How we write
Know Your Isms is a reference, not a debate. Every page follows the same explicit rules, listed here in full, so you can check our work rather than take our word for it.
No named reviewer, on purpose
This site currently has no named editor or retained reviewer. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight. Instead of asking you to trust a byline, we've written down the actual rules every page has to pass, so the discipline itself, not a credential, is what you're relying on. Check any page against the rules below.
The own-tenets test
Every system is described in terms its own adherents would recognize as fair, drawn from its own primary texts and academic reference, never from its critics' framing. If a committed adherent would call a description a caricature, it fails and gets rewritten.
Definitions and criticism, kept separate
Every page splits what a system holds from what critics say about it. Nothing evaluative appears in the definitional section, not a hedge, not an adjective.
Criticism goes both directions
Any page criticizing one system criticizes its comparison the same way, attributed to named schools of thought, with the standard response from within that tradition included. On comparison pages, both sides get equal structural treatment, checked by word count.
Every claim is sourced, tier by tier
We cite primary texts first, academic reference second, institutional reference third, and nothing after that. Op-eds, think-tank advocacy, and partisan media of any kind are excluded entirely.
No current events
No living politician is characterized evaluatively. No electoral framing. Historical examples only, and only once there's broad scholarly agreement on how to classify them.
Corrections are public
When we get something substantive wrong, it's fixed and logged.
Read the corrections log →