On the contrary, I find the left/right spectrum a useful, if rather rough, guide to the landscape og political opinions. But of course, the devil is in the details, and you ignore them at your peril. I consider myself sort of left leaning, but I still think there are a whole lot of misguided ideas on the left, some of them flat out dangerous.

Useful to what end? So that people can easily label an idea such that tribal followers can quickly decide if they are on board? I can't think of great applications, only negative outcomes from such a simplified labeling of people and ideas.

As Karunamon said in a sibling comment, labels facilitate reasoning. Yes, labels have their inherent risks, especially such vague labels as left and right (as applied to politics).

But we live in an age of political parties. It seems we can't do representative democracy without them, for better or worse: And given that, we need a language to talk about parties' politics in broad terms. And then we inevitably come up with various axes such as left/right, authoritarian/liberal, and so forth to describe them. So long as we remember that these are rough categories, I think it is useful and harmless. But of course, once fronts harden and the tribal impulse sets in, that important caveat may be the first to go out the window.

>labels facilitate reasoning

this is the claim, what is your supporting reasoning?

>we need a language to talk about parties' politics in broad terms

Why? Why should we strive to generalize something so inherently complex and impactful as policy.

>once fronts harden and the tribal impulse sets in

I'm not understanding how simplistic labels can contribute to anything other than this outcome.

It's about more than just reasoning. It's about coalitions. There is one fundamental label: every vote has exactly one winner. Whether it's a law or an election, there is a single outcome. The law passes or not; one person wins the election. Either way, they need at least a plurality, if not a majority.

The more dimensions there are, the more you need to make allies to reach that bar. Nobody exactly agrees with you on all things. In order to get them to vote for your things, you need to agree to vote for their things. There's no other way to achieve it.

Policy is complex and impactful, but in the end a decision gets made. The goal is to make a decision that most people can live with. That's the best you can hope for. And you achieve that by assembling a group who support each other. That group is a real thing, regardless of the label you put on it. You're either part of that group or you're not, and you have to live with the outcome.

> Why? Why should we strive to generalize something so inherently complex and impactful as policy.

Because we (most of us, myself included) don't have the capacity to reason about the entire complex mess at once. To some extent, all thinking about the real world must be simpler than reality. This is true even of mathematical models of physical reality, even more so of mental models of politics. Yes, we should strive to improve our understanding, and I struggle with this daily, but if you remove all broad categories from consideration, leaving only the details, I for one will be lost. The usual metaphor is something about forests and trees, I believe.

I definitely agree that it needs to be simplified, but I think there has to be balance and nuance. I would think a simple left vs right is the most simplistic view one can take and thus has swung entirely too far in the direction of simplifying a view.

A spectrum is a numerical label. It has very little descriptive capacity except at two or maybe three points.

Labels facilitate reasoning. Whether that reasoning turns out to be any good is a different question, but good luck speaking about broadly-held political beliefs without using some kind of term to represent it.

How do labels facilitate reasoning in this context? If a politician, for example, says that universal basic income would empower poorer people to become larger contributors to the economy thus having a strong ROI while raising quality of life (all of this is hypothetical I don't care to debate UBI here) - I'm lost on how knowing whether this is a left vs right policy is beneficial to anyone trying to decide if this is useful policy.

You put your finger at an important point there. When applied to a single policy, labels can indeed get in the way of reasoned discussion of the policy. I think the labels are more useful as applied to the entirety of someone's political outlook.

But if we were to apply labels to UBI, I imagine that the left would mostly be in favour, and the right would mostly be against it. Ideally, everyone should consider the notion on its merits. It's just that what way you're leaning, will inevitably influence your thinking to some extent.

Edited to add: To be more concrete, consider two possible effects of UBI: (1) Raising the quality of life of poor people, and (2) Discouraging people from seeking work. I imagine that a right-wing thinker will weigh (2) more heavily than (1), while a left-wing thinker will do the opposite. Each may even say that the other outcome is not even going to happen, or only negligibly so.

I think you're arguing my point for me here! If we don't immediately try to label something with simplistic labels people would be forced to reason about the policy based on merits rather than labels (or just not consider it at all, which I contend is entirely better than making decisions based on tribal labels)

You do have some valid points, but presently we seem to be talking past each other, so I think I'll let the matter drop for now. But thanks for giving me something to mull over.

thanks for the engagement and respect - always feels great to take the opposite position against a respectful individual

Likewise. This is hacker news. We do not want it otherwise here. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

It's completely useless when you move away from the center. The left/right spectrum bastardizes politics to only one dimension and every extreme is trying to redefine what it means, ie. "pick whichever side sounds better to you and then redefine it as the thing you care most about". And you end up with basically good/bad spectrum. Like libertarians, socialists and nationalists have completely different definitions just to exclude from it everyone else.

It seems people have difficulty falling in love with ideas, but they do fall in love with sports and personality cults!

To any thinking person the left-vs-right paradigm is beyond stupid, but yet, it keeps persisting, even worldwide.

Actually, the parties are themselves to blame, as wrong-thinkers gets weeded out or re-educated.

It means that anyone who has ideas that resemble the tenets of communism, socialism, marxism, etc. don't have a political party that pushes for these ideas. Both the leader of the Democratic party (Biden at the moment) and the leader of the Republican party (still Trump) lash out at socialism every chance they get. Even Bernie Sanders, who both sides of the aisle would label a "socialist", is pushing hard for a $15 minimum wage, something socialists would call a cop-op compromise with capitalists. We don't want a minimum wage dictated by the federal government, we want democracy in the workplace so we can vote on our own wage. Even AOC, who the right believe is socialism incarnate, pushes her "Green New Deal" which seems to be a response to climate change that does its best to accommodate capitalists.