Big caveat — just a few years after I originally posted this essay, dramatic shifts in the structure of the political right in the US left many of its references to some particulars outdated. As things have progressed, it has only made the structure of the right even harder to describe on these terms. I modified the diagram in 2025 to start to account for that, but at that point the structure of the right remains in motion and confusing.
The intention of this post
As someone with a weakness for political discussion, I am often frustrated by people who have a very confused vocabulary for talking about the range of political views from left to right. Conservatives who referred to Barack Obama as a “radical leftist” inspired me to write up this essay, but such sloppy rhetoric is nearly as common coming from liberals, and perhaps even more common among eccentrics who like to style themselves as off the conventional spectrum altogether.
Language for describing the political spectrum is necessarily a bit mushy. The spectrum itself is a blunt tool for organizing categories of political thought: one dimension is of course insufficient to describe the universe of possible political stances. But the left-right axis has its uses — I consider it the best simple model available, in practice better than other attempts like the political compass — and of course it turns up in discussions all of the time, so if we are to use it we need as much clarity in it as we can muster.
When I want to talk about one whole side of the spectrum I will usually say “the broad left” or “broad right”. But that is not enough.
So I have tried to cultivate as much rigor and consistency as I can in the language I use in talking about where in the range one might place the philosophy which an individual or a movement expresses. What marks the difference between moderates and radicals? Between the hard right and the extreme right? Between liberals and leftists? These distinctions have an inherent slipperiness, of course. But reading people from a range of viewpoints whom I regard as sophisticated, I find good enough consensus that I can identify a taxonomy which is clear enough to use.
Though this essay references specific examples from American politics, I think this language can serve in other contexts as well.
Left vs right?
Fully addressing the defining distinction of the spectrum is itself a subtle and contentious subject which many people have examined at length. It admits no simple resolution into a clear right answer. I find the diagram’s one-word (over) simplifications that the broad left is egalitarian while the broad right is heirarchical clarifying, but reasonable people may differ.
I keep a collection of links to my favorite pieces on this hard question, and have one of my own. I will not attempt to recapitulate all of that here … though if you believe the canard that the key distinction is How Much Government one favors, I recommend following those links and doing some homework.
For the purposes of this essay, I intend to frame the vocabulary of positions along the axis such that they will still be useful if one rejects my Egalitarian vs Heirarchical thesis entirely. It suffices that we know the left and right when we see them.
Points on the spectrum
The mainstream
These positions care about working for the policy they want
within existing social & political institutions; in the US at a grand scale, that means capitalism and
liberal democracy delivered through the Constitutional order.
Moderate
“we need to work together with the other side”
Moderates are committed to one side or the other, but not perfectly consistently, such that they support some policies from the other side. In principle, politicians tend to be moderates (though back when I wrote this, the Republican Party had driven a lot of their moderates out of Congress, and in 2025 moderates are almost completely absent from the Republican establishment). A Dem who opposes gun control or a Republican who opposes the war on drugs may be described as a “moderate”. People further to the right like to describe moderate conservatives as RINOs (“Republicans in name only”), while Democrats call their moderates “Blue Dog Democrats”. I sometimes use “centrist” with the scare quotes in place to reference how folks further from the center tend to refer to these folks. Occasionally one used to hear “liberal Republican” and “conservative Democrat”, to refer to people’s place on the mini-spectrum within the party, but that usage has become vanishingly rare.
Wing
“we need big policy victories”
The Wing, as in “the left wing of the Democratic Party”, are fully committed to the philosophy of their axis and believe in focusing their political energies entirely within existing institutions. They want to win a decisive advantage in mainstream politics so that government can implement their policies without needing to compromise significantly with the other side.
On the right from the 1980s through the mid-2010s, these folks were generally movement conservatives; these days, I tend to refer to them as “non-MAGA conservatives”.
On the left, these folks are generally just called “liberals”. To distinguish “liberal” in this sense from liberal-as-in-liberal-democracy, I sometimes refer to the position on the axis as “libs” and the deeper ideology as “libdem”. (Much more on that below.)
