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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1864 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 12, 2026

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The Pew Research Centre has a new political typology quiz.

I'm classified as "Pragmatic and Polite Right".

Here's the link to the actual quiz: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/quiz/political-typology/

I'm Left-Behind Leftist Left-Out Left (let me correct that), which made me laugh. It was pretty easy to see which way the questions leaned and what answers would tip you into which bucket.

I always said if I were American, I'd be the old-school blue collar union Democrat voter, who they left behind when chasing the college-educated vote and the rush to the socially progressive side on gay rights, abortion, etc.

I got that "polite right" but I think this quiz is fairly bunk because of the vagueness of the questions and liability for them to be interpreted differently by different culture groups without mapping properly onto discrete political beliefs.

That being said, I do think the polite right being overwhelmingly likely to think that people get too offended AND are too offensive is an insightful result-- I definitely find myself frustrated by how reactive both my "allies" and "enemies" are.

Faith First Conservative

Some of the questions though.

How much do you think the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in American society today?

If I believe there are selection effects that persist perhaps based on one's ancestors selection into slavery, i might rate this high though I suspect that isn't necessarily the legacy the authors have in mind.

+1 for pragmatic and polite right

Another unconventional right here.

I think that's shorthand for "doesn't particularly like rapidly metastasizing federal government but still has a soft spot for the unions who had the balls to shoot back at Pinkertons".

Also unconventional right. I think it's something of a grab bag category.

I also went back and compared by answers category by category. Eleven times my answer matched the answer most URs gave; ten times it didn't. Change just one answer I bet I wind up in a different box.

Something feels off, I got "Faith First Conservative" which is wild because I am militantly an agnostic pluralist. Looking at the "Gender, Religion, and Society" tab shows extremely opposite views to the modal "Faith First Conservative"

I might have broken the quiz with my uniqueness lol... Reading through the options, I have some of the positions from a couple cores but disagree with other position in that group. Maybe Pew just hates classical liberals.

Maybe they should create a “Right-wing Libtard,” flavor for just such a conservative.

I'd prefer a "Right-wing Smooth Brain Autist" flavor for my particular flavor of stupid.

Or realistically Gothos + Achamian + DEATH + Nietzsche, but that would require too many brain cells being rubbed together.

"Right-wing Smooth Brain Autist"

Sounds like you found yourself a flair.

Yeah but it’s more fun if people need to remember me or wade through my post history to understand my views. Giving them a spoiler in the flair robs them of their sense of pride and accomplishment.

Nietzsche, smooth brain and autism were about the only references I caught there. I’m all aboard though. You ever read any H.L. Mencken at all? He was an interesting Nietzschean.

  • Gothos is a character is Steven Erikson's Malazan
  • Achamian is a character in R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse
  • DEATH is from Terry Pratchet.

Just characters that I felt resonated and influenced my worldview.

H.L. Mencken at all

No I have not, I'll put him on my book list lol. I generally stick to the White Autist classic genres: Fantasy, SciFi, Philosophy, looks like Mencken is predominately non-fiction?

Mencken is the funniest writer in American history, Mark Twain doesn't come close. His book "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche" is very interesting, but written very early in his career. Mostly useful as a corrective to modern attempts to make Nietzsche a safe lib. The place to start is A Mencken Chrestomathy, which is his own selection of his best writings. It'll teach you a ton about culture and politics in 20s/30s America while making you laugh the whole time.

Sorry, but the funniest American writer is either Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint, though perhaps you need to be Jewish to see the humor) or John Toole.

Ah. That explains why I didn’t catch it. Your first two points I’m completely lost on. I can’t read most fiction, even though I love a lot of classic Sci-Fi. I’m mostly a non-fiction guy. I do know who Terry Pratchet is though.

And yes, H.L. Mencken was a great American iconoclast who was a fairly die hard Nietzschean. I greatly enjoyed his writings. Literary critics like Hitchens were put off by him because he thought he was “too much” of a Nietzschean (is there even such a thing?). His teachings were greatly bastardized by people throughout history (the most cited example being the Nazis, of which Hitler unlikely read anything Nietzsche wrote); and of course Nietzsche has always been the favorite philosopher of every rebellious, testosterone fueled 14 year old boy.

"No Apologies Right," which doesn't seem correct: "Unwavering Trump supporters with a pugilistic political style and an ‘America first’ outlook."

I'm barely a Trump supporter, and certainly not an unwavering one. I guess my responses on immigration and DEI put me there

"Unconventional Right". Sounds correct. My politics could best be described as something like "Heidegger + 4chan + libertarian on social issues but not as much on economics".

Heidegger + 4chan

predator_handshake.gif

edit: messed up the reddit spacing, which I think counts as proof

I’m “Unconventional Right” as well. “Heidegger + 4chan” is a pretty funny way to describe yourself. You could call me a technological theocrat or a secular conservative in a lot of ways.

