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The False Dichotomy of Political Ideology
That Debate was WEIRD.
Politics is usually framed as a conflict where two opposing sides meet and try to work out their differences either compromising and appeasing no one or remaining at war and appeasing only one side, but to disastrous consequence. This framing is clearly harmful in that there exists no possibility for peaceful resolution, but it’s also both artificial and false.
The framing here does fit the standard two Party political system which more or less evinces itself in a Congressional or Parliamentary setting, but it requires that views be either opposed or orthogonal and therefore results in simplification of positions to the point of meaninglessness.
I’ve explained before that political ideology cannot be sufficiently described on a spectrum. Political ideology is multifactorial which means it is statistically multidimensional. Even if we allow for orthogonal representation to create a visual diagram of ideology we have to collapse it or reduce it to at most three dimensions. This is like putting all cake on a spectrum from chocolate to vanilla. It does not make any sense. Where do checked cakes fall? Where does pineapple upside-down cake fall? Why are we talking about cakes anyway?
