A Further Illustration of the Political Spectrum

I wrote a post previously using the normal distribution to illustrate the political spectrum.

What I did not mention is that the distribution is generally seen as being centered on zero, where negative numbers correspond to the left wing while positive numbers correspond to the right wing.

In Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism, one reads how the myth of Fascism as a feature of the right was an attempt by Stalin to discredit Fascism as a competitor to Communism. If Fascism can be accurately characterized as right wing it is only in the sense that, once the political center has shifted far enough to the left, the right wing is still negative territory—it’s like saying that -40 is right of -50: it’s true enough, but they’re both left of zero.

Once that happens, the far right is anything in positive territory.