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You are taking me to say left means Democrat and right means Conservative, and acting like it's a gotcha when they criss cross. I already said all of this was possible.

> “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.

by iamnothere1 days ago|

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That isn’t at all useful. If a party adopts a few platform items that are “left” and some that are “right” (as all parties do), what good is it to point out that X party has adopted Y-wing stance on this issue? The only purpose that this could serve is to give ultras (left or right) ammunition to enforce orthodoxy to these “standard” categories. Meanwhile in the real world, as I mentioned, all parties and candidates adopt mixed platforms, and if you care at all about pragmatism and responding to real conditions, those positions should be evaluated individually on their merits rather than slapping on a left or right label.

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!