by Ron Raskin
In our rapidly changing world, a wide array of ideas and ideologies compete for the hearts and minds of voters. It seems worthwhile, then, to create a taxonomy of these ideologies—both to clarify the many names we hear and to better understand the ideas they represent.
Ideologies can be mapped along various dimensions. Below are four that are particularly significant:
- Social Orientation – This dimension considers whether an ideology emphasizes the cultural aspects of life at the level of the individual or of society as a whole.
- Economic Approach – This reflects whether the ideology prioritizes individual economic freedom or leans toward equality and social security for all.
- Cognitive Strategy – People approach problem-solving differently—and so do ideologies. Some aim for grand, long-term solutions, a strategy that could be called global optimization. Communism, for example, strives to directly optimize the interests of society as a whole. Others, like 19th-century capitalism, focus on local optimization, where individuals act in their own immediate self-interest, thereby optimizing the entire economic system.
- Empathy Bias – This dimension describes the scope of concern an ideology encourages: does it prioritize the individual and close circles (like family), or does it extend empathy to broader groups—such as the nation, a religion, a civilization, or even all of humanity?
Naturally, these dimensions are interconnected and not entirely independent. For example, an emphasis on individual economic freedom is often rooted in a mindset of local optimization.
Figure 1
Figure 2
- Classical liberalism can be thought of as “liberal liberalism,” since it emphasizes individualism across both cultural and economic dimensions. This double emphasis on the individual is what gives it the name “classical” liberalism.
- Although ideologies like Wilsonism, Globalism, and Multiculturalism aim to create a more ideal world, they are positioned toward the center on the “thinking approach” dimension. This is because their method of optimization focuses on preserving the freedom of choice for different nations or cultural groups—essentially, local entities optimizing for their own interests. What defines their placement is not the scale of their vision, but the way they attempt to optimize outcomes.
Examples:
- Trump, Netanyahu (Bibi), Meloni, and Orbán are examples of Liberal National Conservatism. They emphasize individual freedom in the economic realm, while upholding traditional social values in the cultural sphere. Their empathy bias tends toward their own nations or broader civilizations, rather than humanity as a whole.
(Note: Some of them might also be classified under Liberal Atlantic Conservatism, which shows strong empathy toward democratic nations of Europe and North America.) - Erdogan represents Liberal Islamic Conservatism (the type of Islamic Fundamentalism), which blends economic liberalism with a cultural emphasis on Islam. His empathy bias seems equally distributed between the Turkish nation and the broader Islamic world.
Of course, there are many other ways to look at ideologies, and more dimensions you could use to describe them. One well-known example is the political spectrum on Wikipedia (Political spectrum – Wikipedia).
Figure 3
In that model, the Authoritarian–Democratic dimension is somewhat similar to the Society–Individual plane, which includes the cultural and economic dimensions we discussed earlier. And the Radical–Conservative dimension shows how much energy or urgency a group feels about making change—whether they want big changes now or prefer to keep things as they are.