The Basis of Left and Right

At Power Line, "NEW POWER LINE SERIES: THE BASIS OF LEFT AND RIGHT, PART 1":

The divisions between left and right are fundamental and unbridgeable. A frequent trope of political rhetoric is that everyone agrees about the ends; we merely disagree about the means. Although this is often true at the level of a discrete policy issue (for example, how to broaden access to health care), it is wrong at the deeper level of what might be called the “tectonic plates” that drive the individual political battles. Reducing left-right differences to disagreements only over means has a numbing effect on clear thinking, and is an obstacle to grappling with some of the larger problems that now need reform that goes far beyond the business-as-usual tinkering around the edges, such as entitlement spending. Liberals tend to believe in old-fashioned leveling egalitarianism; conservatives do not. (Much more on this point in due course.) Rather than evade or gloss over fundamental differences, highlighting them is the vital pre-condition to finding any middle ground for possible compromise.

That's one hefty essay, and I'm looking forward to the next installment in the series ---although the main problem right now is that "liberalism" really isn't a left-wing ideology. It's an invention of American progressives to mask their socialist ideological foundations. This guy gets closer to the real American left, but also continues to call them "liberals" when they are not. See "Utopian Folly: Liberalism’s Philosophical Problem."