A small but real part of the variation in the policy positions taken by individuals and organizations is explained by two key factors: an econ and a (social/identity/) culture factor.
'An outcome measure that was more a mess of details might be more stable and closer to detailed policy preferences, though alas that also seems more open to gaming and corruption.'
Please expand on your reasoning here, I don't follow. Detailed policy preferences would seem to me to be more subject to objective Measures of Performance and Measures of Effectiveness (real world feedback) than abstract formulations more vulnerable to concept creep and opportunistic redefinition of terms.
For example, people who make roads could lobby for more roads by getting some measure of road miles into a National welfare measure. People who want to favor cities over rural areas could push for metrics that count stuff in cities more than elsewhere.
So, you're saying something like 'Catch all omnibus bills are easier for governments to pass than a series of clean bills for each policy, but part of the reason for that is precisely because it's easier to slip policies that wouldn't pass on their own into an omnibus bill'? That does make more sense to me, if so. I've encountered the deliberate argument that 'pork is necessary to grease the wheels of government' before, though I tend not to agree with people who actively advocate for making that an intentional feature rather than an undesired inefficiency.
When you say, "So there are far more (upper left of diagram) “authoritarian” left econ and right culture folks than there are (lower right of diagram) “libertarian” right econ and left culture folks. The median left, median right, and libertarian positions roughly form a triangle", I think you're VERY badly misinterpreting this data by pretending that "liberal" correlates with "libertarian".
"Liberal" as used here is the OPPOSITE of libertarian. Libertarians want free markets, small government, free speech, equality before the law, viewpoint tolerance, and debate grounded in empirical facts. "Liberals", as the term is being used here, are today the people who are against all these things.
The left has always been the most-authoritarian culture! They gave us Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, fascism, Mao, Castro, pol pot, and now wokeness. They have never been libertarian.
My contention that fascism is a far-left movement is unpopular today, but only due to a century of assiduous historical revisionism. In French, "right" meant monarchists and IIRC Catholics; in German left and right referred to revolutionary vs non-revolutionary Hegelians. The phrase "right wing" for politics didn't appear in English until the 1920s, and originally meant "right-wing socialist", meaning non-revolutionary socialists like Bernie Sanders today; the phrase "right-wing conservative" was rarer until the 1970s. The Nazis always rejected the term "right wing" due to its anti-revolutionary core. All fascist theorists were leftists; all fascist movements split from socialist movements (unless you count Franco as fascist); Woodrow Wilson was clearly a crucial proto-fascist; FDR was recognized by Mussolini as a fellow fascist; socialist and marxist magazines like The Nation were pro-fascist until 1933. The left has been intimately tied with fascism from the start, and most of all in its unrelenting commitment to authoritarianism. Hugo Chavez had many fascist aspects; communist China today is as fascist as any nation that's been called fascist. Fascism is just race marxism.
'An outcome measure that was more a mess of details might be more stable and closer to detailed policy preferences, though alas that also seems more open to gaming and corruption.'
Please expand on your reasoning here, I don't follow. Detailed policy preferences would seem to me to be more subject to objective Measures of Performance and Measures of Effectiveness (real world feedback) than abstract formulations more vulnerable to concept creep and opportunistic redefinition of terms.
For example, people who make roads could lobby for more roads by getting some measure of road miles into a National welfare measure. People who want to favor cities over rural areas could push for metrics that count stuff in cities more than elsewhere.
So, you're saying something like 'Catch all omnibus bills are easier for governments to pass than a series of clean bills for each policy, but part of the reason for that is precisely because it's easier to slip policies that wouldn't pass on their own into an omnibus bill'? That does make more sense to me, if so. I've encountered the deliberate argument that 'pork is necessary to grease the wheels of government' before, though I tend not to agree with people who actively advocate for making that an intentional feature rather than an undesired inefficiency.
When you say, "So there are far more (upper left of diagram) “authoritarian” left econ and right culture folks than there are (lower right of diagram) “libertarian” right econ and left culture folks. The median left, median right, and libertarian positions roughly form a triangle", I think you're VERY badly misinterpreting this data by pretending that "liberal" correlates with "libertarian".
"Liberal" as used here is the OPPOSITE of libertarian. Libertarians want free markets, small government, free speech, equality before the law, viewpoint tolerance, and debate grounded in empirical facts. "Liberals", as the term is being used here, are today the people who are against all these things.
Left culture has usually been seen as more libertarian than right culture.
The left has always been the most-authoritarian culture! They gave us Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, fascism, Mao, Castro, pol pot, and now wokeness. They have never been libertarian.
My contention that fascism is a far-left movement is unpopular today, but only due to a century of assiduous historical revisionism. In French, "right" meant monarchists and IIRC Catholics; in German left and right referred to revolutionary vs non-revolutionary Hegelians. The phrase "right wing" for politics didn't appear in English until the 1920s, and originally meant "right-wing socialist", meaning non-revolutionary socialists like Bernie Sanders today; the phrase "right-wing conservative" was rarer until the 1970s. The Nazis always rejected the term "right wing" due to its anti-revolutionary core. All fascist theorists were leftists; all fascist movements split from socialist movements (unless you count Franco as fascist); Woodrow Wilson was clearly a crucial proto-fascist; FDR was recognized by Mussolini as a fellow fascist; socialist and marxist magazines like The Nation were pro-fascist until 1933. The left has been intimately tied with fascism from the start, and most of all in its unrelenting commitment to authoritarianism. Hugo Chavez had many fascist aspects; communist China today is as fascist as any nation that's been called fascist. Fascism is just race marxism.