Sad that you got down-voted, because you're 100% correct on this point. "Left wing" and "right wing" are totally meaningless terms in modern times. Neither describes any consistent, principled ideology, but rather they each just refer to a cribbed together hodgepodge of different ideas, loosely related at best, and contradictory at worst.
Mostly "left wing" and "right wing" exist now just to serve as pejoratives to refer to people in "the other camp" relative to whichever label an individual has chosen to identify with.
A simple one-dimensional model like "left <-> right" cannot adequately represent the varieties of political thought in existence.
I don't think they are completely meaningless: Wikipedia manages to give a definition. However, I think they are often misused, misunderstood, and not very useful in practice.
OK, to be fair, maybe I should have said "almost totally meaningless". But I still contend that they are terms that convey very little intrinsic meaning, and have become pejoratives more than anything else.
I agree 100%. Political terms of today only serve a purpose of saying "them, not me", often with disrespectful connotation.
I believe the same with the terms 'liberal' and 'conservative', and I've been interested in writing a blog to explain myself. Essentially, everyone is both liberal and conservative. Every day we make decisions that stereotypically fit both of these labels, yet we entirely ignore it.
If a "conservative" is someone who conserves product and tradition and resists change, then wouldn't a a hippy protecting a forest from bulldozing be a conservative? Portland OR is going through growing pains right now because the locals (majority self proclaim as 'liberals') are being kicked out due to high rent. Wouldn't resisting this change be a conservative move?
If an overweight 'conservative' buys a pallet of soda because Walmart has a bulk sale, are they liberal because they're buying a lot, or conservative because they're getting a slight discount thus saving money? If neither political parties (D/R) want to actually reduce our debt, aren't they both 'liberal'?
[Edit: and if defining a person as (l/c) simply means they live a life that's more than half one or the other, then that will beg the question: how do you even begin to quantify this crap? Simply put... You can't. Use better words.]
My point is that these terms don't make as much sense as we like to think they do. We need to start using better and more descriptive terms to describe our politics.
