Quick note on three polar politics

This from Richard Wolf in Truth-Out is interesting: His three "poles" are left, right and middle, and he's clear on the party representation and enfranchisement issues.

However, this from Stirling Newberry is better. Wolf, it seems to me, is still caught in a linear paradigm, where the right pulls the middle right, and the left pulls the middle left ("polarization"). However, three points determine a plane, and Newberry describes the contours of that plane and the relations between the three poles that consitutute it in a way that Wolf does not. For example, both the far "right" and the far "left" want to abolish the empire. (That's good policy, no matter the reasoning that leads to it.) Wolf's linear paradigm cannot such identities of interest (if not of values). Newberry's planar paradigm can and does.

Two good reads. I advise careful study of both.

NOTE One might also look a three points on a line that do not determine a plane (or rather, the limit case of a plane as a line) as an unnatural construct, maintained, as it were, by an outside force that keeps the three points in alignment even as they "naturally" "want" to go out of two dimensions into three, rather like a splint over a broken limb keeps the limb straight, but at the same time does not allow it to articulate. One might consider the metric for hegemony the continued linearity of the three-polar structure. The counter-metric might be something along the lines of "degrees of freedom."