"Unconventional Right"; I would say that's pretty spot-on.

Most of the questions appear to lack sufficient detail (expected for a 24-question quiz, but still). For example the question about U.S. foreign policy is a simple dichotomous choice between "The U.S. should take into account the interests of its allies even if it means making compromises with them" and "The U.S. should follow its own national interests even when its allies strongly disagree". Then there's also the question that reads "Thinking about assistance to people in need, do you think the government 1: Should provide more assistance, 2: Should provide less assistance, or 3: Is providing about the right amount of assistance" which is so poorly defined and obviously depends on the group of people in question and what kind of assistance we are talking about here.

The way this test functions it's more like a political thermometer test where you pick the statement you feel the warmest towards in sort of a vibe-based manner, and I treated it that way when I was answering. For all intents and purposes I would still say it would classify people broadly accurately, but my autist brain did not feel good entering a response to some of these.

EDIT: Looking also at the opinions held by each of these typology groups, it is noticeable just how extreme "Leftward Progressives" are as a group. The profile of their answers are far more homogenous and partisan than any other group on most topics of contention, including their counterparts; the "No Apologies Right", which I'm guessing is (charitably) either an artefact of how these typologies have been defined or (less charitably) simply a result of intense purity spiralling.

I agree, for most political quizzes, I end up being closest to the opposite end of the spectrum, for example, the response that best matches my view on criminal sentencing is most criminals should spend less time in prison, because my desired reform would be to execute most of the people spending the most time in prison and using far more corporal punishment rather than short sentences. So yeah I agree with far left progressives about the direction of sentencing but we very much disagree about the alternative.

People have said for a long time that left/right is a broken paradigm for analyzing people’s political differences. I tend to agree. It can be useful for gauging subjective measures of people’s general political sentiments, but the specific ideological content of that can contain wildly different beliefs that press themselves to the same end with different people. You can have two different people who both believe that “Securing the borders,” is “Very important,” and one believes that because he’s an ethnonationalist who wants to preserve the perceived ethnic integrity and culture of his country, and the other believes it because it’s a primary conduit for human trafficking and drug distribution. And yet, those two have practically nothing to do with each other.

… it is noticeable just how extreme "Leftward Progressives" are as a group. The profile of their answers are far more homogenous and partisan than any other group on most topics of contention, including their counterparts…

Conservatives were said for a long time to be psychologically high in “disgust sensitivity,” which is the emotional constituent that lends them to support moral norms like sexual purity, racial homogeneity (which actually, partially evolved as an immunological response to invading pathogens in a biological community), etc. That actually isn’t true in studies that have been done in the Big 5. Conservatives are less neurotic than liberals. And it’s more noticeable when you observe just out how enraged they can get over things you say. The tendency for instance to interpret emotional discomfort as injury to them that needs to be fought against can get wild.

Conservatives are less neurotic than liberals

Remember that, because Haidt's a Boomer, he's locked into Boomer paradigms where the [faction where the moral majority dominated due to that disgust reflex] called itself "conservatives", because for the majority of his life that was the case. It ignores what we now know, that progressives [who are what "conservatives" used to be] and classic liberals are different.

This is also why the left/right paradigm is broken, and will remain so for the next 20 years simply because the median voter still uses paradigms common to Haidt's time, because they are of a similar age.

For sure. These terms have changed meanings several times throughout history. To be a “progressive” in the 20th century, you’d have been a support of eugenics, IQ testing, segregation in many ways, compulsory sterilization (which was invented here in the US, the Nazis got a lot of their ideas from us; we were the original pioneers of that shit; Hitler wrote a letter to Madison Grant telling him he referred to “The Passing of the Great Race” as his “Bible.”), all sorts of things which are now almost by default, associated with radical “right-wing” thought. Historically it was exactly the other way around. People should read up on the history of a very small and unknown town in New York called Cold Spring Harbor, and see just how many “progressive” intellectuals were associated with a lot of thought the liberals of today wouldn’t want to own one single iota of.

What people might call a “Bay Arean conservative,” is a “Midwestern libtard,” so technically I’m both, and vice versa. I’d much rather prefer in serious discussions to try and shed labels, because it obscures the nuances that should be captured between people’s beliefs that allow them to expose themselves to a broader landscape of respectable positions worthy of discussion. If I tell someone here “I’m a conservative,” they automatically think I’m a Republican or a typical low information Trump voter.

“Left-Out Left”, then I answered my borderline questions more conservatively and got “Pragmatic and Polite Right”.

Apparently, this is a series going all the way back to year 1987.

My result is "No-Apologies Right". Hilariously, when I clicked on it something apparently broke on the server, revealing that the page actually was written in Markdown!

Woo, me too!

I found the religion questions a bit annoying but overall not the most ridiculous of these things.

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