Dispelling one common popular model of politics, the “political spectrum” (or its higher-dimensional versions like the “political compass”). The problems with it are as follows.
1) Effectiveness. Unless you’re an omnipotent dictator who can freely choose where to place your country on the political compass, you exist not on the political compass but on its tangent space. Your “direction” is your ideology, and your “magnitude” is not your extremism but your effectiveness.
2) The “for whom?” component of ideology. Much of this chapter and book have been about drilling in the fact that Left-liberals are motivated by ideological fanaticism rather than identity: like “no, Indian-Americans who vote Democrat are not secretly right-wing at home, they are also woke about Indian politics” “left-wing American Jews are not hypocrites, they also have stupid multicultural fantasies about Israel and are deracinated on this”, “the leftist American NGOs are not secretly agents of colonialism/Christian nationalists, they’re also very active in America and have done a great deal of damage there”.
However, there are in fact groups which do not assume a liberal humanist morality, are explicitly identitarian and practice the cynical self-interest/realism that right-wingers like attributing to everyone else—they cannot be represented as spots on the political compass, because their views are different for different groups. The DMK, CCP and GCC states come to mind as the clearest examples.
The DMK is capitalist, pro-industry, promotes their traditional culture and history ... for their tribe (Tamil non-Brāhmaṇas). They won’t do that for you, if you do not belong that tribe—in fact, they will cynically back leftist-Congressi parties outside their state, and push out a narrative that stresses on welfare schemes rather than Tamil Nadu’s unbashed pro-business economics, in order to cynically pull down other Indians.
Hindutva has similar policies and goals as the DMK, but on a national scale, for all Hindus, regardless of region and caste, without “pulling anybody down”. This would also be more sustainable for the Tamils in the long-run—because otherwise you yourself end up buying into the cynical propaganda your leaders have prepared for others (and thus you see the DMK getting a taste of its own medicine with Vijay, and the CCP too with the rise of leftist derangement on Chinese internet since COVID, which will certainly destroy their country1). It would do the DMK well to follow the example of the Telugu regional parties (TDP, TRS) who, while maintaining their regional pride have a healthy and positive attitude toward the progress of the rest of the nation.
3) “Authoritarianism” is strategy, not ideology. The two-dimensional compass version with an authoritarianism axis, in particular, only makes sense if you are a libertarian/classical-liberal. Most ideologies do not see themselves as having a position on authoritarianism but rather “freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee”, and the degree of authoritarianism depends largely on your ability to exert power, rather than belief in it. So you end up with libertarians saying stupid things like “See, the leftists are not actually Left-liberal, because they don’t support free speech’ while in reality by personal freedom Left-liberals just mean random things like gay rights and aborting babies.
DMK is CCP-lite. Commie origins, but pivoted to RW economics out of pragmatism and belief in economic growth. Nationalism for their tribe’s culture, but cynically promote leftism (both economic and social) for others. Will probably be bitten by the snake they’re feeding.
Instead, the correct model of politics, religions and ideologies in general, is as described in section 3.4: forces that determine a “vector field” on some abstract space—those in the attracting basins of those vector fields are the believers in that ideology, and the goal of politics is to increase the strength of your force.