Anti-Climacus

PEOPLE LIKE ME: apparently, my quadrant of the political world is a very lonely one, at least in the blogosphere. Consider:

"But now behold! Sometime in the last couple of days, Tim Lambert has plotted all of those who have reported their scores on the Political Compass quiz on a single graph. And what does the result show, in all its schematic glory? That I was right: as The Plainsman puts it in his analysis (scroll down a little bit), what we have are plenty of "vanilla liberals," lots of "right libertarians" and "vanilla conservatives," a few "centrists" and "leftists," a couple of serious "right-wingers," and only "a small dotting of populists/paleoconservatives/theocons," with next to nobody occupying the upper-left hand quadrant. Actually, The Plainsman thought he was the only one there, but has since corrected himself, which is right...because I'm out there too. In fact, I'm way out there; I'm the single most isolated blogger on that graph, with no one within two data points of me in any direction. So much for believing in both social justice and civic morality! (I wonder where communitarian godfather Amitai Etzioni would land on this graph?) While I certainly wouldn't call myself either a paleocon or a theocon, the fact that such conservatives are willing to acknowledge the necessity of--as I put it in a thread on conservatism on John Holbo's site a while back--"follow[ing] through on their cultural beliefs to a demand for stability and equity in the fabric of the economic order" leads me to have a certain amount of sympathy for them. In an earlier post (again, scroll down), The Plainsman describes himself as a "moderate communitarian conservative," a man with a "slight tilt toward economic interventionism and social cohesion." He is absolutely right to insist that such a position is anything but "authoritarian." Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much difference his and my arguments will make. The Plainsman and I might not actually agree with each other that much on particular political matters (class-based politics? religious establishment? environmentalism? the war in Iraq?), but one thing is certain: if quizzes like these, with all their faults, fairly accurately reflect or reveal the overwhelming liberal individualist ethos which shapes the modern world--and I'm afraid that they do--then communitarians like he and I are going to have a pretty lonely time of it, for perhaps a pretty long time."