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Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

Yes, describing political groups is literally "labelling". The idea that the UK's anti-immigrant far right aren't actually far right is just laughable.

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Definitions must be consistent with each other. Conventionally, “right” means more capitalist and “left” means more socialist. To be consistent with that existing definition, the “far right” would be the folks trying to privatize social security, eliminate banking regulations, eliminate barriers to free trade, etc. It would refer to libertarians, not anti-immigration populists.

> To be consistent with that existing definition, the “far right” would be the folks trying to privatize social security, eliminate banking regulations, eliminate barriers to free trade,

Yes, the far right parties in the UK are trying to do most of that (1) as well as inciting race riots against immigrants. I don't think that you have a point here.

1) not so much on the free trade, they talk a good fight on potential global trade deals, but their record is not so great - spurning actual EU free trade, going along with the USA's attempted trade wars.

On that last point, the USA now is a counterexample to your criteria.

The U.S. isn’t a counter example, it proves my point. People call the Trump GOP “far right.” But Trump abandoned the Bush GOP’s project of privatizing social security and promised not to touch Medicare. And Trump eliminated taxation of social security benefits. It hasn’t tried to repeal Obama’s additional regulation of banks. And it has destroyed the Reagan/Bush free trade framework. In all of those areas, the Trump GOP is to the left of the Bush/Reagan GOP.

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left vs right was never a good framework. there are traditional fascists who believe in a state controlled economy and nazi style race laws. libertarians who want gay rights and no social security. socialists can be progressive or conservative on issues like abortion. if you want to collapse it all into one axis you lose all the differences.

Of course, collapsing to one axis can only be reductive. Reducing means losing information, simplifications simplify; and the question is if you are losing a meaningful signal, or losing mostly noise.

It is true that "there are ... libertarians who want gay rights and no social security" - they do exist. But are they a significant percentage of the voters, compared to the more regular right wing (e.g. UK Reform / Restore) who get double-digit percentages of the vote? No, they are not.

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