Right...Left...Right...Left...hup...hup...hup...
Every good soldier knows you start on the LEFT foot, dammit!
"This illustrates...

         the futility of discussing ideology with today's shop-worn vocabulary.  Words like "conservative" and "liberal" now mean whatever anybody saying or writing them wants them to mean.  Wasn't it a Supreme Court justice who said he couldn't define pornography, but he knew what it was when he saw it?  "Conservative" and "liberal" are like that.  Where Perlstein sees the present political environment as a "conservative" epoch, it can be just as easily argued that an electorate unable to choose between Bush and Gore, far from blazing an ideological trail to the right, is drifting tranquilly toward 

...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...       slumber."

Russell Baker
in NY Review of Books
May 17, 2001
How in Creation can the most complex phenomenon known to Creation's most complex creation be characterized by the simple dichotomy Right - Left?
Wake up, America!

If we can't put athletes in a line by "size," (we can, but we are missing seeing some certain, specific rationality when we do) or put thinkers in a line by their "intelligence" (ditto), we certainly can't rationally put people in a line according to their political and/or economic thinking.  .   .   .   Right?
So we are still left with examining what is meant by "liberal," "conservative," "radical," "reactionary," etc.etc.
One right way to start is to...
List as many as we can of the attitudes, statements, proclivities, life styles, preferences, etc. by which we jump to some opinion that someone is "right" or "left."  Then, we can start to look for commonalities.  Look for missed logic (missed "rationalities").  For dimensions of how we should be lining up people by attitudes.
I think we might turn up some dimensions that could be declared "right" vs "wrong."  Might not, too.

1 Do good. Do well.
This comparison is from Russell Baker, NY Review of Books, May 17, 2001, page 6.  Doing good and doing well, we are evolving organisms, evolving to meet needs.  See.
 
2 Justice delayed is justice denied. Even late justice can bring closure.
Here we want to demonstrate two different kinds of meanings for "justice," one describing mutually reciprocal equality, the other describing a kind of revenge.  Lawrence Kohlberg suggested that the first kind requires what we describe as  an "edge of human comprehension" insight.  The second kind expresses "punitive morality," described in the early 1960's as "sociopathic" by some psychology faculty at Berkeley.  That judgement is seldom heard today.  Nor is the work of Lawrence Kohlberg.  My sense of Kohlberg's work is that it has followed a path somewhat like that taken by biology's evolutionary theory.  Its underlying principles and logic simply go "unseen" and  some of its implications are recognized to be antagonistic to deeply held beliefs.  Those who "see" still find the concepts useful.  Those who don't...well, sometimes they get pretty antagonistic.  Consider the word "energy" to see how different meanings of a common word—one subtle, one not—can lead to nearly universal confusion between something seen and something not seen.  Explanation.  Kolhberg and Piaget also tie the very common difficulties people have with fractions, ratios, proportionalities, units conversions, etc, with the difficulty with mutual reciprocity.  Examples.
 
3 No decent society can be based on self-interest. At its foundation, a decent society runs on enlightened self-interest.
The first statement is by Amatai Etzioni.
 
4 Insubordination is a punishable offense Insubordination is a fundamental human right.
The right to self-determination vs the right to manuever others into servitude.
 
5 What this country needs is a strong leader. No, it doesn't!  It needs more competent decision makers. 
The first statement is an item on the "California F-scale" an insturment designed immediately after WWII to measure proclivity towards the fascism that fueled that war.  "The Authoritian Personality" was a large report which used this scale.  Authoritarianism was a concept introduced about then to mean a general tendency to rely on others for the information processing tasks necessary for making decisions.  The concept fell into disrepute and is seldom used today.  In about 1976, I asked Nevitt Sanford, the study's principal investigator, why the concept had faded from the literature.  He answered that society had changed and a revision of the concept was needed to match the changes.   My feeling was, and is still, that its development, and its "downfall," follows a route similar to that of Kohlberg's work—and evolution.  Not useful because widely not seen.  Virtually all the simpler principles of the science of the past several centuries have followed a similar path.  Simple but difficult basic science points to even greater difficulties with the more complex issues.   "Surely You're Joking."
  
6 "Police cameras that get me speeding tickets deny me my privacy and civil rights." "Speeding is a public act, and speeders diminish the public's right to life."
The first statement is from Richard Armee.
 
7 Ask, "How does it let me help others?" Ask, "What's in it for me?"
This comparison was made by a person who had taken religous vows that required that she be motivated by the first sentiment.
  
8 Religion is not a very important part of my life. Religion guides my every action.
This comparison is to accompany the preceding one.
 
9 You get what you pay for. Took!
Here we want to point to some of the logical inconsistencies of confusing the scalar, cost, with the multi-componented entity, value.  Scalar is visualized by ordering of points on a line.  (And Jerry Manheim discovered that college students sometimes do not "see" this simple, elementary insight: "If the temperature is 4 degrees and then falls 7 degrees, what is the new temperature?"  See.)  A next step up in sophistication is the vector: ordering is then in an n-space.  Ordering of colors is an exemplar.  Explication
 
10 Someone once said, "From each according to his ability; to each according to his wants." Someone once said, "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs."
The distinction between "needs" and "wants" is often not seen.
 
11 My country, right or wrong. My country is (almost) never wrong.
Is a patriot someone who can't comprehend improvements of his country?
 
12 "Hitler did one thing good; he got rid of a lot of Jews." "Helen, I'm Jewish.  Does that make any difference?"
This was an actual conversation between Helen, a technician at the semiconductor laboratory where I was a materials scientist (she was an avid memeber of the John Birch Society) , and Joe, a chemist with whom I worked (and a good friend of Helen).
  
13 "Middle of the road...is politically, morally, and intellectually repugnant." "Middle of the road...is politically, morally, and intellectually repugnant."
Wm Buckley Jr said that.
 
14 Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Barry Goldwater said that.  Got him hysterical cheers when he said it.  Got him nowhere closer to the presidency when the voters voted.
 
15 The best government is the least government. It's government's role to comfort the afflicted...and perhaps afflict the comfortable.
Comfort and affliction as seen by economist J. Kenneth Galbraith—here compared with a widespread belief.  "Government" might be seen as "them" and a hinderance to "me." — or it might be seen as "us" and a mechanism by which people help each other.  We suggest that this distinction is a "fourth-level abstraction" (seldom seen – obvious yet unobserved) that comes closest to being the scalar we imagine to be "Right-Left."  Most of the above are subsumed under this concept.