howl
Active Member
What it has come to:
LEFT: Spend money raised on measures that benefit everyone, and especially the most vulnerable (i.e. improvements to transportation infrastructure that move people most efficiently, community centres, social housing, etc).
RIGHT: Spend money making it easier for the upper middle classes to amass wealth (subsidise their driving habits in like a million ways, try to reduce fees and property taxes as much as possible, etc).
This is why someone like Bloomberg, who is not particularly leftist in his ideological worldviews, came across as being a rather lefty mayor of New York.
The obvious problem with the Left-Right labels are they are way too simplistic. People try to paste the Right-Left labels onto candidates in order to sell them to a certain constituency - e.g. the voters who really don't understand the issues and just vote for right or left depending on which newspaper they read. Its not really a helpful characterization in an insightful or (somewhat) sophisticated political discussion, particularly at the municipal level.
A more accurate way to break down the candidates is to rank them on a number of different issues or criteria. For example, fiscal policy, social policy, moral policy, infrastructure policy etc. In the end what you'll likely find is there is no clear Left or Right candidates, and that in many of these categories the candidates the media are calling Right support policies that are actually more Left and vice versa,