I'm not on the right, but I'd like to respond to this.
I believe you are somewhat confused (no offense). Your confusion stems from the
spectrum fallacy, which essentially models human self-identification as lying on a linear scale—for instance, 0 representing liberal and 10 representing conservative (or vice versa). While mathematical thinking matters and this construct is almost universally accepted, it is an absolutely terrible way to model how people think.
A better model is to view things as "clustering"—similar to the Amazon recommendation algorithm. For example, there are millions of people, and if you gave them a survey with about 100 yes-or-no questions regarding their political opinions and had them complete it, you could create vectors representing individuals based on a matrix of ones and zeros.
Now, you have probably heard of the Pythagorean Theorem. What if I told you that it works in n dimensions? Well, it does—whether you believe me or not, you can look it up.
Basically, you can calculate the "distance" between every single person in your giant spreadsheet, record these distances, and rank them by how far apart they are.
From there, you can group people into various "clusters" of similarity by reducing the number of variables used to describe these similarities—by weighting them into two dimensions—and then simply plotting the results on a 2-D graph. How do we determine the number of clusters? You can mathematically compare the various clustering groups and see which one has the least overlap.
What you will find is that there are likely several clusters for any given country—say, five to ten—and you can build stereotypes and mental models based on those clusters, which makes sense from a more human perspective. Socially liberal and fiscally conservative individuals would cluster together and probably share similar characteristics, while libertarians would form their own group. Similarly, Green Party members and socialists would cluster together—likely close to the libertarians—while both would be far removed from the mainstream.
How would you test the performance of this model? By examining how people vote. Libertarians might vote for a Gary Johnson–type candidate, while Green Party supporters might vote for someone like Bernie Sanders. If they do not, then your model is flawed. This raises the question of electoral systems—American electoral systems highly favor two parties, which influences people's decision-making. Even if voters have the option to choose a Bernie Sanders–type candidate in the general election (for example, Jill Stein), they might refrain because they feel it is hopeless. In Minnesota, one electoral vote went to Bernie Sanders; however, that voter was immediately fired and replaced with someone who would vote for Hillary because he was appointed by the Democratic Party, which had the power to replace him with someone who voted strictly along party lines—people vote for a party, which then sends representatives to vote for the president, while the popular vote ultimately does nothing.
