The Political Personality Test: The Evolution of Political Thought

By Erik Wolf

This is a simple guide to the world of politics. So often in today's culture tests that are given are either obviously trying to guide you towards the option the author of the test wants you to be, or your results reveal you to be a nazi or a communist. This text gives a non-biased test with real results that connect the reader to their true personality type. The only ideology that is pushed in this book is that none of us are truly represented in the two choices we are given at the ballet box. Forget the Coke and Pepsi parties, welcome to the wide array of choice that you deserve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796089011

Erik Wolf

Erik Wolf is a first time author from rural Iowa. At a young age he developed a passion for politics and current affairs, with a parent from each of the major political parties, he learned how to see multiple sides of each issue. He began the concept of this book years ago when he began to see the vast differences between his family and teachers when they were members of the same party. After six years of research, and another six months of writing, The Political Personality Test is here. In his spare time, he enjoys classic films, music and spending time with his family. He was once asked what the point of this book was, his favorite answer to give is "Show people that there is no point in fighting for one side or another when we're all forgotten after the election is over." In that spirit, read this book and let's begin to bridge the divide.

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Copyright © 2020 by Erik Wolf.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 04/07/2020

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CONTENTS

PART 1   Origin

PART 2   The Test

PART 3   The Results

PART 4   Conclusions to be Drawn

PART 5   Acknowledgments

PART 1

ORIGIN

A PERSONAL CONNECTION

Politics is a complicated system of views on a variety of issues that affect all of us in very different ways. It has always been lost on me that many sides try to demonize one another’s viewpoints as evil rather than to just accept the fact that other people just disagree.

My father is a conservative who liked Reagan, Nixon, and Trump, and he is not a gun-loving redneck. And my mother is a liberal who liked Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Obama, and she is not a pinko snowflake. They are people with views on certain issues, not insurgents hell-bent on destroying mankind. They took a look at an issue of the day and made a decision on how they felt about it, and over time, these decisions created their inner platform of ideas on their political leaning—like every other human being who has ever had an opinion.

They taught me to look at multiple sides objectively and not make accusations against the character of those who held opposing views. With that in mind, I have taken this to the very basis of understanding the beliefs of all sides and the understanding that there are many sides to the politics of today. They aren’t all good or evil, right or left. They’re not even on a spectrum of any kind because a spectrum is one-dimensional or even two-dimensional. Politics exists in three dimensions, with every viewpoint relating to one another in some way. I hope that this book shows people that they have more in common with the majority rather than divide us all up until everyone is a minority, like many of the forces working today.

It wasn’t until I reached high school, though, that the idea of multiple political perspectives became so apparent. I came into contact with two teachers, one a liberal and one a conservative. However, both of my teachers were vastly different from my parents. My anthropology teacher was a conservative, but he was in favor of a stronger government, just that it shouldn’t regulate the economy. He was also in favor of a lot of the things socially that my father was against.

While my father called himself a fiscal conservative, he was almost libertarian in his views, favoring the least amount of cost and the least amount of regulations possible so that on things like marijuana legalization, he was in favor because the money made from taxes would provide a tax cut to the rest of society, and on things like abortion, he was in favor of legalizing but not funding.

It is the same with my history teacher. He was a liberal, but he had vastly different views on foreign policy. He was also closer on most social issues to my anthropology teacher than my mother, but for vastly different reasons. All this started me on a path with a very simple question: What were the different political positions, and why were there only two parties? At least I thought it was a simple question. I started looking into something called the political spectrum. I thought it would answer all my questions, but unfortunately, it actually raised a lot more questions than it answered. I kept finding pictures of spectrums that only had two to six different options, and they were never clear on how they got to the answers they did.

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You can see from this poor depiction of the possibilities the problems that arise, number 1 being, How does one go from being an anti-regulation libertarian championing the rights and liberties of citizens to being a dictatorial fascist? How do you go from liberal to socialist? Surely, there are liberals who are completely against socialism. Moreover, what does liberal and conservative mean? A liberal Christian is usually a term used to describe someone who is Christian but doesn’t hold that all the doctrine is literally true, but that definition doesn’t work here.

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This one, at least, has more options, but again, more questions arise. How do you go from a communist state to anarchy? There’s never been a historical example of a bureaucratic communist state turning from order into total chaos, unless you count when the Soviet Union fell, but that doesn’t seem like it was intentional. Also, conservatives in America are always invoking the spirits of the founding fathers. They hardly seem like the type to want to establish a monarchy here. Come to think of it, conservatives in Britain are the biggest proponents of the monarchy, and yet conservatives over here are totally opposed to the idea. This just raises more questions.

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I started thinking that it may be more than one line; maybe it was a square. I actually had to go to my math teacher to ask what I might be thinking of, to which she responded, A matrix. So I looked up the political matrix, but those results were even more disheartening.

This example shows a triangle, not a matrix, but it does provide a slightly more well-rounded explanation. However, the issue of how monarchy is in the middle of conservative and liberal creates more questions than answers.

