July, 2025
Washington — If I were a reporter, pundit, podcaster, or writer of any kind offering political analyses these days, I would be careful to limit my use of terms such as right, left, liberal, conservative, red, blue, libertarian, socialist and the like.
Such terms suggest a single continuum of political ideology. Unfortunately, the more the terms are deployed, the more divided the population itself becomes. That's bad enough, but these single-axis descriptors aren't accurate for most Americans, who view themselves as ideological mixtures and are likely to vote on the basis of other factors.
Social scientists often try to deal with these oversimplifications by adding a Y axis to the existing X axis to allow for people who may be fiscally conservative on one axis, for example, but socially liberal on another, and vice-versa. This places people in quadrants and gets closer to reflecting their actual viewpoints.
But within each quadrant are other variables, some of which may be nominal rather than continuous and do not lend themselves to graphing. Consider that some people may favor a strong central government for policy implementation, others want decisions made locally, and others are pragmatic.
Is there a way to describe people in four quadrants with three options within each; that is, 4 x 3 = 12?
One way would be to use the colors of the chromatic scale in a color wheel. The musician Alexander Scriabin, who heard notes as colors, identified twelve such colors. So rather than using red and blue to divide people, a twelve-color wheel would get closer to reflecting viewpoint reality. It might show that many of us are yellow, green, or steel gray. This would also identify more opportunities to work together because commonalities as well as differences are revealed in such a display. Listening for Scribin's colors as notes, as he did, might reveal harmonies through which disparate people could make music together, so to speak.
Another way to depart from the divisiveness of single-axis descriptors would be to consider political viewpoints as particles in quantum physics. Observers can't be sure where they are, let alone whether they are particles or waves at any moment. And they may change their behavior when an attempt is made to observe them. Despite the uncertainties, great breakthroughs are based on those understandings alone.
So the next time you hear terms like left and right used (or shouted as epithets), think how Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg might consider such positions, or how they might sound as notes to a musician like Scriabin.
Listen for political leaders who know how to play notes together harmoniously. Such leaders are currently in short supply. Their pitches are likely to be other than those on a single, overused, and divisive axis.
