To me, this piece reads as advocacy for multi-issue positioning, despite the initial framing. Both the amount of arguing for one side and the positioning makes me think so.
Your analysis seems to me to be very susceptible to the amount of salience a certain matter may have on both axis. Or said another way. Supposing you’re weighting your chances by the area of your graphics, I think you may have drawn them too close to origin of coordinates, specially the multi-issue one. Suppose that, on your multi-issue graphic, people who care bout L won’t support you unless your position on L is at least 50% of the way to the current extreme. Or else, suppose there is a “top right” quadrant where you can’t really make progress, because if you take your positions on the L issue to the extreme, you’ll lose the support on only of the anti-L, but also of the moderate-on-L. That is, you’ve drawn a coordinates system but at the same time you’ve assumed a binary of positions, only L or not-L. Thus, by amount of area, it may very well be that A is, in reality, bigger than B.
Complicating things further, much of the time there is not a single-issue L you have to care about, but a memeplex of which L is just a part, and by taking a position on L, not only you’re committing yourself to having a position on all of the memeplex, but you’re assumed by default of having such a position, unless you actively communicate against that (risking to antagonize your pro-L supporters). With this in mind, your point of “Adopting a Single-Issue Policy Provides a Principled Way to Stay Out of Other Issues” becomes extremely important.
In summary, I fear that, for a slightly more complicated framing of the question, the single-issue becomes simpler and easier to defend, and thus better.
To me, this piece reads as advocacy for multi-issue positioning, despite the initial framing. Both the amount of arguing for one side and the positioning makes me think so.
Your analysis seems to me to be very susceptible to the amount of salience a certain matter may have on both axis. Or said another way. Supposing you’re weighting your chances by the area of your graphics, I think you may have drawn them too close to origin of coordinates, specially the multi-issue one. Suppose that, on your multi-issue graphic, people who care bout L won’t support you unless your position on L is at least 50% of the way to the current extreme. Or else, suppose there is a “top right” quadrant where you can’t really make progress, because if you take your positions on the L issue to the extreme, you’ll lose the support on only of the anti-L, but also of the moderate-on-L. That is, you’ve drawn a coordinates system but at the same time you’ve assumed a binary of positions, only L or not-L. Thus, by amount of area, it may very well be that A is, in reality, bigger than B.
Complicating things further, much of the time there is not a single-issue L you have to care about, but a memeplex of which L is just a part, and by taking a position on L, not only you’re committing yourself to having a position on all of the memeplex, but you’re assumed by default of having such a position, unless you actively communicate against that (risking to antagonize your pro-L supporters). With this in mind, your point of “Adopting a Single-Issue Policy Provides a Principled Way to Stay Out of Other Issues” becomes extremely important.
In summary, I fear that, for a slightly more complicated framing of the question, the single-issue becomes simpler and easier to defend, and thus better.