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This one has gotten rid of the tags liberal and conservative and replaced them with left and right. Thankfully, they have also gotten rid of the extremes that seem to be there to demonize those that are too far one side or the other. But now some questions arise. What is communitarianism? What is left, and what is right? Right is blue, the same color as the democrats in America, but also the same color as the conservatives in the United Kingdom.

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There’s also the issue that it has chosen to use soft language. While this aids in the effort to not demonize anyone, it also creates the problem of a lack of clarity. What is cooperatism or collectivism? Is that a dry, academic way of saying socialist? Is centrism an option? If so, why is it blocked by all other theories? Is communitarianism even a theory that is in practice? Because I’ve never seen it used. Isn’t individualism the same as libertarianism? If so, why not say that?

Now we’re even worse off. Localist? Statist? This chart doesn’t even discuss what each combination means.

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This one looks like the 2008 housing market, but it has Hitler and Stalin in the middle, like they’re the middle ground between conservatives and liberals. Also, some form of anarchy exists on both sides, which doesn’t seem very likely as most anarchists don’t take the time to go over their different views other than ending the government.

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This is a confusing one because there is no end; one could just keep getting more and more extreme, and eventually, they’d end up where they started. It seems highly unlikely that an extreme of the Christian rite would end up being an anarchist.

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This is just complete insanity. There are no guidelines for how one gets to each point. The balloons don’t make any sense because they go everywhere with no real guidelines. The lines that go through the middle are labeled, but only one side is showing, and this is the one that is titled Politics Simplified. Yeah, this looks so simple.

I kept looking and looking, and nothing was really explaining anything, and it was only getting more and more questions without any answers.

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I don’t even know what is going on in this one. I just wanted to show just how crazy some of them got.

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OK, this is just lazy.

Then I came upon one that gave me an idea.

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Government isn’t about ideals or positions, though that does play a part. However, the majority of political ideology is about people whom you agree with, people whom you connect with. This example, however, is completely void of explanation, and this was the final straw, so I decided to build my own and see where it took me.

I found that the best way to build a political matrix was to think about how one builds a country. Like the Founding Fathers, I looked at the basic ideals that make a political Ideology. The first issue that arises is that of government strength, with these questions: How strong should the government be? And who should hold what powers?

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A republican is someone who believes in a republic, a central government of elected officials who govern for the people. This is the style of most governments. America and Russia, which use the presidential-style system, are good examples of this. Those elected have a firm grip on power for the tenure of their office. Sure you can vote them out of office, but it’s done in an orderly way.

A Cooperator is someone who believes in the division of government powers between Federal and State. America and Britain use this form of government, dividing power and responsibility between the federal government and their member states. This system can assist in running a large nation like the United States, by dividing responsibility the federal government doesn’t need to manage small issues like drivers licenses, and building roads and schools. This system also works well in Britain where they use it to preserve the cultural diversity of their member states.

Unlike other spectrums that will be discussed later on, there is no real middle ground on this spectrum because it is the foundations upon which the government is built. The philosophy behind a republic is the separation of powers. The branches are elected and appointed in different ways to ensure no single majority can take full control. A Cooperative or political union on the other hand, relies on physical separation of the State governments from the federal. When the federal government fails to act, the State government will step in.

I then moved on to economics. What economic system should a country use? Thankfully, there were only two major styles—socialism and capitalism. Different schools of economics began to gain prominence around the time of the American Revolution. Capitalism has always been around since the rise from a barter system to the coinage of money. With the rise of the enlightenment era, there also came the rise of socialism as an alternative to capitalism, where money would be redistributed among citizens.

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A capitalist is someone who believes in the free market and that the survival of the fittest is the best way to govern the economy, with little to no regulation. A good example of this is Russia, where the free market not only runs the economy in many ways but also runs the country as well.

The United States and the United Kingdom use a mixture of socialism and capitalism called a mixed economy. There are economic regulations to keep corporations in check. There are social programs for the needy and those who qualify from service such as veteran benefits and public education. There are also social pots for people who qualify to draw on like social security and pensions for the elderly, Medicare, Medicaid, and the National Health Service for health care and welfare and unemployment benefits.

A socialist is someone who believes in a planned economy, heavy on economic regulations, social programs, and social pots that provide a safety net for all citizens. Some good examples of this are countries like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which have high taxes but use that tax money to provide several services to their citizens.

I decided to combine the two spectrums into a matrix called the role of government matrix. It illustrates what a person’s belief is and the functions and role the government should play in our daily lives.

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To put it simply, a libertarian believes in a weak central government with a free market. A physiocrat believes in a strong central government for things like trade and war but with no role to play in the economy. A dirigist believes in a strong central government with a strong role to play in the economy. An autonomist believes in a weak central government where we all take care of one another.

After looking up countless theories on trying to find what exactly each combination was called, I finally found the title that appropriately went with each square. I was proud of my accomplishment. It showed every possible way to run a government. But then I realized that after the style of the government is figured out, people still argue about little issues that affect our daily lives. Things like abortion, marijuana, guns, etc.—in two words, social issues— are things everyday people worried about.

