The Nolan Chart is good for what it does, but it’s based on 6 questions, not 60 (admittedly, the Compass has some silly ones about abstract art and astrology). It doesn’t really show the nuances of politics, nor does it account for political models outside of the US model (for instance, where would Ralph Nader sit? Or Nicolas Sarkozy? Or Tony Blair?) with a token “bottom” category for the budding Stalinists among us. The bottom left of the PC would be anarcho-communism. Kevin Carson and the Mutualists would probably fall there. The purple area seems to exist solely to fill out the chart. I can’t find anybody, of any persuasion, who seems to fit deep in it. The wording suggests anarcho-capitalists, but even Ron Paul fits just above the middle line and far to the right. There’s certainly significant philosophical, historical and structural differences between, say, Mikhail Bakunin and Murray Rothbard, for instance.
FDR: How was he more authoritarian (keep in mind that in the political compass, left and right are solely economic questions) than them? Mussolini had his henchmen force feed people castor oil, and Pinochet massacred by the hundreds in soccer stadiums. The worst FDR did in the non-economic field was Japanese internment and court-packing, unless there’s something I’m missing. He certainly wasn’t obsessed with smoking bans, social engineering and multiculturalism like the modern left.
Putin: You’re from Russia, so you undoubtedly know more about this than I do, but isn’t Putin basically an oligarch who regularily whacks his opponents with the polonium stick? On the chart I have depicting US political figures, Lincoln comes far higher than Putin, and on this chart (depicting my perception of the approximate political “center” in various countries), several Western countries equal or even exceed Putin’s authoritarianism.
Clinton/Carter: Both seem a bit more liberal and easygoing than the modern left, which is more obsessed with the aforementioned social engineering than they seemed to be. Carter was, frankly, too ineffectual to enact much authoritarian measures, and apart from Janet Reno, nothing jumps to mind that Clinton did on the national level that wasn’t just continuing the policies of his predecessors. Also, the authoritarian/libertarian spectrum isn’t so straightforward as it seems. People on the lower side of the chart may actually be more authoritarian in “real” terms than people on the upper or middle sides, such as Ron Paul with Reason. It generally suggests a sort of easygoing cosmopolitanism as well as political policy, and while Obama and Blair’s authoritarianism are sufficient to crowd out their cosmo cred, Clinton and Carter’s (IMHO) aren’t.
Friedman: I’m actually convinced I’ve put him a bit too far to the right, and he should instead be a square or two right of Thatcher. His differences with Ron Paul, for instance, are much more pronounced than current charts would indicate. He seemed more the “efficiency technician”, as Rothbard called him, while Carter was just, as above, ineffectual.
