The Most Important Political Dimension is Certainty

People love to create political compasses. The most famous one has left vs right on one dimension, and authoritarian vs libertarian on the other. Another popular one has political vs social liberal/conservative. Broadly speaking, the goal seems to be to come up with a set of dimensions that puts your beliefs next to the people everyone is supposed to like, and your rivals close to taboo figures like Hitler. There is a whole subreddit for this. I don’t think left vs right is a particularly useful political dimension. Exactly what ideas fall into which group changes over time, and can be different in different countries. It’s more useful to see left and right as evolving political coalitions than stable coherent theories. Similarly, I don’t think libertarian vs authoritarian is as clear cut as it seems, since in practice giving less power to governments often gives more power to corporations, or whoever else might be waiting in the wings. I think by far the most important political dimension is certainty . How certain are you that your own theories about how to run the country will have good results? How willing are you to accept that the other side might be right and you might be wrong? How willing are you to defer to (and maintain) neutral democratic institutions like elections and courts that won’t always take your side? Your degree of certainty in your beliefs is totally separate from what those beliefs are. I used to run a political debate club in San Francisco. We had pe…