How useful are "left" and "right" or "liberal" and "conservative" anyway? The folks over at the Political Compass suggest that while most mainstream political figures fall in a line with strong correlation between their views on social and economic issues, there are still substantial exceptions.
See, for instance, this chart dealing with candidates in the 2008 U.S. elections. Draw a line from Dennis Kucinich to Tom Tancredo and you have the U.S. political mainstream represented almost entirely on a single continuum. Broadly, people who are toward the left economically also tend to be less traditionalist on social issues such as religion, sex, speech, patriotism, and family; people who are toward the right tend to be more traditionalist on these issues.
The same correlation can be found on this chart of European nations: draw a line from Sweden and Finland to Greece and the UK, and you take in the same direction: economically rightward and socially more authoritarian. Likewise on this chart of U.S. states, this one for Australian parties, and this one for Canadian parties
(Their labels of "Libertarian" vs. "Authoritarian" for the social-issues axis leave something to be desired, since "authoritarianism" has strong negative connotations for a lot of people and "libertarianism" is also the name of a political ideology; but never mind that.)
It might be useful to think of the Kucinich/Tancredo axis (or center-left/authoritarian-right axis) as the "main sequence" of politics: most of the data points fall on or near this axis, but whole categories of exceptions exist. The entire Libertarian movement ranges from the middle right (Ron Paul land) down towards the bottom of the diagram; the left-anarchists are at the bottom left; the Communists towards the top left; and the so-called "extreme right" (like the BNP, the French National Front, or Pat Buchanan) are towards the center top.
And then there's me over in a spot nobody wants. Le sigh.
Jonathan Haidt, a professor at UVA, runs an online lab with quizzes that will compare your moral values to the rest of the population. I have found the test results useful for avoiding the typical mind fallacy. When someone disagrees with me on a belief/opinion I feel certain about, it's often difficult to tease apart how much of this disagreement stems from them not "getting it", and how much stems from them having a different fundamental value system. One of the tests alerted me that I am an outlier in certain aspects of how I judge morality (green = me; blue = liberals; red = conservatives):
Another benefit of these quizzes is that they can point out potential blind spots. For example, one quiz asks for opinions about punishment for crimes. If I discover I'm an outlier w.r.t. the population, I should reconsider whether my opinions are based on solid evidence (or did I see one study that found tit-for-tat punishment effective in a certain context, and take that as gospel?).
Extra reading: Haidt wrote a WSJ article last month that applied the learnings of these moral quizzes to better understanding the Tea Party.