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You've made a good description of political extremism, but not it seems to me the left/right divide.
There are further complications: The discrete policy positions are completely untethered to the right or the left. Is gun control right or left? Well, it depends a lot on whether you're talking about France in 1790 or the US in the 2000s. Is war right or left? Depends on the war! Is trade protectionism right or left? You get the idea.
Then you have the problem that political coalitions are shifting constantly, pressure groups, identities rise and fall etc. "Gay" was a big political identity for twenty years or so. Black people shifted parties, and will do so again, so which one is the racists? The liberal assimilationist jews are on one side, but the nationalistic hardcore jews are on the other! Which group hates the jews?
I think Sailer's "leapfrogging loyalty" remains the best predictor of what is meant by "right" and "left" so far, but it's far from perfect.
I'm a fan of Scott's Thrive vs Survive theory. It is true that it's kind of hard to construct a good definition of "left" and "right" that perfectly encompasses all the ways we use the term.
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My theory does not apply to parties positions on policies, identities, or individual's positions on policies. You'd need another theory to describe all that. My theory is solely about how parties actually behave relative to each other, and what to label parties as a whole.
Political coalitions shift, maybe one day the socialists prefer working with the liberals, and the next they prefer the communists. But the core of my theory is that no matter have much coalitions shift, you'll never see a discontinuous coalition that excludes centrists while including both the right and left. At least not a coalition that ever actually ever passes anything.
It's not an unified theory of everything political. But I think it is useful. It solves whether a party should be called far left, center left, centrist, center right, or far right. That's an argument people often have, and I don't think anyone needs to argue about it anymore. And it makes the observation that parties across the political spectrum will be very reluctant to actually cooperate no matter how much they might agree on specific issues like gun control, which is something useful to keep in mind if you're an activist trying to work to transform public support for a policy to actually passing that policy.
I think the complaint is that left and right just don’t mean anything. Instead, I generally see them as boo lights.
I think these are useful observations that do mean something. People often do use left/right as boo lights. But they also use them as meaningful terms. Calling someone "far right" or "far left" wouldn't be an insult if they didn't have real meaning. There's a reason why libertarians want to convince you that Hitler was actually a leftist, and why progressives want to convince you Bernie is a centrist in Europe. My model gives a framework to ignore those people without losing the utility of the terms "far right", "right", "centrist", "left", and "far left" to describe how willing a party is to cooperate with other parties quickly.
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