zlacker

Exactly. This needs to be said more. The political party duopoly in the US and some other countries belies a vast range of political beliefs in the population. If you look closely at each party, there are many competing factions within, often vehemently opposed.

The words "conservative", "liberal", "right", "left", etc., are practically meaningless, and I'm old enough to have seen them change over the decades, sometimes radically. They're nothing but trendy labels.

>>lapcat+(OP)
Indeed, the duopoly tends to become attached to social divisions, and you could choose any of those divisions to label the parties:

Liberal vs conservative

Secular vs religious

Governance vs identity politics

The list goes on and on. In an odd historical analogy, the electric charges were originally assigned "negative" and "positive" according to what happened when they were combined, with no hypothesis as to the underlying cause.