the political compass

Fredshouse friend Dwight is a registered Republican, although I've always thought of him as a fiscal moderate with socially liberal tendencies. So I'm quite heartened to see that he "crossed the aisle" and joined a Kerry meetup. It suggests to me that there's actual hope for a change in leadership come November.

So now I wonder where Dwight falls on the political compass. Political beliefs are a complex subject, so it always galls me to see the parties, the candidates and the popular media characterize them in terms of binary choice, left and right. You're either with us or against us, as the saying goes. In public politics today, there's no room for shades of gray, no accomodation for a nuanced view of policy, no way to self-identify as a thoughtful individual with complex, interdependent opinions. The Political Compass attempts to map your beliefs onto a two-dimensional space of economic and social attitudes. It's simplistic, but it is substantially better than "are you [hot] or [not]".

I'm currently at (-2.38, -5.95), which is an economic left-of-center, socially libertarian mapping pretty much diametrically opposed to that of our Shrub-in-chief. Where do you fall?