Another Take on the Political Spectrum

Derek Haynes had a better description of our political spectrum on his blog Conservative Thinker.  Here's a short summary.

"The political spectrum is a way of analyzing different political philosophies and describing how they are alike and different. Most of us are most familiar with the right-wing/left-wing portrayal of the American political spectrum. Typically we associate right-wing with conservatism and the Republican party and left-wing with liberalism and the Democratic Party. Often we assign colors to this spectrum: red = Republican and blue = Democratic."
"What many of us don’t realize is that the American political spectrum is much broader than this representation. In fact, conservatism and liberalism occupy only the center of the spectrum. Historically, the term liberalism encompassed both what we call today liberalism and conservatism – that is both modern conservatism and modern liberalism used to be under the classic liberalism banner."
"As we fill in the missing ends of the simple political spectrum model, we see the addition of socialism, libertarianism, communism, fascism, totalitarianism, etc. Once we add these to the simple model, the model seems to no longer describe the spectrum adequately. This is seen as we get to the outer edges of the model. When compared, the ends seem to be very similar instead of extremely different – almost as if the spectrum is a circle where the ends bend around and touch each other."