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More dataisdepressing than dataisbeautiful
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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Data Is Beautiful
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Difficult to assess this info without knowing how the data was created.
Also hard to believe the American average is +20 leaning lib. The country is represented by a fascist party and a centrist party, and anything more left than the centrist party is considered "far left".
The graph is about young people, not the entire population. Young people in America are historically more progressive than older people.
Also why does liberal and conservative have to be on an absolute scale? The words liberal and conservative seem to me at least be about pushing politics in one direction or another. Because policy is always subject to change, shouldn't the words liberal and conservative be relative to the political system they exist within?
Yes, "liberal" and "conservative" are relative, not absolute terms. There's a concept known as the Overton Window which describes exactly this shift of what is considered the "center" and what is considered a radical left/right position in any given society at any given time.
The idea that people should vote for their representatives, for example, was once considered an extremist take that could ruin civilization itself if implemented. The Overton Window shifted and nowadays even most Fascists will at least pretend in public to agree with it.
And, I did miss that important detail.
It doesn't have to be an absolute scale of course, but then why show 4 countries where all seem to deviate from the center? Are these country graphs even comparable?
Yeah I agree, it's not a very good graph. I just get frustrated when people ridicule the US political system for everything. We have a lot to fix (like what's causing women to become more liberal), but I think we need to focus on what's actionable and reasonable to fix. We can't become +20 more liberal overnight.
The Y axis here is not an absolute international political compass. It measures which political party each person favors, and judging by that country's local standards categorizes that party as either left or right.
A rising number in the US chart means a larger number of people prefer democrats over republicans. It doesn't mean that people's stances are necessarily moving further left. Similarly, it's no coincidence that the inflection point where UK numbers rise by a lot correspond to Brexit: the party seen as responsible for the unpopular change lost a lot of support, but that doesn't mean the population has so sharply moved drastically more progressive in such a short time.
The US population is largely some variety of “liberal” meaning vaguely left. The problem is the structure of our government favors land, not population.