[iamnothere]

Traditional labels are becoming useless anyway, liberal can mean anything from libertarian free market enjoyer to radical progressive depending on who you are talking to. And I am talking about self-identified labels!

You also have many right wingers (internationally) moving towards things like industrial policy, subsidies, and a populist labor focus (coupled with anti-immigration rhetoric of course). In some cases, even nationalization is under discussion. It’s a wild time to try and label things.

[ronsor]

A better axis is libertarian-authoritarian, because the "left" and the "right" aren't inherently either.

[js8]

My main point was there is not a single axis. Even left and right are not strictly opposites, you can have a society that decides based on some mix of authority and democracy (individual preference). They are only opposites at the extreme, if you insist that every political problem has to be addressed in the particular way.

[js8]

The labels are not useless, they represent certain values and disagreements over how society should be governed. Of course, each of the values has a failure mode, but they are different. The values are:

- Right-wing, conservative, authoritarian - society should be governed by elites, conflict should be resolved by submission to authority

- Left-wing, socialist, democratic - society should be governed by equal peers, conflict should be resolved by democratic consensus

- Liberal, individualist, pro-freedom - the question of societal governance (and the arising conflict) should be avoided if possible by giving each participant their own life independent on others

Of course it is confusing because people cheat and do not always want to state their aims clearly. The values are also not opposites, but independent; they can also be applied per problem. For example, most famously, some communists were both left (they wanted a socialist society without classes) and right (they wanted the transformation under the party authority). But each pair of these has a similar conflict like that, so (aside from the communist spectrum above) you get also capitalist spectrum between right vs liberal, and anarchist spectrum between left vs liberal. In the middle of all 3, things are roughly social-democratic.

[iamnothere]

This is the traditional view, I’m saying it’s becoming useless because ordinary people don’t make these distinctions and the labels have become useless for communication and understanding. All politics is becoming syncretic/heterodox and terms like “liberal” have been stretched to meaninglessness. The labels that political science uses no longer map to reality in a useful way. Maybe we need new labels.

I think this is also why the term “right-wing” has been misapplied to anyone who challenges the status quo, regardless of their other political positions or their nominal political orientation. Things are bad when literal Communists can be labeled “right-wing” because of their position on some issue. (Yes I have seen this happen.)