That's not a subjective opinion I made, that is just a textbook definition of what we consider authoritative right. Left and right mean things, and they don't mean what traditionally progressive or conservative parties happen to be doing at that time.
I don’t care what textbook you are looking at, I’m looking at (or maybe writing) a different one. Left and right do not actually “mean things” if you intend for “meaning” to be universally or even widely agreed upon. I suppose for you “meaning” may only be relevant if a certain group or class agrees upon the meaning, but the rest of us will continue to say and believe what we want!
> but the rest of us will continue to say and believe what we want
Who is we? These definitions are mostly settled, and where they aren't, there are fuzzy differences, not huge gaps of disagreement. It's a shared language of understanding where people lie on a quadrant of politics. It's socially useful to have that language when posing political theory. Again, this does not mean political parties are permanently stuck to their quadrant. What do you think Republicans mean when they call themselves right wing? Nothing?
> I suppose for you “meaning” may only be relevant if a certain group or class agrees upon the meaning
What? You seem to be stuck on an idea that I am making some kind of partisan statement by saying a certain policy is left or right wing. That is not a value statement on whether it's good or bad. I don't know why you are so heated about this.
“Right-wing” politicians are arguing for nationalization in some cases and wielding industrial policy like they’re FDR. We may see price controls and even capital controls before long. The oil market interventions alone would make Stalin blush. Meanwhile they are jumping on regulation in other places, such as AI “safety”, and have floated hate speech bans (to combat antisemitism).
“Left-wing” pols (admittedly in the face of immense hate from their base) are coming out for free market solutions gently guided by the government and deregulation so we can build faster. Outside the US, you have bizarro world Labour policies in the UK (they seem to be aiming to absorb the Tories), China’s roaring Communist economy that’s the global hotbed of economic activity, etc.
The traditional categories still seem to hold in Latin America, for some reason. But that’s it.
What exactly does the left-right distraction provide except for an easily abused method for enforcing a (tenuous, completely malleable) group orthodoxy? These days it seems like people just use it as shorthand for “enemy”. Any heterodox position is automatically of the other wing, preventing adaptation to real-world circumstances. Some positions (like a land value tax) are somehow both left and right wing depending on who you ask. It’s infuriating.
> “Right-wing” politicians are arguing for nationalization in some cases and wielding industrial policy like they’re FDR
Nationalization is a policy lying on the left. State ownership of industry is the textbook left pole
> The oil market interventions alone would make Stalin blush
Price controls on markets are authoritarian left
> are coming out for free market solutions gently guided by the government and deregulation so we can build faster
Economic right, mildly libertarian
> What exactly does the left-right distraction provide except for an easily abused method for enforcing a (tenuous, completely malleable) group orthodoxy?
No, they provide categorization to resist group orthodoxy. People are going to categorize, that is human nature. Without these, the only way to categorize a policy is what the parties happen to be doing at the time. That causes a group orthodoxy. There are people describing themselves as "more left" or "more right" as a shorthand to reject group orthodoxy. There are people describing a policy as left or right, regardless of which party is doing it. You're not sparing anything by resisting policy categorization, you are making things less specific and more likely to default to broad buckets.
That doesn't mean you can't talk about the policies in specifics, it means they lie on a very flexible and descriptive map.
This tendency to force everything into a black or white frame is what gives us politicians who run without platforms, on party label alone, and who then adopt unpopular or harmful positions when in office.
At some point we decided that platforms don’t matter, and if platforms exist, they must be orthodox. This is a problem!