One of my favorite bits of Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky is the use of base-10 time: ksec, Msec, etc. There is a nice time log scale with Earth time to base-10 time conversions.
[0] "How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury." --Tom Duff
But it's reallly strange to try to map the Emergent political structure onto any modern political axis. It's not "liberal progressive" or "traditional conservative" or "libertarian". Or any other popular political ideology. It's certainly authoritarian, but uniquely so. It's almost a dystopia run by project managers and exploiting specialists.
Also a fun bit: The traders in the book count base their epoch on the first moon landing, but if you pay attention, the lowest levels of software count from a different epoch.
The Emergents are what they are, because they are, at the most fundamental level, busybodies who want to control others. Sometime in their own history, they found an excuse (the Emergency) to do that, and they never stopped doing it even after the crisis was over. In this way they map to most other authoritarian regimes in reality, but especially to the leftist authoritarian regimes. They hate "peddlers" after all, who sell things to others at fair prices and of their own free will. Not unlike the mutterings you see all over social media concerning capitalism.
Definitely give the book a read! One of my favorites.