Why do you think they hurt our capacity to categorize political views? Simplification is the only way to explain anything. You don’t want to try to explain political trends using particle physics.
Because ONE dimension is far too simplistic to have net utility instead of net harm. Instead of simplifying in ways that just help us understand, it creates false dichotomies and binary / dualistic thinking. It is self-fulfilling in harmful ways.
Simplify to at least two dimensions and it can be a useful discussion.
There are people across the "left" and "right" dimension who agree on the issues of top-down vs bottom-up forms of power structures. That's probably the most practical second dimension.
They simplify to the point of being false. There is no other way. No two people agree on everything in politics. There is enough agreement on major issues to form sides, but no matter what the issue there will be someone important who disagrees with their side on that one issue.
It’s possible to simplify to the point of being false, of course. But associating environmental activism with left-wing politics is not exactly a wild stretch.
It's also not a stretch to lump guns in with right-wing and for that matter, urban with left and rural with right. But this stuff is insane. It's self-fulfilling.
Environmentalism has been associated with the Left for the same reason as other nonsense here. There are both left and right reasons for environmentalism and both left and right pressures for things that harm the environment. But our simplistic political models have led to tribalism where groups of ideas get associated with one or the other of this one-dimensional polar left-right idea. So, bring up environmentalism in any "right" wing community and it doesn't matter if everything said is right-wing enough, people will suspect the environmentalist of really being some left-wing person.
And yet a lot of environmental activisism is against other left wing environmental activism. This case for example where mines are harmful for the immediate area, but allow extracting the minerals that make a cleaner future possible.
Sure, but it's not crazy that some left-wing groups oppose other left-wing groups. It would be a vast oversimplification to act as if "left-wing" is a monolithic, homogeneous group.
the problem is when you over-simplify to the point of just being wrong. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle where you adequately describe the variety of positions available without being verbose. That's true of all mental models.