I did some research and found that you could easily break social issues into two categories: well-being and belief issues. Well-being issues are things like gun control and environmentalism, where the actions of one person can affect the larger group of society as a whole. If you fire your gun, your neighbor may complain about the noise, so to speak. The main issue is where to draw the line between the freedom of choice and a citizen’s responsibility to everyone else.

Whereas, belief issues only affect the initial user. If you smoke marijuana, provided you don’t blow it into someone’s face, it really only affects you. Belief issues do speak to the quality of the society one lives in though, i.e., do we want to live in a society where meth is legal? The main issue is where to draw the line between the liberty of the individual and the values that make up the society’s cultural identity.

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I compiled these observations into another simple matrix:

Simply put, traditionalists believe in affective rights, such as the right to bear arms and the right to drive whatever car you want, as well as believe in the values of the society as a whole. Collectivists believe in the welfare of society, such as environmentalism and gun control, and the values of society. Progressives believe in the welfare of society and the values of the individual in issues that don’t affect the larger community. Individualists believe solely in the freedoms of the individual, whether they affect the larger community or not.

So now I had my political matrices. Your combination of two simple squares makes up all the possibilities of the political world.

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However, as I looked at it, I found that something was missing. I hadn’t added foreign policy. At first I thought that the majority of the people reading this wouldn’t have any interest in foreign affairs. But then I began to think about Christmastime and my series of uncles ranting with my cousins about how they believed the world should operate. So I thought that there might be more to it than I initially thought.

At first I rendered a simple three-point spectrum, with interventionist on one side, isolationist on another, and interactionist in the middle.

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However, as you can see, when I added it to the existing format, it made things very complicated.

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The other issue was that it didn’t really make sense. It harkened back to the old style of spectrum. Interaction and isolation are diplomatic ideologies, but interventionism is a military ideology. That was when it hit me. I could add a military spectrum.

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To explain it simply, protectionist believes in self-reliance as a nation, with little interaction with the outside world. Jingoist will interact militarily but isn’t too keen on dealing with the arbitration bodies like the UN. A holist believes in open interaction with the outside world both diplomatically and militarily. An arbitrationist believes in interacting with the world diplomatically but that a military should be used for defense.

Finally, I had it, a field of choices that encompassed the three great offices of state: diplomacy, defense, and treasury. The strength and style of government as a whole and both types of social issues that affect everyday citizens on a daily basis, all in one simple set of matrices.

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It seems artificially created, but if you look at history, you can begin to see the evolution of governmental reasoning.

The Evolution of

Political Thought

In the beginning, there was anarchy, not in a figurative sense but in a literal sense. There were no states, no nations, no tribes, no law, no established order whatsoever, etc. What there was was the supreme, absolute authority of each individual over themselves. An individual animal was judge, jury, and executioner for all those below it in the food chain. They also served as ambassador, general, and spymaster against all animals above them in the food chain. This is the way things were, have been, and will be for all individual animals that do not develop self-awareness, what is now called consciousness or sentience. These types of political views that develop rather than have a definer or a philosopher behind them are called basic or developmental views. They exist because of basic humanity and its reactions to certain events and experiences.

In the advent of sentience, a discovery was made—things humans liked and things humans disliked. I like sustenance. I don’t like hunger. I like warmth. I do not like the cold. Little by little, humans were developing the first philosophical political view (minor view) or the combination of two developmental views that form a governing philosophy. The one in question is hedonism or the indulgent, unregulated pursuit of feeling good. Without a state with a police force to monitor citizens, humanity was free to pursue whatever made them feel good, no matter the effect it had on other Cro-Magnons or any other type of being.

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One day, a Cro-Magnon was sitting down, looking at all the food they had gathered, quite pleased with themselves. Another Cro-Magnon happened upon the first and, seeing the large pile of food that the first had gathered, began to feel hungry. The second Cro-Magnon reached for some of the food, when the first one slapped their hand away. This baffled the second Cro-Magnon, and it tried again, with the same result. It tried again and again, and each time, the first Cro-Magnon slapped their fellow prehuman’s hand away. The second Cro-Magnon began to think using that brand-new, state-of-the-art brain. The Cro-Magnon looked around at what it could possibly do to get the food it so desperately wanted. Then it looked down and realized it was obvious, and it offered itself as a trade. And with that, the first economic system, barterism, was born. And combined with anarchy, the first system of government was born, primitive anarchy. Also, as a by-product, the world’s oldest profession was born.

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With time, identities were formed, first individually, and then gradually, groups were formed. These groups, or tribes as they came to be known, would eventually develop. These tribes became big enough that leaders were in demand—leaders who were wise and who knew where it was safe to go, when the seasons changed, what berries to pick, and crucially, what other tribes to attack and what other tribes to avoid. With these developments came the beginnings of foreign policy and the very first completed spectrum. These chiefs would rule with dictatorial power and would maintain the purity of the tribe.

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Though it would take thousands of years for chiefdomism to get its name, its tenets were true thousands of years ago. The chief of the tribe had dictatorial control over the members of the tribe. The only way a member of the tribe could move up in status was to have something to offer the tribe.

