It used to be realitvely easy to classify your political position as left or right. Today this is becoming more complicated as its not really a two dimensional battle of ideologies any more. I prefer the notion that "birds of feather flock together", i.e. those of similar tastes congregate into groups. Historically the Republican and Democrat parties have been characterized as shown belown on the political spectrum. Many often thought they needed to sway these independent voters in the middle (Take John McCain in '08 for example). This is a misguided simplistic notion in today's America.

The above idealized "Normal Distribution", assuming most voters are "centrist" is an incorrect "theory" and not a measurement of the "real" political spectrum. If accurately measured it would look something more like a "two humped camel" as shown below when actual voters are polled.

The important distinctions between liberals (associated with the left) and conservatives (associated with right) can be broken into dozens of dimensions though. Of course people have a tendency to analyze everything to death so people have gone multi-dimensional in their categorizations of ideolology. Here is a two dimension representation of the political spectrum from wikipedia.

One can find many of these types of "categorizations" of political ideology (in two and three dimensions) and the following represent some more examples of two dimensional ideology space.

Be very careful when you see one of these "spectrum charts" because there is no generally accepted standard. Be particularly wary of pejoritives and words like "Fascism" (which has come to mean anything undesirable in today's discourse) that show up on these charts. If we had to create our own spectrum chart for conservatives we would have a difficult time. A more accurate way to look at conservatives versus liberals would be a series one dimensional charts on each issue. We think the following is representative of where the parties fall with respect to the size and involvement of the Federal Government in our lives.