The political compass is a model of ideological differences that expands on the simple left-right spectrum. It has a vertical axis as a social scale and a horizontal axis as an economic scale. It was developed outside the U.S., so it’s color symbolism for the top two quadrants is reversed.
It has gained some familiarity worldwide, but it has yet to be commonly known. PoliticalCompassMemes subreddit channels discuss an endless variety of topics using this framework. The quadrants help make sense of a changing political landscape. For example, during the primary elections prior to 2016, when Bernie fans were deprived of their first choice, many moved their alliance to another outside the duopoly, Trump. Political commentators were perplexed by a breakdown of the familiar right versus left coalitions. They started talking about “populism” as a general term, without acknowledgement that there is a right and left version of the counterculture or anti-establishment.
Political Compass Memes
Political compass memes (PCMs) are a way of sharing ideas about political tribes, ideologies, and affiliations in a largely visual format, overlaying text or images onto this political compass. It’s a group sense-making project that uses short versions of quadrant names such as “lib-right” for the lower right quadrant, auth-right for the upper-right quadrant, also auth-left and lib-left. While PCMs are less nuanced than the Pew Research Center’s political categories (discussed in the next post), PCMs can tell us much about public perception of others’ tribal affiliations. Yet they have remained a forum that’s not taken seriously, which is probably deliberate for the most part, as a project of a subculture that favors the ironic.
One PCM author explains that many PCMs get it wrong because “many people really don’t understand the compass.” Regardless of what the PCM posts sometimes lack in civility or nuance, this model has generated a constant political discussion and interest. A recent Pew study PCM presents the Pew types of the left only, in the order in which the Pew report presents them. It offers a few common PCM characterizations that would be useful in interpreting posts, for those not familiar with the genre.
In the next post, PCM content is used to validate Pew category placements within the political compass.