I’ve previously looked at Google Trends as an indicator of interest in Left-wing and Right-wing ideas. The problem is it’s hard to know the meaning behind a Google search. Well it’s also hard to know the meaning behind viewing a page on Wikipedia- but at least we have some idea, intellectual interest, whatever the motivation, in a topic. These results can’t tell us whether more or less people like an idea, but they can tell us that more people are thinking about that. With that in mind, here’s the history of interest in various political ideologies since mid 2015 on Wikipedia as measured by page views of prominent expounders and influencers of these ideas. Because the selection of thinkers was not scientific in anyway, these results are, at most, suggestive. However I hope they’re interesting.

Fascism: Fast rising up to 2018, with a recent plateau

I made an index of a variety of Fascist ideologues page views on Wikipedia: Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt, Georges Sorel, Giovanni Gentile, Arthur de Gobineau and Alfred Rosenberg. Interest in these thinkers seems to have been rising for a period, before plateauing in 2018.

Worryingly, the index appears to have roughly doubled for interest in Fascism.

Marxism: Slow rise, with dip in the last four months

An index of Marxist thinkers including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Gramsci shows growth, though much less dramatic than interest in Fascist thinkers and with a dip in the last four months.

Conservatism: Stable baseline, with spikes

The pattern for conservative thinkers (using Edmund Burke, William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol, Barry Goldwater, Norman Podhoretz andRussell Kirk) seems to be closer to stability with spikes:

It may appear to be rising because of the two month long downward tail at the start of the graph and the two month long rising tail at the end, but when the trend is considered as a whole, the apparent end disappears.

Libertarianism: Stable fluctuations around a mean

For Libertarianism I used Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick. The overall picture appears to be stable fluctuation around a mean.

Political implications

How interesting that ideas basically comfortable with the status-quo (whatever the protests of Libertarians) are steady, while radical ideas are on the rise.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre…

Grim historical allusions aside, people are looking for alternatives to the political mainstream. Wagging fingers at people and demanding they return to the sensible mainstream will not work- they furious and require a champion. The left must fill that role, because the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate.

Methodology

For each thinker I took the average level of page views per month across the whole period, then expressed the number of searches in each month as a fraction of that average. I then took the average of these fractions for each category of thinkers for each month. I smoothed the results with a rolling three month median.

You’ll note this procedure effectively weights each thinker within a category the same, regardless of their overall level of interest. You could definitely weight thinkers by overall level of interest, but I fear this might give misleading results, for reasons I won’t get into here.

Finally you might be wondering why I didn’t just use the pages for Fascism, Marxism, Conservatism and Libertarianism. The answer is that I suspect reading about exponents of these ideas reflects a deeper engagement that is more likely to be of real sociological significance. What I really wanted to do was scrape everything in the categories related to each of these, but the ersatz excel program I have on my computer couldn’t deal with spreadsheets this large. If anyone wants to redo this experiment with full category data, go here: https://tools.wmflabs.org/massviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org. If you just want to play around with individual page views go here: https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-20&pages=Cat|Dog