Originally posted by eastyy
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People have tried to categorise political beliefs, because it's convenient to do so. One method often cited is a scale, which goes...
Extreme left - far left - left - centre-left - centrist - centre-right - right - far-right - Extreme right
As a general rule...
Right - Right-side views tend to be about preserving the rights of individuals/groups, and preferring the government to be "smaller", i.e. only dealing with things that are absolutely necessary for society to function. Some typical right-side ideas are things like privatisation (where, for example, instead of having the government supply your electricity, you have private electricity companies) and deregulation (allowing companies to work with fewer rules that stop them, which is meant to let "the market decide").
Left - Left-side views tend to be about benefiting society as a whole. They prefer the government to be "bigger", i.e. dealing with things that could be privatised, but instead running them for the greater good of society as opposed to for-profit. Typical leftist ideas include the NHS (basically, everyone pays a tax for the service and some use it more than others, which is a form of "redistribution of wealth").
However, the scale is not perfect, because obviously, political views are more nuanced than this.
For example, in the US, you have "Libertarians", who are a group who want the US government to be dismantled and only deal with external defence. They want absolute freedom, i.e. "liberty", to do as they please, and in their mind, the people will rule themselves without government intervention. These people are sometimes described as "far-right", in that they're an extreme version of the rightist views.
However, sometimes people describe conservatives (with a small "c", i.e. people who want to conserve society - like those Americans who don't want gay marriage because they feel society is changing too fast) as on the Right... But then some would argue an extremist variant of conservatism is fascism, which doesn't follow, as rightists like "small" government, but in a fascist state, the government controls all aspects of society with an iron grip.
Sometimes people use a 2D scale, where you have left-to-right on the horizontal axis, and conservatism/liberalism on the vertical axis - so it gets more complicated.
For the record, the Conservatives in recent times have trended towards the centre-right, and Labour tend to be centre-left - especially Blair's Labour, which was very much centre-left. Part of the reason our government works in the way it does (and the way the US government was designed, with "the separation of powers") is to make it so that society is generally ruled by centrism, and swings between leftist and rightist views, but it's intentionally difficult for a far-left or far-right viewpoint to seize control. This did not come about by accident.
Still, does that explain the general gist?
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