Primary Candidates on the Political Compass™

The good folks who developed the The Political Compass™ have applied their test to the primary candidates, and this picture emerges.

Thus: "....It is important to note that although most of the candidates seem quite different, in substance they occupy a relatively restricted area within the universal political spectrum. Democracies with a system of proportional representation give expression to a wider range of political views. While Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are depicted on the extreme left in an American context, they would simply be mainstream social democrats within the wider political landscape of Europe. Similarly, Hillary Clinton is popularly perceived as a leftist in the United States while in any other western democracy her record is that of a moderate conservative..." -- The Political Compass™

I want to encourage friends, family and visitors to this blog to take their own test here. When I took the test, my political beliefs landed smack dab on top of Nelson Mandela and Gandhi's, as shown. I hasten to caution any lonely, politically correct vegetarian searching for a pen-pal that this measurement applies to POLITICAL BELIEFS ONLY, and should not be used to extrapolate any other virtue. I'm defining "politics" like an ancient Greek, as a series of beliefs regarding how humans, as social animals like lions or meerkats, should manage the problems of living in a group or polis. The values I share with the Dalai Lama have never kept me away from steaks-and-eggs breakfasts. I like porn and gravitate toward MILFs (whereas Gandhi was always testing himself with um, teen-aged acolytes). I bite my tongue a dozen times a day to hang onto the mortgage payment, and would rather emigrate to Canada than trade the comforts of home for political prison. I have a very bad, Scots-Irish temper, which on bad days of maltreatment would make a eugenicist blanche-- if I had laser beam eyes, the landscape would be littered with the ashes of the mean, the cruel and the stupid. And Rupert Murdoch-- I think it's monstrous that British Page Three girls now have word bubbles filled with neo-conservative propaganda instead of "likes horse-back riding, kittens and intellectual men with bald spots". This aggression will not stand, man!

The candidates that would design a government closest to my own beliefs, like Dennis Kucinich, are unelectable to national office in the dominant culture, but that doesn't make them wrong about the best way to provide maximum happiness for the most people. I continue to support Obama over the petulant Tracy Flick. News just came over the wire that John Edwards has dropped out, which will further embitter my friend Bill. As Master Kung tells us, we must work with imperfect bricks.