In Sweden we, like much of the rest of the world, have parties that are generally agreed to have positions along a left-right axis.
The left-right scale is widely accepted and most politicians use it for implicit or explicit reference when they communicate policy. If you are not on the left-right scale, which none of the new "parties" are, you are not considered to be very serious. And when you think about it; how on earth would the debates look like on TV if the politicians were not placed on the panel accordingly to their political positions? Did you ever see a round table on a political debate? The viewers would for sure revolt such a complicated political structure. The political left-right establishment is also helped by this as they gain high ground in any debate just by living on the "serious" left-right scale. The most effective way for a new "party" to escape "strangeness" seems to be to paint its political symbol with either "redish" (FI) or "blueish" (SD). This is apparently almost considered to be serious enough by most, although it doesn't help the Pirate Party who in the pirate spirit has to paint its symbol black, forever preventing any kind of seriousness to the party.
One strength of the left-right system is that although people may question the relative position of every party to a certain degree, once it is established you can scientifically tell how different the parties are. We only have one scale, and although no one knows or accurately can define the left-right axis, it is presumably linear. Linearity helps us understand how different parties are. As an example: M is much more different to S than C because they are further apart on the scale. This makes social clustering a simple task as it doesn't require much nasty own thought.
There have been suggestions for an updated political landscape by adding at least another dimension. Like here: Political compass. In short they claim that the left-right scale may be expanded into something like this.
We hence added a dimension to the picture and can now place parties both by traditional social scale, as well as an economical scale. The problem comes when I now ask which of the parties S, FP and SD that are closest. The problem is now that we have set up set up a two dimensional "orthogonal" basis set. Orthogonality roughly means that no matter how you try to describe X with a portion of Y, you will fail if they are orthogonal. Apples and Pears are sort of orthogonal since they are both fruits but no matter how hard you try you will never be able to objectively describe one with the other.
Now we freak. By introducing this scale we have made the art of politics subjective. And since we (wrongfully but never the less) consider everything subjective (like "flum") with great suspicion we have created chaos. Imagine if the political commentators are caught being "subjective" in their analysis. And what about the social clustering? How on earth do we know if we "should" cluster more with SD or S if we are FP? Imagine the confusion of the anarchistic kids who enjoy throwing rocks at the racists if they cannot objectively "know" if they are closer to V or SD? In short, by introducing this new model of politics, we have destroyed the collective subjective reality of political ideas which we earlier could use as a basis for objective rational analysis, since it was not objective but at least collectively subjective. It may be possible to build a new collective subjective reality in time, but it would take much time and effort. Why did we frek? For the same reasons that we had issues with morals the last time: subjective reality needs to be collective in order to make objective analysis, and by introducing an arbitrary orthogonality to ideas it is up to everyone to come up with an approximation of how to translate apples into pears. As long as we had a totally flawed model like the left-right model, it is at least collectively subjective, and possible to do objective analysis on.
So let's stick with the left-right scale for now, so that we don't rock the boat too much.
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