Right-Wing
The terms "right-wing" and "left-wing" derive, according to Wikipedia (see history of right-wing politics) from the time of the French Revolution, when the main constituencies of the Estates General (a consultative body to the French monarchy) were, primarily, the nobility (termed the "Second Estate") and the commoners (termed the "Third Estate") sat, respectively, to the right of the king or to the left of the king.
Politics is inherently multidimensional, as any serious student of history (who can understand the basic mathematics of Cartesian geometry) knows. These dimensions include:
- Preference for big government or small government
- Preference for great executive power or little executive power
- Preference for representative democracy or direct democracy
- Preference for activist courts (sometimes labeled "legal realism" or "legal instrumentalism") or for "strict constructionism"
- Preference for natural law or for positive law views of human rights
- Preference for capitalism or socialism or communism
- Preference for laissez-faire or central planning/control of the economy
- Preference for state sovereignty (in multi-state government) or for central government domination
- Preference for national government sovereignty or for multi-national control or even world government
- Preference for highly activist foreign policy (as in, for example, Neo-conservatism) or for very limited involvement in world affairs (as in "isolationism" or so-called paleo-conservatism)
- Preference for protection of the unborn or protection of elective abortion
- Preference for "death with dignity" or protection for those who suffer
- Preference for embryonic stem cell research or adult stem cell research
- Preference for government funding of any or all of the above or preference for keeping government out of such political issues
- Preference for removing all religious symbols, speech, etc. from government or government funded functions or acceptance of such in these contexts (or, to put it another way, strict separation of church and state vs. limited connections honored by historical precedent)
And, so on. This is just a small, representative list.
One might note, in passing, that terms like libertarian socialism and national socialism demonstrate that it is possible to have very different ideas about socialism vis a vis the role of government. Ordinarily, libertarianism and Nazism would both, classically, be described as "right-wing", even though they are polar opposites in this dimension of government control.