This thread seems to illustrate my overall point, though, which is that of wrangling over the particulars of political language there is no end. You can expect models like left/right, however defined, to carry some water in the area of analysis. But you can’t really expect them to resolve debates or disagreements for you. Brokering agreements between different groups of people is a much messier task than simply labeling ideologies.

“Right-wing or conservative means classical or whig liberalism. Therefore it stands for religious freedom. People who advocate for restricting the immigration “rights” of Muslims are against religious freedom, therefore they are not right-wing. If they are not right-wing (and certainly not left-wing), then their ideas are outside the bounds of politics, illegitimate, and can be suppressed or ignored.”

Frankly, I’ve heard this argument a great deal, (mostly from Iraq veterans, actually, who tend to be the looniest Islamophiles I’ve ever met, beyond even liberals) and not even from liberals, but from evangelical free-market conservatives.

Secondly, all forms of government on the spectrum are liberal or progressive. All. Bar None. You have the forms favored by Hobbesian Liberalism, Whig Liberalism, Lockean Liberalism, Rousseauan Progressivism, and Marxist Progressivism. 18th Century Absolute Monarchy itself is not a reactionary/traditionalist form of government, but a Hobbesian Enlightened Despotism, containing the same errors at its root as the Whig tradition.

So yes, the Left-Right spectrum is useless, and even pernicious. It serves to place non-liberal ideas outside the conceptual universe of political theory. This is how mainstream conservatives exclude traditional or theo-centric ideas from debate, because they fall outside of the spectrum, and therefore aren’t “real” political ideas.