.
Right wing points to the person being politically active and supporting a capitalist economic system agenda
Left wing points to the person being politically active and supporting a communist or socialist economic system agenda.
Being conservative is more pointing to a set of social values about CULTURE A conservative is not necessarily Right wing in politics.. Likewise a Liberal might not care about the economic / political system but will have liberal social /cultural values..
It's like the weather terms partly cloudy and partly sunny. They both mean the same thing.
Hello Rosie:
You're suggesting that there ARE thoughtful people in the middle. I say, however, that the people in the middle are uninformed. The more divided we get, the less middle there is. Oh, there WAS some middle of the road Republicans, but right wingers called them RINOS and replaced them with TRUE BELIEVERS. Now, they're ALL hard right.
The Democrats, on the other hand, nominated a center left neocon who's anything BUT left wing.
excon
Whatta mess! Thank you for your reply excon. I can't even almost imagine how this nightmare will end. Can you? :(
The difference is whatever the speaker/writer of those words intends at the time he or she speaks or writes them. These things are not fixed in terms of ideology and certainly not over time.
There was a time when a "conservative" President uttered these words in a letter:
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
Sixty years later, an "Ultra-Liberal Commie Muslim America-hater" President proposed to do just that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Commission_on_Fiscal_Respons...
(Note: I recognize it's possible President Obama enpaneled the Catfood Commission as a way to avoid addressing the issue directly. But for a so-called "liberal" to say "Well, let's consider it" instead of "Hell, no!" illustrates a definite "rightward" shift in Democratic political thinking)
The examples are legion.
The terms are meaningless (in the same way "Barack Obama is a Muslim" is meaningless) unless one defines them, and definitions are fluid.
If I could define them I wouldn't ask you to do so OS. Mahalo for your reply.
Thank you for your reply AAPAD.
Thank you for your reply Polk. A cup half empty or a cup half full. :)
