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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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