SPECIAL LR GUEST ARTICLE

by Jacob Asplund,

Political discourse often breaks down because of incompatible or ambiguous definitions. Words like left, right, conservative, progressive, mainstream, extreme, centrist and moderate have different meanings to different people. A wide variety of political maps have been created to try to reduce these ambiguities and facilitate productive dialogue. The Asplund Chart improves on these previous attempts.

Here's a brief summary of the Asplund Chart. By their very nature, the two national parties favor centralized decision-making within their own party. The Republican Party is represented by the area below the red line and the Democratic Party is represented by the area below the blue line. Ideological conservatism is the area above the yellow line. Social conservatism is farther to the right on the chart while institutional conservatism (constitutionalism/free markets) is closer to the top. Similarly for ideological progressives and liberals, located above the green line, farther left indicates a more transformational philosophy while proximity to the top represents an emphasis on civil liberties and personal autonomy. The swing voters, centrists and nonparticipants in the middle are neither strongly ideological nor strongly partisan. These boundaries are dynamically maintained in roughly the same position over time as politicians, parties and ideologies adapt to changing circumstances.

Mapping major political factions on the political landscape helps to clarify observed political dynamics. Common political activities have a clear graphical meaning in the Asplund Chart. The rhetorical positions of Republican and Democratic politicians are close to the red and blue points on the chart. The party platforms are developed to maximize the appeal of politicians to the left or right half of the political spectrum. Republican run on a small government, free market and socially conservative platform while Democrats run on a platform of civil liberties, social safety net and multiculturalism. The infighting between conservatives, establishment (or mainstream) Republicans and RINOs is generally along the three divisions within the Republican area of the chart. Similar rifts within the Democratic Party regularly surface during political debates.

The history of third party futility can be explained by the strong ideological disputes that prevent conservative-leaning independents, libertarians and left-leaning independents from working together. If these groups could coalesce, it would have to be around the smaller government, ideologically neutral position represented by the gray point. Third parties that are strongly ideological cannot draw enough independents from the middle or the other side and end up slitting the vote within their half of the political landscape. Only by completely replacing the major party on their side of the spectrum has a third party ever succeed. The Tea Party movement is attempting to unseat moderates and some establishment Republicans and to vote in conservative Republicans and right-leaning independents without fracturing the Republican Party. A similar, though less successful, attempt was made by progressives within the Democratic Party in the mid-to-late 2000s.

When legislating and governing, the rhetoric and policies of both parties moves toward the black point on the chart. This is the point of moderate, bipartisan compromise between the national parties. These compromises almost always anger both the conservative and progressive base, since the only thing leaders and elites of both parties can agree about is expanding the size and scope of the federal government. Tactical political battles between insiders then determine who gets to manage the resulting bureaucracy. The main tactic in these insider political disputes, triangulation, is simply maintaining political unity within one party while causing the other party to split at either the moderate/establishment or establishment/ideologue boundary. These dynamics lead to the continually expanding federal government we see today and de Tocqueville noticed almost 200 years ago.

The other dynamic that the Asplund Chart captures is political marginalization. Conservatives are derided as reactionaries, Tea Partiers as neo-confederates, libertarians as anarchists, liberals as hippies, progressives as revolutionaries. By highlighting more extreme members and ignoring the reasonable ones, political insiders push each of these factions outside the mainstream. Republican and Democratic leaders are regularly denounced as (from left to right) communists, socialists, statists, fascists, dictators, corporatists, oligarchs and fundamentalists. They insulate themselves from these labels by adopting the language of moderation and centrism, if not the practice.

Having a shared map of politics helps foster rational dialogue, even between people who fundamentally disagree about policy preferences. Hopefully the Asplund Chart can prove useful in that regard.

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