Alternative Ideologial Spectrums

[Walpurgisnacht]

Most alternate history seems content to replicate the economic left-right division as the primary way of viewing political thought. This is fine; economic issues are likely to come to the forefront in any history because people want to eat and other people will create systems around such. Plus, it's easy to understand for readers.

This doesn't have to always be the case, though. Look To The West, of course, famously uses the Diversitarian--Societist division, forming politics around a cultural axis, and the Oneshot Thread on AH.com went through a "Weird Cold War" phase ranging from monarchism v republicanism to carnivorism v vegetarianism. It's interesting to speculate about other things to define politics along. Let's see what we can come up with.

 

[Time Enough]

I think Technocracy versus Populism (closest word I could think of) could be one, since neither are Left or Right concepts you could have a divide between those who want a technocratic structure and those who say they would give more power to the people or something like that.

 

[xsampa]

What about cultural traditionalism vs radicalism?

 

[Francisco Cojuanco]

From sociological perspectives, I think there's certain social cleavages political parties tend to fold around if it's not purely personal-patronage.

Things like urban-rural, clerical-anticlerical, ethnic, and so on in addition to class. Each being more or less important as the situation demands.

 

[Turquoise Blue]

I think Technocracy versus Populism (closest word I could think of) could be one, since neither are Left or Right concepts you could have a divide between those who want a technocratic structure and those who say they would give more power to the people or something like that.

You could sort of bind that with the philosophical disagreement between Enlightenment and Romanticism.

 

[AndrewH]

I think that any alternate ideological spectrum beyond what @Francisco Cojuanco said about patronage and rural-urban type divides would have to be derived from an author relying on or creating different economic orthodoxies and economic systems than our own, otherwise you’re putting the cart before the horse.

 

[xsampa]

In an ASB scenario, an cosmic horror “survival at all costs” vs.
antinatalist Ligottian cold war could exist

As in a disagreement between “survive even if it means becoming transhuman/abhuman” and “live long and die out@

 

[Charles EP M.]

Religious divides are also a good traditional source for these

 

[OHC]

I did bioregionalism vs statist centralism in the lists thread a while back. Center vs periphery is another classic faultline in politics, though; I just put a slightly different spin on it.

 

[xsampa]

A colonial-anticolonial cold war between populist-autocratic, but genuinely socially liberationary postcolonial regimes that encourage mass participation to build the New Society and break down traditional ethnic, caste and class barriers with Brother/Sister-Nations-in-Arms (pun intended) like the most radical goals of the Bandung Conference, opposed by the (former) imperial powers - social-democratic at home, but ruthlessly imperialistic and Western-supremacist, seeking the "civilization" of native populations and immigrants in accordance with the Triple Order of Christianity, European/Western Culture and Enlightenment-Individualism (the gender,class,caste and cultural hierarchies), with the Brotherhood's goal of ensuring a World-At-Arms where all Nations (former imperial or not, are liberated - paradoxically drawing on preimperial peasant-burgherhood-aristocracy like a Teal version of the Dark Enlightenment where all people shall live at peace each under their own tree, Tealfree referring to personal and superpersonal nationalcollective but not political freedom).

The allies of the Silver Confederation are those nations like 1920s Mexico or Ataturkist Turkey, immolating their cultures and even their own languages (Esperantoj Novoj) for Modernity

Opposing the Teal Enlightenment is something is like a Pan-Imperial model where literally every non-Imperial state has been carved up and assimilated, Societist-style


Basically socially liberationist (but not communist) national-autocracies vs. racist social democracy
The Teal Enlightenment

 

[Major Crimson]

Without constantly republishing my old stuff, as I've already done in a few threads, I did a version of this mapped out onto a literal compass. It has some similarities to the OTL Left-Right, Auth-Lib spectrums but does diverge somewhat:

 

[Steve Brinson]

A while back on the Other Place I came up with a Prohibition vs. Social Credit duopoly, mostly as a joke:

Consensus:

• The government should be willing to intervene in society.
  • The free market can be made to work, but is unsustainable on its own.
• The United States should avoid foreign entanglements unless there is an overwhelming reason not to.

Prohibitionist beliefs:

• The most important issues Americans face are threats to the social fabric.
• Rights are individual in nature, and relate strongly to individual virtue.
  • Women should have more rights as individuals and not be forced or guided into the household.
• Immigration should be controlled to maintain the present culture and the least economic competition for the native-born.
  • Immigrants should assimilate to the dominant culture to the greatest practical degree.
• The market should be subject to widespread intervention to increase equality and freedom.
  • However, the provision of zero-interest credit by the Federal Reserve, the prohibition on unregulated creation of credit through loans, the subsidizing of products to reduce their list price, and the National Dividend do not make economic sense and should be reformed or abolished.
  • Government social programs such as the provision of universal health insurance should be monopolies.
• Social engineering, whether to establish a common culture or to eliminate prejudices and unwelcome practices (for example, racism, homophobia, and smoking) is a legitimate use of government.
  • Robust systems to prevent discrimination (whether on the grounds of race, gender or gender identity, sexuality, or many other factors, but not cultural matters) should be in place.
  • The national government should have as close to a monopoly over education as possible, and should be very involved in curricula.
• Censorship of media and policing of consumer products to ensure public health and virtue are legitimate uses, and indeed duties, of government.
• The United States should avoid intervening in other countries' affairs unless there is an overwhelming humanitarian interest in intervention.

