A Look at the ESP Spectrums – Political Part 1

As I did with the social spectrum, I’m going to start this look at the political spectrum by copying exactly from my first post in this series.  From my previous column:

“We now move onto the global political spectrum shown in Figure 2. 

 

 

Again, we assume a government exists, thus no anarchy.  The overlap between Figures 1 and 2 is not a coincidence.  Our political structures are directly correlated to freedom and the social spectrum.” 

One form of government I didn’t capture was fascism.  The main reason for this is that fascism is, in my view, basically an unholy hybrid of the worst of both communism and fundamentalism.  One could put fascism at the extreme left or extreme right of Figure 2 and be able to reasonably justify it because, in essence, it represents a political system in which the government is god-like in power.  Said another way, I don’t view fascism as unique enough to justify its own category.  Nazi Germany is the prime example of a fascist state.

Having just addressed the missing content, it’s now time to address what’s already there.  We’ll start at the far left with communism.  This is a system of government that’s founded with the vision of a society in which everyone is equal.  The government is generally very totalitarian and domineering over the population, granting the people very limited rights.  It truly epitomizes the phrase, “Big government, small people.”  Economically, communists hate capitalism and believe it must be destroyed.  Karl Marx is the man behind it all, so this is relatively new.  It has failed (or is failing) everywhere it has been tried.  Soviet Russia is the quintessential example, but we still have communist-like states failing today in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. 

Socialism is basically communism-lite, and no more successful.  Look at present-day Europe.  The main reason they’re in the mess they’re in over there is because of their socialist governments (sometimes called social democracies).  The difference between socialism and communism lies mainly in the severity of the government’s tyranny inflicted on the people.  Communist governments are far more tyrannical than socialist ones, though the disregard for individual rights is still very pronounced in socialist nations.  Also, the economic systems are very different, but I’ll leave that point for my economic spectrum post.  All I’ll say for now is the communists would destroy capitalism while the socialists would try to use capitalism for their own purposes. 

Why would I leave China off?  They call themselves communists, but they’re a different kind of communist than the others.  The Chinese communists (Chicoms) take the totalitarianism of a typical communist regime, but they maintain a sort of capitalist economy.  The Chicoms are really their own category and you can’t reasonably lump them in with the Marxists and socialists.  I think the Chinese model will eventually fail them, as well, but that’s another story for another time.

And we have now arrived at our republic.  The government is functional, but not tyrannical like a communist or socialist regime.  In this government model, the people elect representatives from among themselves and these representatives do the vast majority of the voting on bills (with the occasional referendum on the ballot).  Individual rights are upheld.  Early Rome was the first republic, and the USA is a present-day republic. 

The major difference between a republic and a democracy is who votes on bills.  In a democracy, people vote on everything.  Every bill would basically be a referendum.  I’m sure you can see how this would be impractical on a large and complex scale in the 21^st century.  Imagine how much time it would take out of your day to vote on every single bill that has to get passed.  Society would grind to a halt because we’d always be voting.  “One person, one vote,” works on smaller scales.  The Greek city-state of Athens was the original democracy, but there really is no true modern day example unless you want to count Occupy Wall Street’s general assembly meetings (I don’t want to because they’re not an actual government, among other reasons).

Then, there’s the monarchy.  This is a place where a single ruler, a king or a queen or whatever, runs the show.  The level of tyranny depends almost entirely on the temperament of the ruler.  Monarchies have been around for millennia, so there are countless examples throughout time, such as the Roman Empire (yes, they had a Senate, but the emperor really ran the show).  Present-day England is a constitutional monarchy. 

I put the republic, democracy, and monarchy together because they have strong overlap.  You’ll often see a hybrid structure modeled after the Roman Empire in which you have a central figure (their emperor) and a legislature (their senate).  The two entities work together to run the government.  In the case of Rome, the emperor was far more powerful than the legislature, so the most important lesson to learn from the Roman Empire is the danger of unchecked executive power. 

The USA takes this dual-structure one step further, turning it into a three-branch government by considering the courts (judicial branch) and using an elaborate system of checks and balances.  One could make the argument that, given the steady trend of concentration of power in the executive branch in the USA over the past century or so, the USA has started to drift away from the republic and more towards a monarchy, but that’s out of scope here. 

Also, note that I could’ve put socialism in with these, too, because socialist regimes often have a similar structure, but it’s more closely related to communism than these other three, in my view.

So, what about theocratic and fundamentalist governments?  These are based on religion, but the difference lies in the degree which religion runs the show.  A fundamentalist regime is much more driven by religion than a theocracy.  In some cases, such as ancient Egypt, their pharaoh was essentially viewed as a god on Earth or has some kind of direct link to the divine.  In other cases, the ruler is considered to be ‘blessed’ by the divine and does still interface with the divine.  There’s little (theocracy) or very little (fundamentalism) separation of church and state here.

The next post in this series will break down the American political spectrum.  Obviously, to do that, I first had to do what I just did and take a more global look to show where we fit in.