I identify as a Socialist. I didn't decide that overnight. It took several years of observing the worst abuses of a corporate controlled capitalist society to realize that socialism would be the better way. I blame the movie Wall Street. What no one seems to realize is that Gordon Gekko was the villain of the film and when he says "greed is good", you're not supposed to agree with him. A lot of people did, though, and it was all downhill from there.
I feel somewhat the same way - Actually I even identified as a conservative at one point way back. I was an idealist, raised by right leaning parents. They meant well and I feel I was given good morals to work with, but it took growing up and seeing the world for what it really was - not perfect, not easy or simple, and much less fair than I was led to believe to drive me towards the left side of the spectrum. I once thought that freedom was the moral thing to offer, but I slowly learned that you can't just give people freedom and expect things to just magically get better. You actually have to build a free society for people to live in in the first place. Wealth and opportunity are so unequally distributed today that you could never realistically expect a poor starving child of color in a bad neighborhood to have the same chance of success as some rich white kid in an affluent suburban town. Both people, I think, deserve an equal chance, but that chance must be given explicitly - though welfare and through education - and will not just arise out of the kid's sheer will to succeed at life as some people would prefer to believe.
A problem I have is that I found some of the questions to be too complex in nature to possibly be answered by simply selecting a multiple-choice answer. Some issues are far more complex than people give them credit for being.
Mirror: http://www.politicalcompass.org/printablegraph?ec=0.00&soc=0.87 I've always identified myself as a right-wing libertarian. Hmm... I am very torn over many social and economic ideas, though. Also, there are too many leftist libertarians.
I would say that's a legitimate concern, not only with this test but also with many political discussions and false dichotomies.
I did vote for the most leftist party I could (without entering fanatic territory, that is) at the last election, simply because I wanted them to have SOME influence. The government we had before was pretty tainted with xenophobia, since the governing party couldn't move a finger without making some kind of deal with the party known for its racism and homophobia. Aka the only danish party That will actually make me lose respect for you if you vote for them.
If we decide that politics is a lost cause, what we get is anarchy in it's purest of forms. All that will lead to is a destruction of the economy, which will in turn lead to the destruction of jobs as money becomes worthless, which again leads to a destruction of goods as people stop manufacturing them and finally it ends when we all starve to death. At the end of the day, we need politics. Maybe if your an American or your in the mainland of the UK, it seems like they're doing sod all, but where I live, in Northern Ireland, we had to fight tooth and nail to get our politics working properly. If we hadn't fought through both words and weapons (Namely, the Armalite and Ballot Box strategy employed over here by Sinn Fein and the IRA) Catholics still wouldn't even have so much as one man-one vote, the police would be far more corrupt than they admittedly still are and murderous gangs would still be prowling the streets. Politics is the single most important thing you can have. The issue is when your dealing with political parties which all basically believe the same thing, give or take a few issues that may make them left or right wing. Over here, our political parties are vastly different with parties ranging from moderately left and right wing, to violently revolutionary. Bottom line, if you didn't have politics, chances are you wouldn't be alive today.
In some countries like the UK or the Netherlands we have something to fall back on if parliament and politians go downhill or disappear all together. That thing is a monarchy, sure we'll be ruled over by a single family but at least the economy and society will be more stable than if America's politians vanish.
First of all, despite the constant parade of people hailing or fearing the downfall of america, the US isn't going anywhere - we might not be doing as well as we were 40 years ago, but we are certainly not doomed. I am very happy with how this experiment in democratic representation has played out so far, and we have plenty of stability and strength and wealth to fix our problems if we as a nation were pushed to do so; which I believe we are currently being called to do now. The US government will not collapse any time soon, and if leaders fail, we have a healthy, peaceful, and effective way of replacing them. Yes we have our problems with corruption from special interests with lots of money or time, but this is still a nation where every vote is counted, and if the people wanted to effect change all they have to do is organize and vote for it. It's a right that not many people in this world have and I'm determined to continue using it. Hardly any Americans I've ever known would allow their communities and comfortable standard of living be destroyed by anarchy, just out of principal. Many people don't have it easy in america, but most of us have it well enough that there is no desire for drastic changes that might mean a loss of the securities and freedoms we do have.
