This is not a post on the philosophy of politics-that will come another day. We can ask ourselves these questions from the basic understanding of Left-Right as from its historico-political context: What is reform? Is reform always “leftward”? What is the status quo? Are you conservative if you seek to defend a liberal or socialist status-quo? Such questions poke immediate holes into the Left-Right paradigm. The problem with the Left-Right paradigm is not only is it unphilosophical and, therefore, unsubstantial, it is highly relativized which is something that propagandists use to their advantage which distorts the philosophical reality of political movements. This established the most rudimentary understanding of the paradigm as the Left being equated with reform and the Right being equated with the status-quo.
The history of the Left-Right paradigm arose during the early days of the French Revolution where the opponents of the monarchy sat to the king’s left in the National Assembly and supporters of the monarchy sat to the king’s right. The “Left”-“Right” paradigm is famous in political science though generally eschewed in political philosophy as generally meaningless and unsubstantial, at least without important qualifications.