#but there’s a much larger gap between his left-libertarian ideology and the fascism of Donald Trump

[canichangemyblogname]

The political compass isn’t a perfect measure of political alignment, but it did help my father finally conceptualize where he sits relative to the people he used to vote for (Republicans).

Years ago, I came home from college for break and had all my family take the political compass quiz. The quiz frustrated my very anxious and wildly neurodivergent father who either wanted to answer “it depends” on every-other question or throw his hands in the air and shout, “No one would honestly pick these other answers! They’re immoral!” Neither of those were actual options, tho.

When we all got done taking the test, my father and I were the furthest left on the compass, situated firmly in the bottom left of the box. He was shocked to see how close he was to me in his results, as I had nearly given him a heart attack a year earlier after telling him I was a communist at just a semester into college. So he asked me where Joe and Trump sat on the compass. And I explained how they would both sit firmly at the top of the top right quadrant.

He was genuinely shocked. He was shocked that his politics were so dramatically different than the people he was voting for. And he was shocked that, despite how dramatic the differences between his politics and ideology and my own, we were closer to each other in our alignment than he was to the president at the time, Trump.

He hasn’t looked at politics and his political alignment the same since.