Left vs Right/Conservative vs Progressive

I’ve been increasingly feeling that the terms left and right have become overused and watered down in recent years, as well as becoming a “camp” you place yourself in rather than a representation of your overall viewpoint. They’re kind of meaningless terms - left of what? Right of what? As we’ve seen, the center shifts, and not necessarily at the same speed or in the same direction on all subjects. Left and right meant different things even just five years ago, before the pandemic. And that can obscure the actual stance that’s being taken on various issues.

Conservative vs progressive are, I think, better summations of the positions that left and right has taken to represent. Instead of vaguely referring to some spectrum of political alignment, progressive and conservative places themselves against the mainstream, against the present, against current norms.

Conservatives seek to strengthen and reinforce the current and past ideals of society, while progressives seek to move past them or change them to represent more modern ideas. Conservatives implement structures that follow the status quo without challenging it.

Labour has become very economically conservative in the sense that while they are pushing for left wing measures and some progressive change, they are unwilling to make meaningful change away from the economic neoliberal income-tax heavy norms that they have established and enforced. This is in contrast to TOP, who were a “center” party but with economically progressive ideas.

I keep getting in conflict here for describing NZFirst as centrist, and to be fair I think the better term is populist. But they are still centrist in that they appeal to the traditional left and traditional right on different issues at different times — protection of our housing market and our benefit age being the two biggest issues that give him grace with us lefties. But in terms of their positioning on current and past norms, Winston is firmly conservative, seeking to sustain the status quo of the kiwi house owner (but limited to the wealthy because he’s not that personally interested in making ownership accessible beyond lip service/anti immigration stuff), enforce current race norms (Maori shouldn’t get this “extra” stuff they’re asking for ie we shouldn’t change the system to help them) and to bring back gender norms from about 20 years ago. At least. And their economic and defence policy is firmly in favour of our traditional allies.

They’re also selling us out to corporations and overseas interests which can seem kinda economically progressive on the surface maybe — but really they just want to keep the good old days of oil and coal mining, without all this pesky environmental worry that should really be the burden of future generations to worry about the fallout of, and to keep cigarettes in people’s hands. Which is pretty anti-progress to me.