Hard
“we need both policy change and institutional change”
The Hard left and right believe in trying to win policy victories through participation in conventional political institutions (like elections, government, and the two major parties) but also believe in the importance of working to change those institutions themselves if their philosophy is to be fully enacted.
The hard left are generally called “progressives”; they may want a Constitutional Amendment to counter the Citizens United decision on free speech and corporate campaign donations, or to dismantle most of the military-industrial complex.
Someone on the hard right may want a dramatic re-interpretation of the First Amendment, or even a new Constitutional Amendment, to recognize that the United States is a Christian nation. There is not a ready term of art for talking about the hard right generally. When I first wrote this post, the hard right included most of the “Tea Party” (remember them?), the “religious right”, some “libertarians” (more on them below), and many movement conservatives. These days, the MAGA movement includes people ranging from Hard to Extreme; I like to distinguish “soft” from “hard” MAGAs to account for that range (more on that below) so often I refer to people & positions on the hard right as “soft MAGA”.
“Far”
When people talk about the “far” left & right, they are talking about movements & ideologies which disdain participation in existing major “mainstream” social & political institutions — including electoral politics — because they see the range of political possibilities within them as meaningless in comparison to the need to change those institutions. Critics of the “far” left & right fault them for embracing of political violence and
authoritarianism — and yes, that becomes more
common at the “far” ends — but they are neither definitional nor universal. The defining thing is the focus on stuctural change.
Radical
“only institutional change matters”
“Radical” literally means “striking at the root”.
The radical left are generally called “leftists” or “The Left”. They want to dismantle capitalism. (More on the distinction from “libs” below.)
The radical right are commonly referred to as “reactionaries” or “the Right” (from which we get the “Alt Right”, remember them?) though to be fussy “reactionary” refers to a particular type of far right movement. The radical right are fundamentally skeptical of democracy, though in the US they may not say so overtly. Radical right projects include structural changes like dissolving seperation of Church & State, or dismantling the Federal government’s power over the States to dramatically strengthen the independence of county government. Radical right movements include Christian Dominionists, “Patriots”, and MAGA.
Extreme
“only revolutionary change matters”
Extremists have eccentric philosophies, directed not just to altering political institutions but to revolutionary change throughout society. There is a wide range of different extremisms, as there are a wide range of visions of the post-revolutionary world. Though “horseshoe theory” claiming that the extreme left and right ultimately converge is more misleading than helpful, departure from ordinary political discourse can make it hard to place these folks on the left-right axis at first glance.
Left extremism includes Maoism, anarchism, pacificism, lesbian seperatism, and much more.
Right extremism of course includes fascism, but “fascism” is not just synonymous with right extremism — there are many very different movements including monarchism (really), neoreaction, green primitivism, and much more.
Neighbors
One reason why I like my taxonomy and its breakpoints is how it reveals a pattern in people’s views of other positions. Across the spectrum, people read their neighbors in strikingly similar ways:
People take the folks directly next to them as allies whom they can work with because they they have their hearts (mostly) in the right place, while considering those allies compromised by confused priorities and misunderstandings of how the world works.
People have an especially passionate disgust at the positions two notches away from them, seeing those people as rivals whose agenda presents special dangers greater than those presented by people at positions further away.
hard | wing | moderate | moderate | wing
Moderates think their own Wing has good ideas, but consider that Wing naïve about how one gets governance done because of the Wing’s refusal to reach across the aisle to the Moderates on the other side.
Moderates look at their Moderate counterparts on the other side as wrongheaded about their policy preferences but respect them as reasonable people one can work with …
… unlike the Wing one step further to the other side, whom they hate for making things harder for those reasonable Moderate counterparts.
Moderates consider their own Hards narrowminded ideologues who must be kept away from any power, lest they break every effective institution.
radical | hard | wing | moderate | moderate
The Wing admire their Hards’ ideas and idealism, but see themselves as smarter than those Hards, who waste too much energy on impossible dreams.
The Wing returns the friendly frustration of their neighboring Moderates, whom they see as allies vulnerable to manipulation by the supposed Moderates on the opposite side.
