[wutbrodo]

I truly don't understand why people try so desperately to shove politics into a one-dimensional axis, _even in a comment that's pointing out how inadequate it is!_

Politics is complicated, but the two-axes model is a lot less laughably simplistic: left/right, liberal/authoritarian. To drastically oversimplify:

left-liberal: Bernie Sanders, sort of

left-authoritarian: full communism

right-liberal: libertarian

right-authoritarian: paleocons

This is just off the top of my head, has some issues, and is _still_ oversimplified[1], but you can already see how much less than the one-dimensional model it smushes together fairly-mainstream groups that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Anarchists are very much on the left, and big parts of the left (and the right) these days very much dislike liberals.

[1] For example, anarcho-communism doesn't fit very well into this. Ancaps fit (sort of) on the right-liberal side.

[Chris_Jay]

I believe the answer is quite simple - the two major US parties would like to maintain their duopoly and allocate a considerable fraction of their vast resources towards pushing that narrative and smearing anyone who tries to act outside it.

The acceptance of the left-right paradigm by half the US voter base looks like little more than a successful propaganda campaign by the incumbent political parties.

[pamqzl]

Two dimensions is certainly better than one, although I note that almost nobody would self-identify as "authoritarian" which makes half of the chart a bit useless.

The vast majority of people, at least in western countries, agree with the basic assumption of (classical) liberalism, which is that "people should be allowed to do what they want, except...". For the most part people just differ on what comes after the "except", whether it's "sell harmful drugs" or "exploit workers" or "use hate speech" or "burn coal" or whatever other grab-bag of activities a certain individual has decided are sufficiently harmful to outlaw.

[int_19h]

Many socialists quite eagerly self-identify as "authoritarian", actually. It's not the opposite of "democratic", necessarily, at least not on paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism