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The Pew Research Centre has a new political typology quiz.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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