Thus the Wing regards the Moderates of the other side as both tactially and morally dangerous for their ability to seduce Moderates of their own side with feigned “reasonableness”. People further out on the opposing side “are at least honest” in contrast to the disingenuous of the opposing Moderates.
To the Wing, heaven forbid the Radicals on their side get their hands on power; the Radicals claim to stand for the same things but their dangerous plans would destroy the necessary foundations of society.
extreme | radical | hard | wing | moderate
Hards share most of their Radicals’ long-term goals, but they do not want to abandon the fights within existing institutions to people who do not share those ideals, so they see their role as a bridge between the Radicals’ aims and their allies in the Wing.
Hards hope to ignite the ideals of their side’s Wing as a way to drive the Wing to wring as much as they can out of existing institutions.
Hards hate their side’s Extremists as scary lunatics almost indistinguishable from the Extremists of the other side, discrediting their entire side and threatening to seduce the Radicals they admire.
Hards suspect that their side’s Moderates do not really believe in anything because of how often they prioritize appeasing the Moderates on the other side over supporting their Wing.
extreme | extreme | radical | hard | wing
Radicals have a loving pity for both of their neighbors, whom they see as sharing their dreams. They expect the Hards to eventually end up heartbroken after wasting their energies on hopeless institutions, while they read most Extremists on their side as tragic products of heartbreak, their legitimate moral urgency boiling over into an understandable but counterproductive zealotry.
Radicals feel contempt for the Wing on their side; to Radicals, their Wing paradoxically supports the very institutions which create the problems which they claim to want to fix.
I am wary of supporting the Horseshoe Theory that the extreme left & right wrap around to be “the same” — they do not — but something like it is useful in this narrow context. When Radicals look at the Extremists on the other side they are terrified to see the passion of their side’s Extremists — often aroused by similar wrongs — dedicated to morally perverse ideals.
radical | extreme | extreme | radical | hard
Extremists return the feelings of their neighboring Radicals on their side: they see folks who want the right things, so come the Revolution they expect their Radicals to step up belatedly, after having wasted their time for so long with refusal to Do What’s Necessary.
Extremists also return their Hards’ hatred: to them their Hards sap the energy of people who see The Problem, softening the way people talk about it, making people complacent with the world which must be overthrown.
Extremists have ambivalence about the Extremists of the other side, whom they see as sharing their understanding of the profundity of change the world needs, but half-right and half-wrong in their reading of The Problem. To an Extremist, opposing Extremists have terrible ideas about the world they want to build after The Revolution — but they will fight for The Revolution and thus can serve as allies, either to be flipped to join their side … or at least employed as useful idiots on key issues until the current order has been overthrown, at which point they must be prevented from holding any power.
Extremists see the Radicals on the other side as the worst monsters of all, determined to build the world of their nightmares. This looks to Extremists like a revealation of the horrifying impulses which animate the entire other side, suggesting that the Radicals on the other side must be the secret masters of the world they seek to fix through revolutionary change.
More terms on the right
Revisting this post in early 2025, the taxonomy of positions on the right is very hard to pin down, as we are in a moment of radical reälignment of our political dynamics, with churn on the right driving that change.
I sometimes still reference “movement conservatism”, a term of art for the dominant ideology of the Republican Party from 1980-2015: a marriage of quasi-libertarian economic policy (low regulation & taxation), military “strength”, and “social conservatism” courting white Evangelicals. Movement conservatism ranged between right-wing and hard right, with its most ambitious manifestations pursuing big institutional change in dismantling the policy order emergent from the New Deal and Civil Rights Era. Donald Trump’s successful challenge to that agenda has almost entirely broken the power of this strain of conservatism. The rise of MAGA demonstrates how few movement conservatives were true believers. But a large handful of them have become Never Trump Conservatives.
Fascism is not simply synonymous with authoritarianism or the far right; it is a distinctive extreme right ideology.
