>>9477>I'm not sure what authority makes these definitions formal. Normally 'formal' is an appeal to state power, but I don't think the state defines what goals the two political parties need to have.Authority
doesn't come from the state here, what's "formal" here is within the realm of academia, these terms specifically having their origin in modern European academic political discussion after the french revolution of 1790.
The terms are what's collectively agreed upon by political and social philosophers.
The spurce of the
colloquial understanding of the terms are rooted in
rhetoric, that and propoganda. The reason anyone in America belives one party is on the left is a relic of the cold war and the other party exploiting fears of the soviet union and leftism to accuse the other party of being leftist,
it's literally a product of demagoguery, and it's been taken to the point that many in America don't even know what the origin of the terms left-wing and right-wing
actually meant when first used or how they are still used everywhere else in the world.
>Do we have something like a class system and neither party wants to dismantle it?Pretty much. yeah. We have social classes but not an officially enforced caste system. We (ostensibly) have a more centrist system of social classes with social mobility. The differences between the parties (ostensibly) is how much they believe the state has to intervene to maintain/ensure that social mobility. In many ways, one party denies that any intervention is necessary and denies that social stratification happens and the other party believes that intervention is necessary to prevent stratification.
Of course, again, your average American rarely thonks of this as rhe fundamental distinction between right and left as popular understanding gets further confused by the popular discourse.
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