To which I say, oh god, not again.

Sorry to intrude, you were addressing ER and I couldn't figure out what new term ER dropped that you googled that led to this manifesto, but I read (at first, then skimmed) the article, and man, what a dog's breakfast it is!

I never did locate parts 2 and 3, but it looked like he was headed to a very complicated place, laboring under the delusion that there is any such thing as "a universal scale for defining political belief systems". He acknowledges where he's headed when he notes that, while the poor fools who went before him thought it was a two-dimensional space, he's realized that it "turns out to be a complex, three-dimensional matter".

No shit, Sherlock.

The rest gets complicated fast, culminating in two supposed litmus test questions...excuse me while I translate that to ClickBait: Two Simple Questions That Reveal Anybody's Political Orientation!

Maybe he's just young, and I should be understanding, having spent decades wrestling with the question myself. I've come to the conclusion that there's not really much insight to be gained by trying to place the political beliefs somebody espouses at some point in some notional multidimensional space, some geocentric model of the political solar system complete with epicycles.

It's a lot simpler than that: It's a matter of personality types, and what each personality type is attracted to from the menu of ideologies available at the time in which she or he lives. You can move the (average) political beliefs of an entire population over time by changing the menu, changing the definition of the "center" and thus what's conventional wisdom.

Which, come to think of it, is true "political relativity".

And by "ideologies", I include religion as well as politics, because the mechanism by which different mental architectures bond to different memes is the same. People are no more rational about their political beliefs than their religious beliefs, and people always pick religions compatible with their political beliefs.

That's the mechanism by which followers work, and politicians, who understand the dynamic, try to craft their messages to appeal to particular blocks of particular mental types (e.g. Trump is deliberately turning the key that unlocks a truly dark door). It's not entirely a one-way process, of course, as we've seen in the last few years watching Republican politicians riding the tiger of appealing to what psychologists call the "right wing authoritarian" personality type, gradually moving the message--the menu of available ideological choices--farther and farther to the right, and to their dismay, succeeding far too well. Seems like nowadays that tiger is riding the politicians.

See how simple it is?