The two-dimensional political compass had its first influential predecessor in the Nolan chart of 1969, when David Nolan added a personal-freedom axis to the standard economic-left-to-right line and argued that the libertarian quadrant existed and that the old vocabulary could not see it. The compass that descends from that chart became visible to millions of people through the Political Compass website launched in 2001. Whatever its imperfections, it carried a load-bearing idea: there is a second political axis, perpendicular to the economic one, that runs from authoritarian on one end to libertarian on the other, and most of the twentieth century's political vocabulary collapsed it into the economic axis in a way that produced systematic misclassification.
This piece is about what that axis actually measures and what gets visible once you stop pretending the economic axis is the only one. Most of the live arguments about authoritarianism in contemporary democracies are arguments about positions on this second axis. They look like new arguments because the Cold War vocabulary had decided this axis was either a derivative of the economic one or the same axis under a different name. Neither is true. The axis is independent. It cuts across the economic one. It produces alliances and hostilities that the old vocabulary cannot explain.
What the libertarian end actually contains
The libertarian end of the axis is the position that political authority should be dispersed, civil liberties should be strongly protected, and the state's default toward its citizens should be one of restraint. The libertarian tradition contains very different economic positions inside that shared procedural commitment. The libertarian socialist tradition descends from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin. Bakunin's 1872 split from Marx at the Hague Congress was the founding moment of self-conscious anarchism as a tradition distinct from state socialism. The libertarian-capitalist tradition descends from Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and the post-war Mont Pelerin Society infrastructure. Rothbard's For a New Liberty (1973) is the canonical anarcho-capitalist statement.
What unites the two ends of this internal disagreement is the procedural commitment. Both insist that the burden of proof falls on the person claiming a right to rule rather than on the person resisting that claim. Both treat concentrated political authority as a default-bad and require any specific case of it to be justified. Both have produced extensive literatures on the conditions under which voluntary cooperation can substitute for state enforcement. The bigger argument between the two is about whether private property counts as another form of arbitrary authority. The libertarian socialists say yes. The libertarian capitalists say no. The shared end of the axis is real anyway.
The libertarian end of the axis tends toward drug legalisation, scepticism of mass surveillance, opposition to qualified immunity for police, suspicion of military intervention, defence of free expression against both state censorship and corporate content moderation, and a default preference for federalism over centralisation. The procedural commitments produce different policy positions when run through different economic assumptions, but the commitments themselves are recognisably the same.
What the authoritarian end actually contains
The authoritarian end of the axis is the position that political authority should be concentrated, civil liberties should be limited where they conflict with the regime's priorities, and the state's default toward its citizens should be one of active direction rather than restraint. Like the libertarian end, the authoritarian end contains very different economic positions inside the shared procedural commitment. The fascist tradition runs from Mussolini's 1922 March on Rome and the Italian Fascist Party through to the Nazi project in Germany and the Falangist movement in Spain. The Soviet tradition runs from Lenin's 1917 seizure of power through Stalin's consolidation and the post-war Eastern bloc. Maoism is the Chinese variant of the same family. Pinochet's Chile after 1973, the various Latin American military juntas of the 1960s and 1970s, and the contemporary Gulf state monarchies are right-authoritarian without being fascist.
What unites the two ends of this internal disagreement is the procedural willingness to concentrate authority for the sake of underlying priorities the regime treats as more important than procedural restraint. Fascist regimes wanted to remake the nation around a racial-nationalist project. Marxist-Leninist regimes wanted to remake society around a class-revolutionary project. Pinochet wanted to suppress what he saw as a Marxist threat. The procedural willingness is the load-bearing thing. The justifications differ. The mechanism is recognisably similar across cases.
Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is the standard reference for the inner subdivisions of this end. Arendt distinguished totalitarianism, which tries to remake the whole society around an ideological project, from authoritarianism, which concentrates power but leaves most of social life unmolested as long as it does not threaten the regime. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were totalitarian. Franco's Spain after the early 1940s and post-1990 Singapore are authoritarian but not totalitarian. Most regimes that aimed for totalitarianism settled for authoritarianism after the early ideological phase exhausted itself, because totalitarian ambition is institutionally exhausting in ways ordinary authoritarianism is not.