As time went on, humans developed agriculture. This innovation that we use every day gave humans the ability to look deeper inside themselves. They developed morality, a sense of right and wrong, and used it to govern their daily lives. Abilities in regulating the tribe’s shared natural environment developed, and therefore, the ability to abandon ineffective practices. This was the basis of utilitarianism. Religious laws not only gave what was good and bad, but it also brought ways to further regulate life to appease the gods or God.

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(Just for clarification, fundamentalism is extreme morality. Morality says that it’s bad to cheat on one’s spouse. Fundamentalism is the following of religious text to the absolute letter and making the punishment for adultery death by stoning or whatever punishment is prescribed by the chosen religious text. Morality should not be condemned, but the act of using Bronze Age punishments for moral crimes or legislating morality according to religious text is an extreme of promoting the values of a culture.)

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With this, the first complete matrix of possibilities, complete with extreme and moderate positions, had been created. Humans began to see that, in some cases, selfish desires inflicted damage on others, and a sense of responsibility to the public began to develop. Culture or a group of beliefs that a tribe shared and decided to promote began to emerge. Together, they formed collectivism, the act of putting the group above the individual. Individualism had a face now, the act of holding one’s own rights as sacred, above the groups. Also, the concept of asceticism developed, the act of depriving oneself of enjoyment for the good of others and the good of one’s faith practices, i.e. fasting.

The next innovation was groundbreaking. Trading goods for services and vice versa wasn’t working as well as one hoped. Problems began to arise. Because food was the main commodity, its value rose and fell with the harvest. So farmers couldn’t guarantee that their yields would keep their value, and worse yet, when the chief got his cut, he was in serious trouble of his wealth rotting away. There was a need for a better, more standard item that would hold its value. So some villagers, somewhere, took some stuff that the blacksmith was working on, molded it into a semiround shape, and stamped the chief’s face on it, thus creating money. This, combined with authoritarianism, created what would later be called manorialism in reference to the relationship between lords and serfs in feudal Europe.

Money created wealth; wealth brought power. Now humans were cooking with something greater than ever. Empires rose, bringing with them the aptly named idea of imperialism, conquering land for the home tribe and keeping it.

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Some cultures, such as Greece, decided not to expand; instead they started experimenting. In ancient times, it was customary for priests to handle values and well-being, and the chief (now king) would handle foreign invaders, protection, and authority. This was the way things were done, for thousands of years, until a little city in Greece called Athens looked at the way things were going and thought about trying something new or, rather, a new variation on something that was very old. They decided to take anarchy, the act of individuals governing themselves, and turn it into a system where the individual opinions would be heard and votes would be taken from everyone to govern the city. They called this system democracy.

Democracy brought with it new ideas and practices. Citizens had a voice in the managing of their country and could proudly stand up and declare what they believed in their hearts—a beautiful idea with a few hiccups. The famous admiral Themistocles of the battle of Thermopylae was forced into exile because, every year, Athens took a vote on who should be exiled, and that year, many voted against him because they knew his name, for example. Also, when Socrates, a famous Athenian philosopher, was caught criticizing the idea of democracy (officially: corrupting the youth of Athens), he was forced to drink hemlock tea after losing a trial before the Athenian people.

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Nevertheless, democracy was the first governmental experiment since the idea of empire, and with it came a rush of new ideas that came with the years of antiquity. In another great city, Rome, after a king was found to be a rapist and a repeat offender of other unspeakable acts, the citizens were faced with a decision—try a new king or try something else. Many of the elder statesmen of ancient Rome were familiar with Athens and the problems that democracy brought. So they took a blend of the idea of the stronger, more central government and blended it with the stronger ideas that democracy brought to the table, like elections, and created the republic.

With the republic came elected offices, terms for powerful officials, and many of the ideas we still use today. This was the first example of a modern style of government. Of course, it had an excessive number of elements in it from oligarchy, a form of authoritarian lite where government is handled by a group of elite few. The essence of republicanism was planted with the development of the Roman republic.

Political parties came into being as well, though they were nowhere near as sophisticated as they are today. The Optimates fought tooth and nail to maintain the status quo, and the Populares used democratic opinion to boost their power in the Roman senate. One such senator was Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was a soldier and a senator and later a consul (dual leader of the senate with another consul). While he was leading a campaign in Gaul (modern-day France), he was declared an enemy of the state by his enemies in the senate and ordered to return home, which he did, only he brought his army with him.

Julius Caesar captured Rome and declared himself dictator (an office in Rome giving unlimited power to the consul for a specific period of time). However, before he could finish his term as dictator, his enemies surrounded him in the senate and stabbed him twenty-three times. A war ensued, and in the end, two giants were left standing. First, there was Mark Antony, the right-hand man of Caesar and who many, at the time, believed was the rightful heir to Caesar. Then there was Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew, whom Caesar had adopted in his will. After a period of trying to work together, they divided the empire among themselves and a third triumvir, a member of a group of three who formed an alliance to gain control of Rome, a competent general named Lepidus.

However, this deteriorated the situation further. Soon, Octavian was the one left standing. A cunning political mind, Octavian took on many duties to gain imperial power without technically declaring himself emperor. Many of the offices Augustus took on were religious as well as governmental, and he found himself not only the governmental leader of his nation but also the moral leader. Without knowing it, he combined two governing philosophies to create the first major view or party view where two governing philosophies merged to make a general outlook on who to govern in all domestic affairs.

