only just inaccurate; it probably is also actually misleading in its representation of where the third party really stands in relation to the other two. Often, a particular debate can elicit three different opinions, and the third party will have arisen to stand in opposition to both of the other parties.
Yet, that is all just the politics of the moment, and that is easily glossed over by the passage of history - since the US political system doesn't support having three major political parties for any length of time, you can just ignore the three-way debate until it goes away, with any excess political debate of the time that doesn’t fit within the simplistic Left/Right line roughly trimmed away, thus preserving the simplicity. Which is why this was the more minor point.
Far more problematic, however, is the Left/Right system’s complete inability to describe the politics of the modern era (even though describing politics is, technically, its sole purpose).
The foremost reason for this complete failure of accuracy on its part is the assumption built into it that politics will always and ever be a Left/Right divide. But, the major political debate of the 20th century was the dispute (one-sided though it might have been) between Progressives and Populists, not the dispute between Conservatives and Liberals.
To illustrate: Why does everyone in politics always talk about Reform, not just reform but Reform — as if reform itself were somehow a value? Why does the same kinds of legislation get passed, no matter who you vote for? Why does nothing seem to change no matter which of the two parties is in power?
Classically, the answer to these questions is: It is because of a grand conspiracy of power, wealth, and corporatism.
But, this is wrong. It is actually because just about everyone in positions of power and/or influence — from politicians to international experts to reporters — in the 20th century were all Progressives. They might have had their Liberal or Conservative leanings, but the core of their belief was Progressive.
In fact, for a while there, just about every politician in office, whatever their political persuasion, was even identifying themselves as being a Progressive - hat’s how deep Progressive thought was running in US politics during that era. They might not all have known the history of Progressive thought, but they were identifying themselves with it anyway.
Which might seem strange, even impossible, when Liberals and Conservative supposedly forms the core of the Democratic and Republican parties. However, neither Liberals nor Conservatives were much in power in either party. For most of the 20th century, Progressives have controlled both parties, though their influence did wax and wane over time.
While it is true that the Progressive party name hasn't really been on the ballot since Teddy Roosevelt's time, its power and influence were definitely alive and well. Certainly, its anti-Populist furor has been felt in every election since the rise and fall of the Populist party at the turn of the previous century.
The Progressives, with their ideals of Reform, Progress, Exceptionalism, Corporatism, Aggression, and more Reform, pretty much dominated US politics for an entire century, while Conservatives and Liberals mostly seethed in the wings. And while the Populists were repeatedly savaged by the Progessives, until even the word "Populist" because something actually even worse than a sneering slur — it became political death to be saddled with it.
That was the political divide of the modern era - a four-way split, heavily lop-sided though that divide might have been. And because that was that nature of the political debate of the modern era, I would propose that we stop using the simplistic Left/Right model of politics, or the simplistic X-axis graph, and start using an X/Y graph - leaving Liberals and Conservatives on the left and right hand sides, but adding Progressives to the top (Elitists that they are) and Populists to the bottom (being of the masses as they are).
This fuller grid would far more accurately represent the nature of the disputes of modern politics.
And if we wanted to be even still more accurate, we could add the Zed-line, putting Individualist on one end of that line and Socialist on the other. Then the different political groups could be plotted out on a three-dimensional grid, with bubbly spheres drawn around whatever the current coalitions of the two major parties happen to be at any given moment. You could even, then, run a kind of time-lapse over it, and show how the nature of the political parties changes over time. It would also naturally depict the philosophies of third parties far more accurately, and how those philosophies relate to and affect the rest of the political spectrum.
We don't need to go so far as the 3-D version, though. The X/Y grid version by itself would add so much more to the illustration of the nature of the debate. I would very much like to see the terms "Progressive" and "Populist" re-enter the political spectrum in describing the politics of the 21st century.
(Of course, the current movement amongst certain Liberals to adopt the word Progressive for their own to describe Liberalism might mess this X/Y system up a bit. That is, if it turns out that they aren’t actually Progressives-with-liberal-tendencies anyway.)
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