I think I’m of the direct opposite opinion to @raggedjackscarlet and @bambamramfan: the people whose metaphysics are weird and politics are normal are the people I trust the most.
And it’s basically because in questions of politics, something like this Will Wilkinson take has to have crossed your mind – or at least your dashboard. But it doesn’t make sense to “abandon ideal theory” in metaphysics. Or well, if it does, in my conception it looks a lot more like “the kind of existentialism where you just try to maximise volume of experience” rather than “be a standard secular materialist”.
So it’s at least possible the people with weird metaphysics and normal politics are worth listening to. The other parts of the quadrant are likely to have the failure modes of “just picked the ideology for the aesthetics” (weird everything) “is a monomaniacal crank” (normal metaphysics weird ideology) “just doesn’t care about any of this” (normal everything)
There are a couple of problems here.
In a society where conventional ground-level political beliefs and conventional high-level sociocultural* beliefs don’t actually line up very well, you would expect a large number of thoughtless careless almost-normies to espouse normal politics and weird ideas. And that’s exactly what we have, and that’s exactly what you get.
* “Metaphysical” is very much the wrong word here, but whatever.
Someone who explicitly asserts that “the rich have far too much wealth and we need massive state-enforced redistribution,” but who reliably goes to the mat for contemporary Democratic corporate-friendly neoliberal policies, is…a totally run-of-the-mill educated elite Democrat. Someone who explicitly asserts that we need a vastly more libertarian system of government, but who reliably goes to the mat for Republican-backed redistribution programs that favor his own social groups, is a standard-issue Republican. You can get to those places by just parroting the things you’re told if the things you’re told are inconsistent.
So if you’re judging claims based on the epistemic virtue of the claimants, which is what it sounds like based on your justifications above, this quadrant is probably worse than anything else.
More importantly:
The word “politics” is playing a double meaning here, and it’s causing problems.
In a very direct-action kind of sense – the sense where “politics” consists of voting for people and writing letters to congresscritters etc. – yes, it’s true, no sensible person’s politics are weird. If you’re stamping your feet and shouting “the only thing that matters is getting to an eco-topic Cyber Monarchy RIGHT NOW!”, then you’re not accomplishing anything useful with your time. Something something art of the possible.
But most political argumentation isn’t actually about that. We don’t have these discussions on the internet because we expect anyone to end up voting for someone different, or because we expect a cabinet official to read our Tumblrs, or something.
A lot of politics is culture. A lot of politics is trying to convince people to accept the idea of a new and different world, to want a new and different world, so that it will be more buildable – and so that it will be more successful when it is built. This plays out on the scale of years, not days, so you can’t easily track the shifts. But they happen. The world of anomic behavioral freedom was built brick by brick over decades.
And those politics really should be weird. If they’re not, you have no imagination. Americans are a lot more prepared to accept things like drug legalization and socialized health care now than they were a while ago, because someone prepared them, and it is good people are thinking far enough ahead to keep preparing people for improvements and paradigm shifts.