Does this mean China, which leads the world in published scientific papers, is the model democracy? What about the Soviet Union, which definitely assigned a lot of value to objective science?
I feel these axes are mostly orthogonal. The modern ideals of science and democracy arose at about the same time but they are hardly inseparable.
Try to publish in China a scientific paper with real COVID numbers and you will see how democratic the country is.
> ...the Soviet Union, which definitely assigned a lot of value to objective science...
Unless the objective science throw a threw a bad light on the soviet system in which case science was dismissed. Just take a look at the story behind Chernobyl.
You won't find objectivity in a totalitarian system.
I think you simply won't find objectivity in politics.
Democracy doesn’t really have to rely on objective science. In our form today in fact it rather doesn’t in many ways. And in fact calls many things “science” which aren’t at all.
https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paseo_(fusilamiento)
surely the purging of the right wing was not that big in numbers, given that most of it was in the other side of the war.
I think you're correct that with the right interpretation of history, either side could be made to look like the authoritarians.
I don't think he would have liked your replacement of 1 axis with another.