Left = wants big government

Right = wants small government

Do you agree with the above?

This is probably good enough to generalize about most people. But most people don't think very hard about politics, and thus are confused about it. And so this distinction is likewise confused and doesn't give us very useful terminology; hence right- and left-libertarians are forever misunderstood by most people, and will forever be minorities in political thought because of the terms in which most people (confusedly) think.

u/MakeThePieBigger has hit upon a much more fundamental distinction: that of equality vs. inequality. But even that's a bit confusing; shouldn't it mean one side prefers more equality (check), and the other prefers more inequality (nope)? I mean, nobody is like "we need more inequality today, that would make things better." On the equality vs. inequality issue, one side says "more equality! equality is good!" and the other says "inequality is natural! the idea that we are/should be all equal doesn't present a 3-dimensional view of reality!" We can see that these two things are not exactly dichotomous.

The most fundamental political distinction I can think of is universalism vs. particularism. Universalism is something like "ethics/politics is universal, and what's good/right for one is good/right for all." Particularism is exactly the opposite: "what's good/right for one isn't necessarily good/right for all."

At first you're probably going to say "I'm a universalist then." Most people are. Today. But that hasn't always been the case. It just so turns out that universalism is really good at taking over, for obvious reasons. But the problem is that, much as the inequality-advocate might have said to the equality-advocate, the particularist might say "that's cool, but people are different. what works for one doesn't work for all. eventually, your universalism is going to collapse of its own instability because it's divorced from reality."

Since WWII universalism has pretty much taken over, but its roots go back a long way, to the advent of monotheism. But since WWII, it has been highly unfashionable to be particularist, to say that the people over here should (in the strongest, fullest normative sense) live one way, and those over there, another way. Do many people consciously embrace it? Not at all. Does that mean it's a useless category? Not at all.

Particularism is a dimension of human psychology. It's there. It always will be. And if a dimension of human psychology has no outlet, this spells trouble. This is why we laugh at so-called "natural conservatives"; they seem backward and weird to us with their very strong intuition toward particularism. Why hasn't liberal democracy gotten more stable over time rather than less? I mean, all the alternatives have been destroyed. Communism is dead, fascism is rotting, monarchism is a ghost. So, what's up with Putin? and Trump? and the far right in eastern Europe? and Italy's Five Star movement? and Marine Le Pen? and Duterte? and Singapore?

What's up with them is that universalism isn't the only game in town. And we seem to think it is. Hence, what's going on in the world seems confusing, and still more so will the future, when it should be plain as day.