Our Ajax Rock political compass

With the presidential election right around the corner, I thought it was time to pull together our readers' responses to the political compass "test" we all took some months ago and see where we all stand.

Try as I might, I could not reproduce my beautiful, plotted graph online, but I'll do my best to sum things up.

Two people landed in the Authoritarian Left quadrant: Rita and Brother Don. But they were not extreme. That means that both of them are a little bit socially liberal and a little bit economically conservative.

We have one family member in the Authoritarian Right: Don K. It's interesting, though, that he's in good company with both McCain and Obama in that section. In fact, all of the presidential hopefuls except for Dennis Kuchinich fall in that square, with our current president being the most extreme and leaning toward fascism. Big surprise. Of course, we don't know if any of them actually took the quiz, but their results are based on their stated policies.

Again, we have one family member in the Libertarian Right: Mitch, of all people. He is very liberal on social issues and very conservative on economic issues. Interesting to note that he is a "wealth manager" for TIAA-CREF, which might explain his right-leaning economic viewpoints; but he's right down there with the rest of us liberals on the social scale.

Boy, that lower left quadrant is crowded! Along with Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama are a whole bunch of Ajax Rock readers: Laurie, Beth, Nan, Libby, George, Johnny, Cecilia, Don K. the Younger, Lois, John, Ms. Moon and Patti. But there is a lot of variation in the "liberal" crowd. George, for example, is near the middle socially but is surprisingly (to me) liberal economically. And John is nearest to the center.

In the "respectable left" are John, Laurie, Don the Younger, Patti and George. Loie is nearly in the middle of that box, being less liberal economically than socially, where she's quite open. Cecilia, too, is still in the sort-of-middle. Then we have the group of extremists in the bottom left, led by Beth as the most socially liberal of all of us and Suzi as the most economically liberal. The other leftists are Libby, Johnny, Ms. Moon and Nan. Best friends Nan and Suz are the most extreme economically, leaning dangerously toward both anarcharism and communism. Yikes! Guess I really am out in left field.

Now Beth may test as the most socially liberal of all, says her mother proudly, but she also let it slip that she thinks she would be the perfect benign dictator, deciding who is worthy of living and who should be, uh, done away with. So there may be a tad of latent fascism there. I guess she figures that she's so tolerant that if she can't make room for someone, that person has to go.

Nary a one of us is as conservative as John McCain, so my thought is that nobody has any reason to vote for him, but I suspect that's just my wishful thinking. Let's just all be proud that nobody we hang around with was anywhere near Hitler or Stalin -- or George W. Bush, for that matter.

Now there's a good reason to make sure we all get to the polls on election day.