Politically Perpendicular

Why the Left–Right spectrum is failing us— and what we might see if we step off the line

If it hasn’t been clear already, a government shutdown makes it painfully obvious: American politics is broken. Not just gridlocked. Not just messy. Broken. And sliding ever faster into cruelty and violence.

When governance grinds to a halt and democracy drifts further beyond the horizon, we’re not just stalled. We’re in freefall. Plunging into new terrain with no shared map, no compass, and no clarity about how to claw back our rights or civility — let alone return to the quaint idea of engaging in collective governance to improve people’s lives.

We’re told the problem is polarization. That if only Left and Right could learn to work together again, we might repair what’s been lost.

But what if the real divide isn’t Left vs. Right at all?

What if the real divide is between those trying to manage (or more often, exploit) a dying system for short-term gain……and those willing to face that our entire way of living is out of sync with the planet’s life-support systems?

Even our most thoughtful analysts seem trapped in the old frame. Recently, I watched Ezra Klein interview writer and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose work I admire.

And yet, as they talked, I felt my frustration rising.

Ezra seemed bewildered and held hostage by the question of why “the left” is losing ground. One of his takeaways? Maybe progressives need to adopt the right’s aggressive debate tactics and just get better at winning the argument.

At that point, I almost turned it off.

Not because I disagreed with everything. But because I realized — we’re still trying to win a game that’s unplayable. It’s Lucy and the football.

Left. Right. Center. Implied symmetry. A narrow spectrum potholed with massive blind spots. An orientation that’s not up to the task, but one we don’t question. Instead we use it to define each other and double down on strategies that guarantee our collective demise.

And just as I was trying to give language to this gnawing feeling, my husband handed me a draft passage from his upcoming book and it did what the best writing can do:

It said what I couldn’t yet say.

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The following section is shared with permission from author Rob Davies, excerpted from his forthcoming book.1

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The Politically Perpendicular

Why Left vs. Right Is the Wrong Axis for a World in Collapse

There was a time when the traditional Left–Right spectrum could orient a person reasonably well. In the industrial era, it mapped competing priorities: capital vs. labor, tradition vs. progress, individual liberty vs. collective responsibility. But today, with the conditions for a livable future unraveling, these coordinates have collapsed into dysfunction.

This isn’t fence-sitting. It’s frame-shifting.

We live in a moment where continuing to think in Left/Right binaries is like navigating a burning building with the wrong floor plan. We’re no longer debating policy differences between two functional worldviews. We’re watching a civilization accelerate toward ecological and social collapse — and both political “sides” are captive to the same deeper paradigm: modernity’s faith in growth, control, extraction, separation, and techno-optimism.

To be politically perpendicular is to step off the spectrum entirely. Not to claim neutrality, but to shift the axis of concern— from ideology to viability, from tribal identity to relational integrity, from scoring points to regenerating the conditions for life to thrive.

The Case for Perpendicularity

We didn’t get here because one side was wrong and the other right. We got here because both sides are playing a game that the planet can’t sustain.

The Right insists on hierarchy, supremacy, and market fundamentalism — often cloaked in the language of tradition or nationalism. It scapegoats the vulnerable and sacralizes the status quo.

The mainstream Left, while offering inclusion and redistributive justice, largely shares the same economic logic: that perpetual growth is possible, that technology will save us, and that social progress can flourish on a dead planet.

Neither side is confronting the real problem: we are in civilizational overshoot, and no amount of better branding or policy tweaks will fix a fundamentally extractive operating system.

What Political Orthogonality Stands For

Political perpendicularity (orthogonality), in this context, is in the direction of planetary thinking — that is, reorienting toward the basic conditions required to sustain life, justice, and meaning on a finite planet.

Politically perpendicular, along the Planetary Thinking axis, stands for:

• Postgrowth economics that operate within planetary boundaries

• Relational governance rooted in trust and mutual responsibility

• Civic education grounded in planetary realities and historical honesty

• Cultural narratives that regenerate belonging, not division

• Design principles that deepen dignity and reciprocity

This is a politics not of Left or Right — but of Right-Relation.

