IMO, the terms are so garbled as to be counter-productive, and their use is very dishonest in terms of the descriptions not being very accurate about the members on the right.
They mean almost anything now - even moreso when you have those who say things about how 'they are left or right as it used to be, but not now'.
I think they mask the real views and behaviors of the people who are in the groups, just as "states' rights" masked the racism of adherents in opposing federally-mandated civil rights. For example, people on the right tend - but many are exceptions - to be especially drawn to 'follow authority' in their views. They tend to be members of churches who tell them the right views, to listen to right-wing media who tell them the right views. But you won't see that trait in any right-wing description of their own group.
(Go see the Nebor thread on how he changed his position on universal healthcare because Wal-Mart put out an ad saying it's a good thing for an example).
I think that was especially honest of him, many here likely have the same basic practice but won't admit it.
On the other hand, I have to say that as I've discussed, with the overwhelming number of complicated issues, none of us can be experts on everything, and I endorse and practice the identification of experts to help us reach positions - based on their track record being established at being good at it. So I've identified such experts like Gleen Greenwald, Paul Krugman, and Juan Cole in their respective areas of constitutional issues, economics, and the Middle East, who I can pretty reliably count on for good positions in those areas.
That's quite different than listening to a corporation like Wal-Mart, who has a very different agenda not that legitimate or good for the nation as even his fellow righty genx87 said.
I could try to help you with the definitions, but it's a pretty lengthy topic to even try to say anything accurate.
If I would summarize it in a sentence, I might say that the left tends to prioritize the outcome of policies as serving the universal human needs the best, while the right - well, it gets difficult here, I can't really think of what they're 'for', leaving what they're against, and even there trying to say they're against collectivist or 'big government' activities quickly needs clarification as most of them support the government in some areas such as the military, public schools, roads, police, etc. There are many sub-factions.
Perhaps even the most iconic 'right-wing' figure, the man who wrote 'The conscience of a Conservative', Barry Goldwater was later practically a member of the 'left' he disagreed so strongly with so much of what the so-called 'right' was, and he said he did not want association with them. His final planned book was with John Dean, who was also a 'former right-winger', laying out many of those disagreements.
In *practice*, in my opinion, the right consists largely of the big corporate interests selling, through the propaganda of the think tanks they run, to the public pro-corporate ideology.
That means people get all kinds of pretty words to use - just like 'states' rights' was a pretty phrase used for those who wanted to fight black civil rights but not say so.
And to be fair, it's not as if most of those people knew what they were doing - they didn't *think* they were racist for wanting to 'protect tradition' and such. Just as they don't know what they are doing now, as they buy the marketing hook, line and sinker not understanding the effects of the policies. No one was 'for' the economic crash - they were only for 'modernization of the financial system' and other such pretty words thay just happened to serve the interests of Wall Street at the expense of the nation.
But even senior people who are doing this are not often understanding it - Alan Greenspan was very senior, and caused a lot of it, but was surprised at the result.
So when a lefty says to a righty, "you support this terrible policy that causes harm", the righty doesn't agree, and they disagree - and vice versa.
Remember the Contras in Nicaragua? The Democrats saw the US acting as terrorists, hiring thugs to murder people - police, teachers, mayors, etc. - to force the citizens of Nicaragua to vote how they were told for the interests of big business who wanted to continue to exploit the Nicaraguans as they had under the previous Somoza regime. Ronal Reagan saw the Contras as the "moral equivalent of our founding fathers" fighting for freedom from tyranny.
Both couldn't be right - but that's the sort of disagreeement. There can be 'some truth' on both sides - no doubt there was some bad behavior by the Ortega government the right could point to - but on balance, one side was a lot more correct than the other. But it's very difficult to get them to notice that.
As with Nebor, it practically takes the leaders on one side saying they're wrong. There's probaly *nothing* liberal leaders could say to Nebor to have made him agree with them.
But now I'm crossing from the definitions to the problem of how blinding ideology is - including that of the so-called 'moderate' who can be more blind than left or right.
Not surprisingly, Al Gore invented non-partisanship - or at least, he wrote a book about the problems with our citizens' blinding by ideology I describe, "The Assault on Reason".
Anyone read it? You should. It's an eye-opener on these issues. And then you will likely undertand that as convenient as 'left' and 'right' are for categorizing the public's basic political views, they're more harm than good, really, and what's more important are the values and such.
The misleading and confused nature of the labels can easily be seen by how far one side's definition of the other's label is from the other side's definition.
I constantly see that here as I see some on the right defining the left as loving any government program or spending, loving deficits, hating the rich, loving tyranny, etc.
To be fair, I think may on the left misunderstand many on the right, too.
And so much of the situation is not really 'left' or 'right'. Chris Hedges wrote a book, "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning', that describes the mass psychology in societies that pushes people to unite behind war and support it as much as they might have opposed it before it started. He mentions 'left' oriented friends of his in Argentina who wanted to overthrow corrupt military leaders until the leaders started the Falkland Islands war with England - at which point they supported the government, to Hedges' shock - and his observation that was why they did so, and how many wars can be similarly explained in human history. Indeed, George Orwell introdued 'permanent war' as an idea for maintaining the public's support for the government. Is that a 'left' or a 'right' issue? Neither.
However, in our two-party system, interests tend to latch on to one or the other side when there are two sides - or to try to dominate both parties when it's them versus the public.
So you tend to see 'labor' and plaintiffs' lawyers on the left, and the owners and big businesses they're at odds with on the right. Environemntalists left, polluters right.
Other interests such as Wall Street don't fit the two-sides model, and donate to both parties - note the heavy Goldman-Sachs presence with both Bush and Obama.
Sometimes, the whole 'left' and 'right' breakdown is viewed as designed to split the public in half to gut its power to unite and oppose the real enemis (see Goldman Sachs).
I think that's pushing it too far usually, but is worth understanding the idea because the effect is often just that.