Where the Candidates Stand on the Political Spectrum
I was struck by how Donald Trump - in spite of his bellicose rhetoric - isn’t any more authoritarian than the remaining Republican candidates, and how Bernie Sanders ultimately isn’t any more LEFTIST!!1!!1!1!! than, say, FDR.
And look how far to the right Hillary Clinton is.
Just a microcosm of how far to the right the whole spectrum has shifted in the past generation.
This chart extends to all areas of political thought — not just to the confines of the US campaign. Accordingly, the placement of the candidates is in the context of universal political landscape. The chart will be adjusted if and when there are significant policy shifts.
Voter reaction against the party mainstream and Washington insiders couldn’t be more in evidence, as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders confound the apparatchiks and pack out the town hall meetings. The GOP, having lost its way since the end of the cold war, has little that’s unique to unify its supporters. Wall Street? The Obama/Clinton Democrats couldn’t have been more supportive. Militarism? Think only of Libya, Syria and Iraq. Civil liberties? Have you checked out the extended presidential powers in the NDAA, further surveillance provisions and Obama’s unprecedented pursuit of whistle-blowers? With liberal Republicans a long-extinct political species, and the party shifting relentlessly rightwards, the GOP became the home to Christian evangelicals. There’s little to distinguish the deeply traditional conservative Christian Republican candidates, yet the profane Mr Trump is paradoxically enjoying the largest share of white evangelical support. Never mind that he’s clearly more at home with the gospel of Ayn Rand. A recent U-turn on abortion was all that the blustering billionaire, a man of apparently few fixed principles and no guiding ideology, needed to attract many of the party’s Christian conservatives. His economics are sometimes less right-wing than the other GOP candidates; Trump for a time even supported single-payer health care. Is he really a Tory … or a wig? Unlike his opponents, he’s against the Transpacific Partnership Agreement, which gives corporations unprecedented influence in government. And he also defended Obama’s bank bailouts — anathema to the other GOP contenders. Contradictions notwithstanding, he successfully targets the heartland of the anti-tax, anti-immigrant, pro-security social base of the party. He’s a populist in the Berlusconi mould, and the more outrageous his statements, the more his supporters love it.
Style more than substance separates Trump from Hillary Clinton. After all, Trump was a generous donor to Clinton’s senate campaigns, and also to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary is nevertheless disingenuously promoting herself as the centrist between an extreme right-winger (Trump) and an ‘extreme left-winger’ (Sanders). Abortion and gay marriage place her on a more liberal position on the social scale than all of the Republicans but, when it comes to economics, Clinton’s unswerving attachment to neoliberalism and big money is a mutual love affair.
More: The Political Compass