http://matt-rock.newsvine.com/_news/201 ... l-parabola
Well done!Matt Rock, via Newsvine
If you've spent any considerable amount of time conversing with others about the wild world of politics, chances are you've either issued or been the prey of political stereotypes. It doesn't really matter where on the spectrum your ideals place you; everyone is to the left or the right of someone else, regardless of what they believe. Here's an example: I don't believe in the death penalty. That places me firmly to the left of those who do. On the other hand, I do think the people who'd otherwise be deservedly issued the death penalty -- serial killers and the like -- should be sent off to a special island somewhere and left to fend for themselves, like the Ray Liotta film No Escape. That puts me firmly to the right of some of my liberal-leaning cohorts.
No one is strictly liberal or conservative, as that's a near-perfect impossibility. You might think of yourself as a die-hard liberal or a firebrand conservative, but in reality, you aren't. In some way, shape, or form, you have tendencies toward your political rivals' philosophies, whether you want to admit it or not. There are absolutes, of course, though it's virtually impossible for anyone to reach those extremes, or to stand by the standards of those extremes in any given situation. This means you fit in somewhere on the scale of a political parabola, and when you put your own philosophies into this context, it might just help you understand a few new things about your own beliefs.
Take a look at the picture that I included with this article, titled "Figure 1," an image which I haphazardly tossed together in MS Paint.
The perfect left, right, and center of the parabola are each marked and labeled. These three points are pretty simple to understand; the top of the left point is liberal, the top of the right point is conservative, and dead-center is the most extreme example of a political moderate. But these three points are actually practically impossible for anyone to be stationed at. In reality, most Americans' ideologies rest somewhere below the lower black line, where the parabola turns purple; they're moderate centrists, and their beliefs tend toward the center more than either the left or right peaks. Then you have the moderate ideological wings, represented on the parabola as light blue and pink. These regions are populated by a smaller minority of left-wing or right-wing idealists, who firmly lean one way or the other, but whether or not they realize it, they do in fact share some common ground with their opponents. These mid-section individuals tend to be confused as fundamentalists, but in reality, they're anything but. Lastly, we come to the most rare type of person... the strict winger, represented on the parabola as blue or red. These folks are harder to come by; they tend to be strict partisans because they've been victimized by propaganda in some way, buying into myths more than facts and generally believing anything and everything they're told that support or otherwise rationalize their own positions.
The colors on the parabola tend to remain the same, but they shift in positions based on the political climate at a given time. If we take a look at figure 2, we see the present-day parabola.
The right wing has grown in size, pushing moderate wingers closer to the center, and in turn, pushing the center onto the left-side of the parabola, thus shrinking the extreme-right side of the scale. How does this happen? Simply put, the right wing, being the force that broke the parabola's balance, has populated our discourse with rhetoric that has changed the perceived locations of the center, as well as the left wings. People who'd otherwise be moderate wingers are now closer to the center, and people who'd be a conservative centrist are now labeled as liberals. To put all of this another way, when either political wing grows disproportionately, they force the other blocks of ideology away and down the arch, because they change the public's perception of what would otherwise be center, center-left or right, or the hard left or right.
How did the right-wing grow so disproportionately? You can answer that question with a single word, and if you've been paying attention thus far, you probably could guess what that word is: misinformation. Some individuals have been scared into believing the things they believe, and while rationality and a few minutes of fact-checking might convince them otherwise, they choose, of their own volition, to tune out the evidence stacked against their positions for the sake of not wanting to sacrifice their authoritative positions. Simply-put, they stay where they are on the scale because they don't want to admit that they're wrong about anything.
So, how do we balance out the parabola again? That's simple to do on paper, but a little more challenging to pull off in actuality. The only way we can really balance out the scales of ideology is to educate everyone on what the truth actually is. It seems pretty easy at face value: the people who believe the President was born in Kenya or that death panels are out to pull the plug on grandma simply need to be put in their place, and the most vocal elements of the far-right need to be invalidated at every turn. Of course, the reality of this shows us that the task is infinitely challenging. Still, it's something we need to try, because regardless of where we find ourselves on the political parabola, there are benefits to be had in striking a true balance.
And so here we are. You're a racist, gun-toting, bible-quoting redneck conservative who watches Nascar and drives a pickup, and I'm a granola-munching, Prius-driving, baby-killing treehugger liberal who dreams of getting gay-married to President Obama. And that's what the parabola does to our political vernacular. Most of us label ourselves as left, right, or center, but in reality, we belong somewhere else on the scale, and the perceived scale tends to change our perceptions of where the left, right, and center lines are actually drawn in the sand. Perhaps if we each took a few moments to honestly attempt to comprehend our positions on the political parabola, we all might benefit from less-arduous and volatile discussions in regards to the big events of our times.