Why the Cold War vocabulary hid this axis
The post-1945 ideological vocabulary fused the authority axis to the economic one in a way that made the authority axis politically invisible. Soviet propaganda described any non-communist regime as fascist by reflex, which made fascism a synonym for capitalism rather than a specific authoritarian-nationalist tradition. American Cold War propaganda described any communist regime as totalitarian by reflex, which made totalitarianism a synonym for state economic planning rather than a specific kind of regime project. Both sides treated the regimes the other side allied with as part of the same hostile camp regardless of their actual political organisation. The CIA-backed military juntas of the 1960s and 1970s were therefore filed by American conservatives as anti-communist rather than as authoritarian, and the East German Stasi state was filed by Western communists as socialist rather than as a secret-police regime.
The post-1989 period has slowly made the axis visible again. The collapse of Soviet legitimacy removed the geopolitical reason to treat authoritarianism as a derivative of the economic axis. The post-2001 War on Terror produced a domestic-civil-liberties argument inside Western democracies that ran along the authority axis rather than the economic one, with both libertarians and the institutional left finding themselves on the same side against the security-state expansion. The post-2016 populist surge has produced authoritarian currents inside several Western democracies, including the United States, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and India, that the old left-right vocabulary cannot map.
The result is that the authority axis is now doing more political work than it has in fifty years. The visible alliances of the contemporary moment, the libertarian-left and the institutional-liberal coalition against various national-populist movements, do not fit the Cold War vocabulary at all. They fit the authority axis cleanly.
What the libertarian and authoritarian ends share
This part is uncomfortable to write but worth being clear about. Both ends of the axis include sub-traditions that the contemporary mainstream finds disturbing. The libertarian end includes anarchist currents that have, at various historical moments, defended political violence against state actors and capitalist institutions, including the assassination of public officials in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and various forms of property destruction in the recent past. The authoritarian end includes regimes that produced industrial-scale mass killing, from the Holocaust through the Soviet gulag system and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
The asymmetry between the two ends is real. The libertarian sub-traditions that defended political violence were small actors operating against vastly more violent states, and they produced low casualty totals by comparison. The authoritarian sub-traditions that produced industrial-scale killing did so with the apparatus of state power behind them, and the death tolls run into the tens of millions. Anyone trying to evaluate the axis honestly has to hold both observations at once.
What this means in practice is that the authority axis carries real moral weight that the economic axis usually does not. A position on the economic axis is mostly a position on how to organise productive activity, with real distributional consequences but few first-order questions about political violence. A position on the authority axis is, at the extremes, a position about how much state coercion against citizens is justified by what ends. The extreme authoritarian positions have, in the historical record, produced almost all of the worst outcomes the twentieth century is famous for. The extreme libertarian positions have produced a much smaller set of much smaller outcomes. The axis is not symmetrical. Pretending it is, is a kind of false balance the historical evidence does not support.
How the Votely cube uses this axis
The Votely quiz uses three independent axes: Economic (left to right), Authority (libertarian to authoritarian), and Progressive-Conservative on cultural questions. The Authority axis sits between the other two and is independent of them. A point on the cube has three coordinates. The four corners of the Authority-by-Economic plane produce the canonical positions: libertarian-right (anarcho-capitalism, classical liberalism, libertarianism), libertarian-left (anarchism, libertarian socialism, mutualism), authoritarian-right (fascism, authoritarian capitalism, Falangism), and authoritarian-left (Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, state socialism).
Most actual contemporary positions sit somewhere inside the cube rather than at a corner. The post-2016 American populist right sits at modest economic-right, high-authority, conservative cultural. The contemporary American liberal mainstream sits at modest economic-left, moderate-authority, progressive cultural. The democratic-socialist current inside the Democratic Party sits further left economically and slightly more libertarian on authority. The contemporary libertarian movement sits well right economically and well libertarian on authority. The axis separates positions the standard left-right line keeps lumping together.
Where to go from here
If you want to see where you actually sit on the authority axis rather than guess from the labels, take the Votely quiz. The result places you across all three axes and gives you a dossier for the closest tradition and a comparison set for the ones nearest to you on the cube. For the intellectual history, the libertarianism dossier, the anarchism dossier, and the fascism dossier cover the canonical positions on the axis. The disagreement between Hayek and Rothbard about whether the minimal state is stable is the live argument on the libertarian end. The disagreement between Arendt and the post-Cold-War literature on whether totalitarianism is a distinct regime type or just authoritarianism with more ideology is the live argument on the other end. Both arguments are still going. Both deserve a serious reading before you settle on a position.