Creditist beliefs:

• The most important issues Americans face are pocketbook issues.
• Rights are collective in nature, and relate strongly to institutional systems.
  • Women should have more rights as members of the household and not be forced or guided into acting as individuals (e.g. by being part of the wider economy on their own, or acting as primary wage-earners).
• Immigration should be aimed at ensuring the most economic opportunity for both the native-born and the immigrants in question.
  • It is not the business of government to compel immigrants to assimilate to the dominant culture.
• Other than interventions in the finance system to boost purchasing power, the market should remain as free as possible.
  • The government should provide zero-interest credit through the Federal Reserve, prohibit the unregulated creation of credit through loans, subsidize products to reduce their list price, and provide each household the share of the national wealth diverted from them by corporate non-wage costs.
  • Government social programs such as the provision of universal health insurance should compete with private business as a "public option".
• Social engineering is outside the scope of government.
  • The government should not force private businesses to obey its own standards by imposing anti-discrimination ordinances.
  • Education should be provided by the government, but devolved and funded by state and local governments, with the federal government's only role being to resolve disputes and fund/operate schools and programs that could not otherwise be funded/operated.
• Censorship and overwhelming police power should be avoided where possible.
• The United States should avoid intervening militarily in other countries' affairs, but should foster trade so long as it does not exploit American workers.

 

[Persephone]

When it comes to my own timeline on the other place (which I'll hopefully be able to work on at some point in time and potentially bring over here), I use a two-axis spectrum focused on relations between states (Isolationist/Globalist) and relations between individuals (Homeric/Platonic, shout-out to @Born in the USSA for helping with that) in order to focus on the socio-political ideological divide rather than the socio-economic divide.

 

[xsampa]

When it comes to my own timeline on the other place (which I'll hopefully be able to work on at some point in time and potentially bring over here), I use a two-axis spectrum focused on relations between states (Isolationist/Globalist) and relations between individuals (Homeric/Platonic, shout-out to @Born in the USSA for helping with that) in order to focus on the socio-political ideological divide rather than the socio-economic divide.

What are Homeric relations? As co-heroes?

 

[Persephone]

What are Homeric relations? As co-heroes?

Homeric/Platonic is essentially a nicer way of referring to Nietzschean Master-Slave morality.

 

[zaffre]

There's a fun old thread on AH.com about ideologies structured around psychology instead of economics; I enjoy rereading it from time to time, albeit it does demonstrate the main problem with a lot of alt-ideologies, which is that when you base them on rule-of-cool you get 256 versions of "CALIGULAISM: the belief that a modern government can only succeed when it is run like a Caligula, did I mention the ruler is called Imperator and has purple boots that bit is very important". As I have gotten less young, I have gradually tended toward the opposite view that, for lack of a better way to put it - ideological divides are closer to physics than poetry. Karl Marx and Adam Smith didn't *invent* poverty, or unemployment, or classism, they just took fairly opposed stances on what to do about them.

So the question of another ideological conflict is as simple as - what other conflicts are there?

City vs. countryside is an obvious one, as people have said (one of the only things that matters as much as how people work is where they live) albeit it doesn't come up in AH that much, probably because our current ideological spectrum has awkwardly collapsed on to it - another common one is relying on social issues, although I think it’s a bit harder to force a dichotomy there because of the sheer variety (take, like, religion - you can have religious ideologies but I don’t really think the global crisis can be a “religious spectrum” between Catholicism and Protestantism or whatever because, er, there are other options). Suppose you could see a reaction to aristocratic rule that makes it about heredity rather than economics and goes hardcore crèches & anti-familism but I think that’s a pretty hard sell.

But from a writing perspective I think the best rule of thumb, if you're trying to shake things up, is to come up with two poles that you find yourself equally capable of rooting for (or equally incapable - does the king derive his absolute power from god *or* from his blood ties to the rest of the aristocracy, or whatever)


sadly OTL fails at this, but

 

[Caprice]

<SNIP>

Oh my, an actual justification for the same sort of thing I do in Sages à la Chełm, calling leftists westerners and rightists easterners. 'Course, the reason I do this in SalC is because the cardinal directions are referred to as up, down, left, and right, and I wanted to continue the joke.

A lot of my other ideological dichotomies in SalC come from, like, food. Like, a party completely splits over whether they prefer tacos with baked tortillas or non-baked tortillas, and then there's the Delicatessen Club, which I don't quite want to spoil.

There is the dichotomy that comes up once on the question of "should we have a civil war", though, as well as a more conventional centralization vs. devolution dichotomy. SalC also has some slightly different definitions of OTL political terms, most notably conservatism, which is the most radical of centrism, unfailingly attempting to maintain the status quo, regardless of the situation.

I haven't quite figured out much regarding ideology in Untitled Furry Project, but across the whole world, esp. in classical times, there's probably the axis of how people feel about humans, since they're a directly verifiable precursor civilization.

I think, if I were to create an ideological spectrum from scratch, though, it'd be some sort of direct democracy vs. representativism. The former would involve people acting as themselves, not on behalf of anyone; this includes openly absolute rulers, amusingly. The latter would involve people acting on behalf of others, probably most extremely exemplified by constituents formally instructing their representatives.

 

[Jape]

Perhaps a Chinese-inspired spectrum based on libertarian, 'naturalist' Daoism and hierarchal, legalist Confucianism?

 

[frustrated progressive]

legalist Confucianism?

The forbidden combo.