I think scholar David Griffin provides the most useful single thesis, summarizing fascism as “palingenetic ultranationalism”: a dream of violent, transformative national rebirth. He and other scholars find a host of characteristics common among fascist movements, but his description of that dream as the “core” of fascism helps see through confusion created by the ways in which fascist movements vary dramatically.
I have my own distillation of Griffin’s and others’ theories, describing fascism as a myth combined with a method ⋯
Neoreaction is a different extreme right authoritarian idology significant in this moment: “rationalist” in contrast to fascism’s irrationalism, enthusiastic about the fragmentation of the Westphalian order in contrast to fascism’s reification of the Westphalian order with “nationalism”.
In the course of a post about Trump voters, I name a taxonomy useful here:
Though with precious few exceptions MAGAs refuse to recognize themselves as fascists, that is what both types are. Fascists are driven by bigotry, drawn to the absurdities of fascist rhetoric which free them not just from moral responsibility but from having to think rationally at all.
Hard MAGAs have bloodlust. They do in fact dream of gunning down millions of people they hate et cetera. They know Haitian immigrants are not eating pet cats, but since Those People are inhuman monsters, they love the lie for getting at the “essential truth” that the suffering & death of Those People is a positive good in itself.
Soft MAGAs have doublethink. Horseshit to rationalize horrors — as good, as necessary, or as not actually horrible — works better the more preposterous it is because it distracts from facing the centrality of their bigotry. They “believe” that Haitian immigrants eating pet cats must be “true”: it “makes sense”, it justifies the fantasy they have of Getting Rid Of Those People. They don’t think about what that will require, and when the bloodshed does appear before them, these kinds of “beliefs” will justify their schadenfreude at the suffering & death.
Non-MAGA Trump voters do not think like fascists. They are bigots but it is not their central motivation in the same way. They prefer to look away from their own bigotry; the shame they feel about it compels them to deny they have it rather than to correct it as they should. They dislike the absurdities of MAGA, but see aligning with MAGA as “necessary” in the face of the Greater Evil of the nightmarish “radical left” Democratic Party. They have selected an information bubble which protects them from hearing the story about Haitian immigrants eating cats; Trump’s nonsense is irrelevant, they just have a thirdhand impression that he cares about the Important Problems facing Real Americans. If MAGA fascism guns down millions of people, they will deny that they knew and it will be half-true because they go out of their way to not know.
More terms on the left
I added this long-overdue section in early 2025, though I used these terms for many years before that point.
I often use “lefties” and “the broad left” to mean the entire left side of the range.
Usage of “progressives” out there gets slippery, but I think one can get close enough to what most people mean if one understands it as a term for the hard left in the US — folks interested in both institutional change and policy change within existing instutions. This makes progressives the leftmost edge of the Democratic Party coalition. One can count Senator Elizabeth Warren among elected “progressives”, together with the clear examples of Sanders & AOC. Chris Hayes & Jamelle Bouie stand among the few progressive voices in mainstream political media; there is also a robust ecosystem of explicitly progressive political commentary, including old “netroots” internet commentators like Digby who influenced this blog.
Though progressives have more high positions in elected office and political media in 2025 than when I first created this post in 2014, they still hold very little institutional power. IMHO, this fails to represent the progressive bloc among US voters as strongly as they deserve … but progressive voters fall far short of the major voting bloc which they tend to imagine they have.
“Leftists” and “the Left” mean people focused on institutional change, particularly in ending the capitalist order. This is not perfectly distinct from progressives; some leftists dismiss electoral politics but others do engage with it. Leftists are noisy on the internet but their numbers are small in the US, and they hold practically zero institutional power in the US. I have a lot more on the distinction between “liberals” and “leftists” below.
I use “the Dem establishment” to mean the constellation of players shaping the Democratic Party: that includes not just folks in the Party organzation but also allied organizations, some voices in political commentary, major financial backers, and others. Many folks exaggerate the coherence of the Dem establishment — progressives & leftists often imagine that the DNC hold far more leverage than they do — but the constellation is coherent enough and powerful enough to be worth referencing. The Dem establishment almost entirely excludes progressives.
