David Brin offers up his own Two-Dimensional Political Landscape:
In my two dimensional political landscape there is still left versus right. Only now we shall do something unprecedented and actually define our terms. Taking only one of the many and often contradictory attributes commonly associated with the old linear model, let’s assign the horizontal axis the task of depicting a person’s attitude towards personal property. In other words, the far left is where we’ll assign people who consider personal property a suspect, if not an inherently evil notion. The further to the right you go, the more property-holding is seen as innate and irrevocable, one of the fundamental rights of man.Along our second (vertical) axis we shall then array various opinions regarding State or Private Coercion, or the desirability of some authority with the might to impose its will (perhaps for the “common good”) upon recalcitrant individuals or competing systems.
One advantage of figure two over the old linear model, is apparent at a glance. It separates natural foes who should never have been lumped together in the first place.
Stalin believed nobody should own anything, but that he could and should feel free to torture his opponents to death. Therefore, he is placed in the upper left corner as both coercive and anti-property. Ferdinand Marcos, Anastasio Somoza and Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, ran their nations as personal fiefdoms, enforcing programs of inherited family wealth and power to benefit their oligarchic supporters. They were classic coercive aristocrats of the kind that dominated nearly all human cultures since agriculture and metallurgy came along, feudalists who believed they could by right both torture and own people. That puts them at the upper right.
(Want to learn a magic trick? How to make most dogmatic libertarians turn purple? Show them what we’ve drawn so far, and ask—WHICH type of coercive repressor destroyed freedom and markets in most cultures, across 4,000 years of recorded history? Taken across that span, it has been propertarian wealth-accumulating aristocracies that were the market-repressors, 99% of the time! True, we grew up terrified by anti-propertarian (socialist) tyrants, like Stalin. But these were, in fact, a recent invention. A mutation of the older, more pervasive pattern of owner-aristocrats. But, having thrown that idea-grenade, let’s get back to model-making.)
Let’s look at a few other examples. For example, Hitler’s position in the top center in no way makes him “moderate.” This chart simply portrays the syndicalist economic program the National Socialist Worker’s Party (Nazis) imposed upon both labor and factory owners, soon after it killed off all opponents and confiscated the goods of non-Aryans. Their rule was one of unparalleled horror, but Nazi opinion about personal property was indisputably far more centrist (with syndical-socialist elements) than old-line Marxists would have us believe.
This at once illuminates a lesson which the old model conveniently disguised, and yet one of vital importance to us all—that the center, too, can go mad.1 The concept of populist madness is an especially important one for Americans. Our Jeffersonian traditions seem to protect us against being suborned by the radicalisms of the far left or right, since our myths teach us to despise aristocrats, while even the most average middle American has only contempt for “the masses” (who are quite distinct from “the people”).