First and foremost, there isn’t an objective, true “left” and “right” political perspective from which to view all political issues and questions – it’s a schema, an observed distinction, poorly defined, and therefore best understood by immersion and observation of how the people who use the terms apply them – something which changes with circumstance and time.
People who use the terms often (and without enclosing quotation marks) are likely to subscribe to the belief that there is a liner continuum of political beliefs. They are unlikely to say, as dre2xl does, that the far left loops around and becomes the far right, and are far more likely to perceive far left and far right as polar opposites.
Critical perspectives on “left” and “right” dismantle the terms in many different ways, e.g., -
• As per dre2xl, claiming that the far right and far left are in some sense in the same direction towards something, and therefore away from something else, so therefore the continuum is defined wrong. One example of a specific claim of this nature is made by anarchists: that you would learn more by drawing a continuum from Authoritarian/Coercive to Cooperative/Free, and that when you did so you’d see that “far left” and “far right” are just different superficial ideologies to justify Authoritarian/Coercive. The anarchist would also say that the traditional “left-right” continuum hides the fact that the other end of the pole – Cooperative/Free – is effectively omitted from the political road map of possible perspectives.
• Enlarging on that criticism, the libertarians like to work with a two-dimensional map with an x line and a y line – using one line for Economic Collectivity versus Economic Individualist and the other line for Authoritarian versus Cooperative and locating political perspectives at various points on the resulting plane rather than as points on a single line.
• In one of the current threads for conservatives who are disaffected with the current US Republican party (or at least with George W Bush as its current standard-bearer), there is a very good dissection of “conservative” (aka “right wing”) into several different belief systems that aren’t intrinsically interwoven or derived from each other: economic conservatism (fiscal responsibility, minimal federal programming, minimal tax burden), international-military conservatism (“hawks”, believers in American global hegemony and military dominance), social conservatism (the “religious right”, other advocates of governmental imposition in moral matters), decentralists (states’ rights, individual rights advocates), and various flavors of domestic order-preservers (immigration-limit proponents, law-and-order advocates, people who want stronger rule enforcements). You could do a similar deconstruction of what is considered to be “the left”.
• The point is often made, especially on this board, that the prevailing American sentiment seems to be economically conservative (lower taxes, trim the fat from spending, balance the budget, pursue a sensible fiscal policy) and socially libertarian (“pro-choice” about everything – knock down all official barriers to any behaviors that aren’t criminal or directly harmful, let people do as they please). This sentiment does not map nicely onto the conventional left-right continuum.
• “Left-right” is used as shorthand in the US (as is “liberal-conservative”) for Democtratic Party aligned versus Republican Party aligned. But both parties’ primary reason for existence is to win elections and continue their viability as parties, and they will switch views and belief systems over the course of years as strategy (or, less kindly, they’ll pander their butts off to get into or stay in power). So policies that were considered “of the left” because the Democratic Party was pursuing them may be described a decade later as “of the right” because the Republican Party is now promoting them. And vice versa, of course.
In short, everyone is fuzzy on the meaning of “right wing / left wing” because the terms don’t have definitions aside from “they mean what the person using the terms meant when they used the terms in the context in which they used them”.