The Test of Asymmetry

Sometimes we are told that what the world needs now is more listening, more empathy, more dialogue between opposing sides. And often, that’s true.

But not always.

There is a test. A test of asymmetry.

If one side is arguing for the basic dignity of human and more-than-human life, and the other side is arguing for domination, erasure, or harm — this is not a symmetrical disagreement. It is a moral asymmetry. And we must not pretend otherwise in the name of civility.

But we also must not mirror the logic of domination in our resistance. To be Politically Perpendicular is to refuse both complicity and mimicry. It is to say: “We will not play your game. We will change the field.”

The Strategic Bind of Refusal

But to say we will not play the game does not mean the game stops playing us.

To stand perpendicular to the political spectrum — to refuse both domination and complicity — is to opt out of a game designed for escalation. But here lies the bind: games that confer advantage tend to dominate the field, even when they are destructive. This is one of the central insights of evolutionary dynamics, game theory, and systems behavior. Once a dominance-based strategy (violence, disinformation, resource hoarding, surveillance, coercion) proves effective in a competitive context, others are structurally incentivized to adopt it. Failure to do so risks defeat. So, even those who are ideologically opposed to domination may feel forced to mimic it, just to survive.

In short: if domination wins, everyone learns to dominate. And if we refuse, we risk losing everything we care about.

To be politically perpendicular, then, is not naïve idealism. It’s not above the fray. It is a wager: That we can refuse the logic of domination without being defeated by it.

There are three strategic options:

• Complicity — Adopt the tools of domination “for the greater good.” But this legitimizes the logic and perpetuates the system.

• Pacifism — Refuse all engagement, on moral or spiritual grounds. But this may result in irrelevance or being overpowered.

• Perpendicularity — Change the logic of the game itself. But this requires nonconventional tools, creative risk, and, most of all, deep coordination.

What Does Perpendicularity Look Like in Action?

• Asymmetrical disruption — Disrupt with tools the dominant game can’t anticipate: satire, poetic refusal, radical hospitality.

• Build what the old system can’t digest — Don’t just critique; create. Model the alternatives in real time.

• Narrative jiu-jitsu — Reframe the fight. This isn’t Left vs. Right — it’s Life vs. anti-Life.

• Engage without absorption — Step into power systems when needed, but don’t become them.

It is difficult. But the alternative is worse: To win the game by becoming what we set out to transform.

So we orient ourselves to something deeper. Not victory. But fidelity. Not domination. But dignity. Not power over. But power with.

Beyond the Spectrum

This is not a rejection of politics — it’s an invitation to deepen it. To reimagine political life as the collective stewardship of conditions for mutual flourishing — not perpetual conflict and competition.

The spectrum is obsolete. The stakes are existential. The way forward begins where the line ends — and a new axis begins.

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Reading this, I felt my shoulders drop — not in relief, but in recognition. This wasn’t strategy-as-usual. It was an ethics of orientation. An orientation that makes sense of my disillusionment, my grief, and the questions that won’t let me go.

It also makes sense of something I’ve been feeling for a long while now: that I have no interest in fighting harder inside a frame that’s killing us.

I want to step out of the frame entirely — not into neutrality, but into viability, into right-relation, into the messy, necessary work of composting the destructive game itself.

What Rob calls “politically perpendicular” is not a position. It’s a pivot.

A turning away from the spectacle, and toward the soil. A refusal to optimize collapse, and a commitment to regenerate something livable — even if we don’t yet know how. And I wonder — what becomes possible when more of us make that turn?

This essay doesn’t represent finished thought. It’s simply planting a stake in the ground to spark a new conversation.

I’m not trying to be right. I’m trying to stay in right-relation.

With the Earth. With each other. With what’s still possible.

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Rob Davies is a physicist, educator, and global systems thinker at Utah State University, and founder of The Institute for Planetary Thinking. His work focuses on complexity, global change, and civilizational futures.