re: #585 Obdicut

No, they’ve always been used in contradictory and self-defeating ways, even back during the French revolution.

I call your bluff.

They are, in fact, interchangeable.

So saying “Fox News is a right-wing media outlet” makes as much sense as saying “Fox News is a left-wing media outlet”? “When Glenn Beck calls Hitler a left-wing dictator he is incorrect” is as meaningful as saying “When Glenn Beck calls Hitler a right-wing dictator he is correct”? Absurd, and obviously false.

It is both a left and a right-wing position to provide universal healthcare, for example. The left and the right are both in favor of strong government intervention. Both the left and the right are anti-regulation. Both the left and the right are more for individual liberty than government power, and both the left and the right are more for government power than individual liberty.

First of all, listing things up that Left and Right supposedly always have in common (which isn’t even true for your list*, but that’s not important here) is not a way of proving that they are interchangeable terms. Also, your list is focusing on the statism paradigm for political analysis, which is a pretty narrow point of view and distorts the actual meaning of the historical movements more than it illuminates.

* Left and Right wing do not generally both want universal healthcare, I don’t know why you think US quirks matter so much. Whether Left or Right want strong government regulation depends on the historical circumstances, the government already in power and the government realistically obtainable at the time. Left and Right differed and differ a lot in what they want government intervention for, and these policy goals have been and are substantial. How individual liberty is supposed to be achieved is another substantial difference in left and right politics (think stimulus versus bootstraps or empowering the proletariat versus empowering property owners). The different social aims of Left and Right also change throughout history depending on the social circumstances but coherently stay true to their respective idealistic and ideological impetus in regards to social stratification.

One crucial difference, though: The Right is wrong.

My ‘problem’? And no, I don’t think of terms in a nominalistic way, except in the trivial way that I don’t think that Platonic ideals exist.

Yes, your problem, since you seem to go by the assumption that the terms could ever have meaning independent from how people used and use them when you ask me to define what left and right “are”.

You have a bizarre habit of thinking that you understand someone’s thoughts after a very brief exchange.

I don’t know why you think that I do that. You have a bizarre habit of ascribing behaviors to me that I have never exhibited.