The Ideological Continuum: Left and Right are an Illusion
Round and Round We Go!
Ideology has inertia. When a person is steeped in a set of beliefs that form an ideology, they tend to stick to that ideology. But if their ideology begins shifting, it tends to continue to shift until some outside influence stabilizes it again.
We are taught to think of our ideologies as being Left or Right. The definitions for these things are not really helpful in determining the actual meaning of a person’s ideology. We can find the well-accepted definitions in Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations.
Typically, the relationship of Left-to-Right ideologies is expressed as a spectrum: Communism -> Socialism -> Liberalism -> Conservatism -> Fascism.
Notice that this doesn’t really account for tolerance of religious systems and is not clear about the delineation of state-run economies and…