It is sometimes useful to use “neolib Dems” to describe the more centrist wing of the Dem coalition. One must tread carefully with that, since progressives & leftists too often villify neoliberalism on oversimplified terms. But neoliberalism is a real thing and it has dominated both the Republican Party from 1981-2016 and the Democratic Party from 1992-2020.
Liberals vs leftists
Even people on the broad left often get confused about the distinction between liberals and The Left.
Partly this reflects how both “left” and “liberal” are a multivalent terms. Even people seriously engaged in politics tend to get confused, tangling up the different layers of meanings, with commentators in both camps and on the broad right tending to muddy these waters.
As I say above, there is a deep layer of political philosophy which aspires to an egalitarian society, where we can meaningfully include everyone from moderate Democrats to Maoists in a “broad left”.
At a comparably deep level, we can understand “liberalism” as a differently broad constellation of social & political ideas — the stuff which distinguishes most real-world democratic societies from simple tyranny-of-the-majority direct democracy: universal rights, rule of law, structural limitations on government power, and so forth — a governance ideology, a vision of norms & institutions: how government (and to a degree society) should operate, how we set policies. We reference liberalism in that sense in calling movement conservatism, exemplified by Reagan, “neoliberal”. Some libertarians invoke liberalism in this sense by calling themselves “‘classical’ liberals”. We invoke liberalism in this sense which we call some leftist movements like Maoism “illiberal”. I sometimes refer to this deep liberalism-as-in-Isaiah-Berlin-and-liberal-democracy as “libdem” for brevity and clarity; I argue that many strains of socialism can and even should understand themselves as liberal in that sense.
When we contrast “liberals” with “the Left”, we are talking about “liberal” and “left” in narrower senses, as not governance ideologies but policy positions, programs of particular things they want government to do: projects to undertake, rules to enforce, an approach to the economy, and so forth. We can locate these well enough on the left-right spectrum. “Liberals” — as in neither-conservatives-nor-leftists — sit closer to center, mainly at the the location I refer to as the wing while “leftists” stand further out, mainly at the location I refer to as radical. For convenience I sometimes use the leftist convention of refering to liberals in this sense as “libs”.
That said, to truly understand the split between libs and leftists, we do need to think about another question more profound than just policy. Political positions ranging from hard left to hard right — including liberals in this sense we are talking about but also many others — do not directly challenge fundamental institutions, which includes both libdem as a governance ideology and capitalism as an economic ideology.
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Capitalism is when capital (the factories, land, patents, and so forth which make it possible to create the goods & services which people want & need) is privately held. These means of production are owned by particular people, either directly or through indirect institutions like a stock market.
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Socialism is when capital is publicly controlled. There are a wide range of possible arrangements for public control: it can mean government control, but could also mean any number of alternatives, like corporations where each worker owns an equal share and the workers choose their own corporate leadership in elections.
Looking at examples in the world, one cannot draw a bright line separating capitalist from socialist societies. A “socialist” country may have small privately-owned cottage industries like corner stores. A “capitalist” country may have utilities like electric power plants owned by the state. Though socialism rejects markets in capital — people cannot buy or sell factories — it may or may not embrace markets for goods & services in general, or for specific things in particular. A socialist might advocate corner store shopkeepers choosing their own stock and setting their own prices in a market … while opposing a market for housing, calling for the state to act as landlord for everyone without charging rents.
All this gives us the equipment to understand contrasting leftists with libs without getting tangled up in other meanings of “liberal”.
Libs embrace both libdem & capitalism as a given, and advocate policy which they believe will deliver greater equity under both. They frame these policy objectives in libdem terms: protecting rights, electing representatives who will pass legislation enforced by the state, building democratically-accountable institutions which tax & regulate privately-held corporations, and so forth. They support policies of universal social insurance like retirement pensions or healthcare provision funded through taxation. Some of these social insurance policies may even give government socialistic ownership of particular elements of the economy (like schools and hospitals) but they do not pursue a general disruption of capitalism.