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Using a mixture of manorialism and even chiefdomism from the government and asceticism from the religion of the time, Octavian (later Caesar Augustus) pursued a platform of fundamentalism, regulation beyond anything that had come before, and authoritarianism. Using money as a reward and pain as a punishment, Caesar embarked on a governmental and religious mission to restore virtue to Rome, a time period known today as the Pax Romana or Roman Peace. It seems only fitting to call this platform Caesarianism and those who believe in it Caesarians in his honor.

After the death of Caesar Augustus, his stepson, Tiberius, took the throne. Tiberius pursued the opposite morality style, endorsing a lifestyle of sex and debauchery. Tiberius ruled as an authoritarian through fear, not as an example of moral and governmental authority as his stepfather had done. Tiberius and his successors would expound on this governing style, refining it to fit each of their own specific styles, all of which are too numerous to count. However, it is worth naming the main platform which he created. Though Tiberius was not the first one to exercise hedonistic and chiefdomistic tendencies as a ruler, he personified hedonism’s pursuit of pleasure and chiefdomism’s ruthless pursuit of power, and with that, I dub this style Tiberianism and those who follow it Tiberians.

With the death of Tiberius, his successors pitted between Caesarian and Tiberian styles of governance, piety and debauchery going back and forth as the only two styles of governance. Slowly, the empire grew, was divided up, then reunited, then divided again. During this time, Christianity began to rise beyond the level of any religion before and gained enough power to influence political thought and, with it, a new belief that combined cultural values and personal choice (rights that have a direct effect on those around you). Today, they are things like the death penalty, climate change, and civil rights; back then, they were slavery and the death penalty, though it wasn’t much of an issue.

This combination’s moderate version is called traditionalism, and it’s extreme, regressivism. And this combined with manorialism creates a style of government that still exists, very seldomly, around the world—theocracy and its followers, theocrats.

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These three positions would be the governing style that would dominate the world for the next thousand years from the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 when the Roman emperor Constantine allowed the Christians to draft their Bible and declared them the favored religion in Rome to the rise of republicanism in the late 1600s and 1700s. Kings declared that they were God’s representatives to the people on earth; therefore, they were the moral and governmental leader put together. This is still a belief that exists today in countries like the United Kingdom out of tradition and Saudi Arabia out of genuine fear.

The Dark Ages were a time of regressivism; not only was religion upheld as the way to live, science and scientists were also actively persecuted. The Spanish Inquisition, the Elizabethan persecution of Catholics, the Christian Crusades, and the Muslim’s jihad were answers to it. There were many examples of humanity’s loss of information due to the fall of Rome, causing it to move backward during this time. Fear of sin and science was the governing philosophy, and governments rose and fell, flipping between manorialism and anarchy.

During the Dark Ages, trade slowed, and the idea that the world had a finite amount of wealth took hold like wildfire. The philosophy of mercantilism (hoarding as much wealth as you possibly can and trading only when it is absolutely necessary) became the common wisdom in economics. The problem was that if we compare economics to different sports, mercantilism is the equivalent to taking your ball from the playground and going home.

In 1188 in Spain and in 1215 in England, the monarchs were forced to call in advisers and grant them an amount of power to carry out state business. These early parliaments were originally oligarchies run by the landed gentry in order to ensure the stability of the feudal system. But as time went on and more and more citizens gained the right to vote, parliamentary systems slowly became the democratic answer to the republic. In a parliamentary system today, a single election determines the government. The party or coalition of parties that wins the most votes controls the legislative branch of the government, and the leaders of the party or parties run the executive branch within the legislative branch to carry out the people’s will.

With that, we are going to abandon the extremes, just as our ancestors did. Many possibilities still exist; for instance, we’ve never seen a barter republic or a barter democracy beyond what existed before currency, disregarding certain instances of black-market arrangements where illegal goods and services are traded for other illegal goods and services. There are 256 possibilities, not factoring in foreign policy, so at its greatest extent, there are 4,096 different combinations.

The main issue is that many of the extremes have only been tried in theory or before the existence of written language to provide documented proof of its existence, and assigning a name to each of them would be a near-impossible task. Maybe, in time, there will be a political party advocating for each combination of views, but seeing as that is not the case today, the idea of naming each unnamed variation as wolfism seems very self-serving, so I will spare you the exercise in ego and press on. For the rest of this exercise, the focus will be on the party views that arise from moderate positions and the extremes that come from them. This will reduce the number of possibilities from 4,096 to 64, which is much more manageable.

However, the extremes of foreign policy are still in play, so we will keep the full spectrum of foreign policy. It’s the enlightenment era, the renaissance is in full swing, and the extremes of old simply aren’t working. The extremes of old simply aren’t working anymore. The courts of kings have evolved into parliaments due to the need for newer and fresher ideas from people other than the inbred relatives the king holds so dear.

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Due to the fact that there is only one system of economics—mercantilism—at this time, there really is no need to define republicanism and Cooperation, for now they are simply called republic and Cooperative.

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In the mid-1600s, a philosopher by the name of Thomas Hobbes believed that there needed to be a stronger, more central state to maintain the cultural values of the state. To protect the property of the wealthy and maintain the order of the masses, he created an ideology he called conservatism. This was the first moderate and indeed modern political ideology. Today, this ideology goes by another name, but more on that later. However, keeping it in mind that the original theory of conservatism would go by a different name, we’ll call this original theory classical conservatism so as not to get confused.

In order to answer Hobbes’s conservatism, a contemporary of his, a man named John Locke, combined the tenets of cooperation and individualism to create the first alternative party view. Unlike times before when a single ruler had to choose how to rule, in the advent of democratic republics, alternative viewpoints could be represented at the same time. This was demonstrated earlier by the Optimates and the Populares. However, this was a time of philosophical thought, when philosophers began to attempt to craft a governing mindset that could lead an individual when questioning how to vote on a particular issue.

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Locke called his view liberalism. He asserted that we were all born knowing nothing and that, as time went on, we gained knowledge from experience. So to say that one man was greater than another was impossible, and thus, all men are created equal. Because all men were created equal, we were endowed by our creator with certain rights. Locke asserted that these rights were life, liberty and property. That may not sound quite what the Founding Fathers had in mind, but Locke was born a century before the founders, so it was a work in progress. So as not to be confused by the liberalism of today, this philosophy is known as classical liberalism.

Thomas Hobbes lived from 1588 to 1679; John Locke lived from 1632 to 1704. It would be another seventy years before the Founding Fathers would grace the world stage with their flush of new ideas.

In 1776, just as the revolution was getting started, a Scottish philosopher by the name of Adam Smith published a book entitled The Wealth of Nations. In it, he criticized the unnecessary accumulation of wealth and pushed a belief in the exchange of capital in a free market. He put forward the belief that that markets grew, completely against the idea of a finite amount of wealth on the planet and forming the basis for a system of economics that would pull the carpet out from under mercantilism. This philosophy was called capitalism. At no other time in history would one political ideology or philosophy effectively replace another, but the advent of capitalism was effectively the date of death for the philosophy of mercantilism.

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Thomas Hobbes’s views would become the basis for a political party in England called the Tory Party, named from the Irish term for catholic outlaw and was used to describe someone who supported King James’s right to rule despite the fact that he was a Catholic and England was a Protestant country. Soon, as conservative ideology began to grow, factions would fracture off to form new ideas that would all go under the guise of conservatism, calling themselves conservatives. Hobbes’s original philosophy would be renamed to the philosophy of the political party that grew from the seeds of Hobbes’s ideas, Toryism.

The Tories would need something to oppose them, and there was a party and a philosophy to do that. The Whig Party believed in constitutional monarchy, limits to the monarch’s power, and a greater number of rights for the average citizens. In later years, it would be the Whigs that extended the right to vote to nonlandowning men and end slavery in the British Empire on August 1, 1834, exactly thirty-one years, four months, and five days before the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865, ending slavery in America.

It would be many years before a revolution in political thought would occur, and it would occur on the back on an actual revolution. The American Revolution brought with it an explosion of revolutionary thought. The need to draft a constitution caused many great thinkers to bring their best ideas to the table.

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Thomas Jefferson drew from the ideas of John Locke. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You may have noticed the subtle change from property to pursuit of happiness. Jefferson, you scoundrel.

Thomas Jefferson believed that a limited government—limited in size, power, and duties—was the best way to ensure that the government didn’t overstep its authority. He believed that a government should provide for the common defense of the nation, conduct trade, and do maybe one or two other things, like states providing a police force and fire department and regulating one or two things in the state houses. But after that, the federal and the state governments should keep out of citizen’s business.

Alexander Hamilton drew from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke as well as on many of his own ideas. He created the United States’s treasury and banking system and was a big supporter of a strong central government and building America into a strong power. He provided the government structure necessary to build a great nation. Unfortunately, he didn’t tackle the issue of slavery as ferociously as he did other issues, but he was very much an active proponent of the public well-being with his party, the federalists.

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James Madison began his career as an avid federalist, promoting a strong central government. However, when he got the strong central government he wanted, he switched to the Democratic-Republicans (the party of Thomas Jefferson) and decided to promote individual liberty. The idea of creating a strong central government to protect the individual liberty of citizens wasn’t a new one; it, in fact, had been something that had been going around the philosophers of the day in the time of Hobbes and Locke. The difference here was that Jefferson put his money where his mouth was and actually did it as president of the United States.

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Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine also contributed to political philosophy after studying the political organizations of Native peoples, mainly the Iroquois Confederacy, and their combination of oneness with nature as well as their tribal or parliamentary governing style. They merged these practices into their political ideals about limited government, liberty, and the responsibility that humanity had to be stewards of the land. This ideology would one day feed into the Green Movement that today, around the world, advocates democracy, citizen’s public responsibility, and liberty. This was the common practice of the five tribes that made up the Iroquois Confederacy and Native American governance.

With all these innovations on the domestic front in foreign affairs, there were also innovations. While European kings and queens were off practicing imperialism, Americans began to think about how they would like to interact with the outside world.

Some said not at all—no trade, no war, no diplomacy. We just got done fighting a war, and the two major powers of the time, Britain and France, are always at war, so why would we want to interact with them at all? They’re just going to try to get us to fight in their wars. This idea of diplomacy would come to be called isolationist protectionism, or protectionism for short.

Some believed that America should interact with the outside world and establish alliances and trading partnerships to help grow the economy but that America definitely shouldn’t get involved in the wars between France and Britain. This position today would be called arbitrationist; it champions peaceful diplomacy over intervention with or against another foreign power.

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Others believed that America should interact with other nations, with guns. America should expand westward until resistance was met and then blow them to the heavens above, no warning, no talking, just boom. These sentiments today are known as jingoism. Jingoists champion military action over diplomatically talking things over.

Back in Europe, capitalist republicans finally had a name for themselves—physiocrats. Their ideals were openly hostile to the mercantilists and their expansion of what would have been a good financial plan for an individual person by advising to save as much as possible, into a government policy of importing as little as possible and exporting as much as possible in exchange for gold. The physiocrats wanted an open market to exchange goods and services, selling them for silk and wine and other goods to enrich their standard of living, not to just sit on a growing pile of gold while eating grub and moldy cheese, hoping to die young so they would stop having to spend the little that they did at all.

Now the ideas of socialism had been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Robin Hood was stealing from the rich and giving to the poor during the reign of King Richard the Lionheart from 1189 to 1199. This was the first time, though, that anyone had decided to define what taking from the rich to provide services to the poor was, other than robbery.

Early proponents of a state-run economy began moving further and further along the spectrum until the late 1700s, and in the early 1800s, they had a name for their economic system, socialism, an economic opponent to capitalism. Socialist republicans eventually took to calling themselves dirigists, from the French Diriger, meaning to direct. Their ideas were that one needed to build an economy that rewarded workers with more than just existence. They needed some semblance of comfort, and so socialism and federalized socialism were born.

One such individual was Henri de Saint-Simon, a count in France. He took dirigisme and combined it with Christian traditionalism into what he called Saint-Simonianism, promoting the values and practices of Christianity as a justification for the redistribution of wealth, providing a comfortable living for the peasants of his county. Now originally, Saint-Simon advocated for a dictatorship of the best and the brightest of the county or country, but later, Saint-Simonians backed away from the idea of a dictatorship and moved more toward a strong republic to administer socialist policies as republicanism swept through France at the downfall of Louis XVI.

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By the 1800s, the Whigs in both America and the United Kingdom had gravitated towards a more collectivist belief. In Britain they still believed in the power of Parliament over the power of the Monarch. However they began to support the culture of their home countries along with the responsibility of citizenship. The Whigs in the United States were responsible for the containment of slavery, keeping it from spreading but not outlawing it. It would be the Republican Party, more liberal successors to the Whigs that would provide the all out ban.

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In the mid 1800s, a movement in Great Britain known as the Chartists sprang up. Taking their name from their People’s Charter they advocated for more economic controls, and a charter of rights for all citizens. The People’s Charter that they put together was a list of 6 demands to make Britain more democratic, including fairer electoral districts, and greater citizen suffrage.

In the late 1800s Charles Fourier, a French philosopher, created what he called Fourierism, a blend of Autonomist and Collectivist beliefs. Later an American social reformer named Albert Brisbane brought the philosophy to America and renamed it associationism. This philosophy promoted a utopian socialist ideal based on community and the people’s will.

The idea of progressivism also came with the new century, a mixing public wellbeing with safeguarding individual liberty. In 1912, the Republican Party’s schism between the old Whigs who wanted to maintain the status quo and the new progressive wing came to a head. Teddy Roosevelt, the former President who was running for 3rd nonconsecutive term left the party to form the Progressive Party which would be nicknamed and come to be known as the Bull-Moose Party a party advocating a radical platform including: an 8 hour work day, women’s suffrage and further conservation of the American Frontier. He lost the election, but gained a following that lasted

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The Dirigists also gained some competition with the more Cooperative Autonomists, these people could also be called democratic or cooperative socialists. They advocated for a socialist society where the workers had a say in the company they were working for.

Also the idea of Unionism, a strong socialist republic fighting for workers rights came into being. Working conditions of the industrial revolution were terrible. People died every day while a few people became obscenely rich. Out of this, Unionism was born, the idea of workers uniting for better conditions and better pay, with a few great organizers to lead them into a Union, Unionism brought Dirigism and individualism together.

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In the later quarter of the 19th century, the Fabian society grew in England pushing a progressive, cooperative socialist, or Autonomist message. The Fabian Society would one day give rise to the earliest members of the British Labour Party, and Britain would be forever changed. Pushing social programs like the National Health Service, Britain would be forever changed.

In Ireland there was a great push for independence. The Fenians, which would later call themselves the Irish Republican Brotherhood grew into a large movement across Ireland. One member of the IRB as it would come to be known, was James Connolly, an Irish Republican Socialist, who pushed for greater liberty for individuals with a focus on workers and women’s rights in, what was at the time, a very progressive agenda. With fellow revolutionary James Larkin, Connolly started the Irish Labour Party, and put their ideals to the polls. The Irish Labour Party, under James Connolly, was instrumental in the events leading up to the Irish War of Independence. Unfortunately Connolly was executed following an IRB attack against British Forces on Easter of 1916, an event that would come to be known as the Easter Rising. Connolly never lived to see his Irish Socialist Workers Republic.

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With the horrors of World War I, people began to look at Foreign Policy differently. Alliances and imperialism had come together to create one of the most horrific wars ever seen by mankind. Millions of men shredded by machine gun fire as easily as a waiter would do to cheese. Gases that caused soldiers to vomit their liquified organs. All because in an age of mechanized, industrial warfare, too many nations were friends with too many other nations in an intricate web that one tug could bring global conflict. At the end of the war, President Woodrow Wilson proposed a new idea that was mostly laughed at: One large alliance, a community of nations that would negotiate and work together to maintain peace, and come down on any nation that threatened peace like the fist of God.

This blend of Interactionist Interventionism would come to be called Holism. Rather than looking at the world as if it were a big ball of independent nations, Woodrow Wilson saw a global community. Sure each country was like it’s own house, but if a neighbor’s house caught fire, and the wind blew just right, there was a serious risk of burning down the neighborhood. Wilson’s plan was put into action, (though America didn’t join and the League of Nations didn’t have nearly enough power to ever be able to prevent a war).

In the 1930s, Italy’s house caught fire, the wind blew the fire over to Germany, and then Japan. The fire engulfed France and Central Europe, then Russia, the United Kingdom and The United States, along with many allies were able to put the fire out, but not before it had caused some of the most unspeakable damage in the history of the global psyche. The fire was Fascism, Nazism and World War 2, and the damage was the Holocaust, the 15 million military dead and 25 million wounded, and the staggering 45 million civilian dead that made it and it’s after effects one of the most horrific wars in history.

Suddenly Wilson’s idea of a large alliance of nations dedicated to peace and punishment for those who upset peace didn’t seem so crazy. The United Nations was created, The European Union, Nato, the African Union, The Arabic League. All of these organizations tied nations that might otherwise be in a constant state of war with each other together through Diplomacy, Economics and Culture, all to prevent the possibility of another World War.

Meanwhile in the 1930s and 1940s, President Franklin Roosevelt brought the focus of political thought back to America’s shores. He created a huge push for social programs in an attempt to alleviate the great depression. Social Security, banking reorganization and regulations, the Tennessee Valley Authority that started building dams along the Tennessee River to provide hydro-electric power to people of the area with the end result of cheaper power for citizens, a series of public works projects to provide employment. This and much more created the modern America many citizens know and love today. Along with this was a promotion of American Values and the American Dream.

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By the 1930s though, Liberal no longer meant a proponent of limited government, parliamentary procedure, capitalism and individualism. Now it was an amalgamation of all things Socialist, Republican (the idea of being pro-Republic, not the political party in America), and Progressive. All of these things that Jeffersonian Liberals were defiantly against. A new word began to be used more and more to describe what used to be known as Liberal. The word was Libertarian, Libertarians took up the mantle of pushing for a limited government power, a small sized government with reduced number of obligations, as well as a more democratically answerable government for the things that it did.

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The 1950s and 60s saw the last of the major developments in political theory. In the 1950s, Frank Meyer, an editor and political theorist brokered a blend of Libertarianism and Traditionalism into something he called Fusionism. Now to an American today, if you asked them what a Traditionalist Libertarian was, and they knew anything about politics, they would respond with Conservative or Republican. So you can see that the misrepresentation of names and titles can cause a lot of confusion.

Now the Jeffersonians had another issue to deal with: just like liberalism, Jefferson began to be called into question. Fusionists claimed to also be the philosophical descendants of Jefferson, but Fusionists promotion of the values of a collective went against what Jeffersonians stood for. They believed that it would be ideal for a person to be moral, but that it was most important that each citizen be free to decide what morality meant to them, and whether they wanted to follow it. Quickly the term Social and Governmental Libertarian began to be used to describe someone who was Individualist and Libertarian. For the purposes of this, there is, thankfully a different term to describe these beliefs. Social and Governmental Libertarians began to call themselves Minarchist’s, coming from the word minimal, as in minimal government interference in the lives of citizens, minimal taxes, minimal laws, and maximum rights.

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The 1970s brought with it a new idea, something that Richard Nixon called The Caring Conservative these were post New Deal Conservatives who saw how popular the New Deal social programs and regulations were and didn’t want to mess with them. In fact, they did their best to ensure their survival, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of Medicare, Medicaid, The 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts, and the Voting Rights Act were also extremely popular, even if the Vietnam War had made Lyndon Johnson extremely unpopular.

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Fresh off of the creation of Fusionism, many conservatives decided that leaving the socialist programs of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1960s intact. Some of them even began campaigning on expanding them to include more benefits for more people. This brand of Conservatism was called Paternalistic Conservatism because of its philosophy of governing like a stern parent, holding citizens to