Leftists reject capitalism. They hold that it is unjust for individuals to own capital, because that produces a dramatic inequity in wealth and power over people who do not own capital, that the structure of capitalism inevitably creates inequities which no liberal policy under capitalism could adquately correct. They advocate replacing capitalism with socialist economic institutions which they believe will enable greater equity than capitalism will allow. Different leftists can vary enormously in the particular institutional forms they advocate as an alternatives.
Leftists have a range of relationships with libdem. They may support libdem norms & institutions as worth retaining while criticizing the limitations in the equity libdem delivers — “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread” — arguing that society must also enact other social & political governance institutions beyond only libdem. For example, leftists commonly say that libdem universalism which forbids overt discrimination based on race or sex or other characteristics is insufficient to correct inequities which linger from past discrimination, so society must make a positive effort toward cultural, institutional, and material supports for the populations who inherit those legacies, extending beyond the universalism of libdem mechanisms to incorporate unequal treatment of different groups which can correct the inequities between those groups. Other leftists reject libdem entirely, again on a range of different terms. Marxist-informed leftists may say that because libdem and capitalism spring from the same historical and political processes, we cannot disentangle them; a different form of state governance must displace libdem in order to overcome capitalism. Leftist anarchists reject the state itself as exercising power which inevitably produces inequities, and see libdem principle as inseperable from the logics of the state.
For more on this, including a bunch more vocabulary, I like a pair of posts by Sophia Lewis and Nathan Allebach. (Allenbech’s index of The Most Influential Political Identities From Left To Right explores some distinctions which get lost when one only thinks in terms of the one-dimensional left-right spectrum.) For more about the meanings of “liberalism” in the US, Jamelle Bouie has a brisk video. For more on current intra-leftist tensions, I like Ben Gidley’s & Daniel Mang’s Left Renewal in an Age of Waiting. For more on approaches to social justice, I have an attempt at clarifying common social justice praxis.
Libertarians
We need a quick word on libertarians, as they often claim that libertarianism is a third, distinct peer to liberalism and conservatism, or hold that a Liberty vs Authority axis is a peer to Left vs Right, or protest the common presumption that libertarianism is a species of conservatism by pointing to the left-libertarian tradition.
These folks have a bit of a point. The smartest and most principled libertarians end up with policy preferences which resist facile placement on the spectrum. But I submit that one can place even the most eccentrically thoughtful libertarians on the spectrum if one has a real understanding of what the broad left and right represent.
And frankly, in the US, the term “libertarian” emerges from rationalizations of conservatism, and one can see it in how most folks who call themselves “libertarians” prove to be firmly on the right if one examines their positions and their implications closely.
Mad magazine!
They covered this question back in 1970 with a set of satires of liberals, leftists, conservatives, reactionaries, right-wing militants, and new left extremists. I would say “just for fun” but it remains surprisingly familiar, and maps to many of the same waypoints I point to here, so I consider it a ratification of my taxonomy.
Ongoing revisions
I have made several clarifying changes and expansions from the original version of this essay over the years. Aside from many tweaks to phrasing and formatting, key changes include:
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Adding the groupings “broad left/right”, “mainstream”, and “far left/right” to the diagram. That last reflects a subtle change in nomenclature. I had long used “far” and “extreme” interchangably, but this revision makes “far” into a term which includes both “extreme” and “radical”.
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Softening the description of the Extreme position from saying “only violent revolution matters” to saying “only revolutionary change matters”. Advocacy for, or acceptance of, political violence is common at the far edges, but it is not universal.
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The original exemplars of different positions on the right became frustratingly dated, but hard to pin down in new forms. DJT’s impact has scrambled the structure of the broad right in the US. One can find the Trumpist slogan Make America Great Again used from the right wing to the far right; I’ve tried to use “hard” and “soft” MAGA with increasing precision. Clear examples in each position will have to wait for things to settle.
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The original post only had a small hint about what the section about neighbors now describes in detail.
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I added the explication of the relationship between liberals and The Left, and exploring more common terms for different points on the left side, long after the original post.
A more generic diagram
In case one needs it, this variant diagram strips out the specific examples of where to locate particular ideologies:
