Left-Right politics is the traditional terminology used to describe the two ideological poles of a political spectrum in a society, especially in a democracy.
In modern Western countries, the political spectrum usually is described along left-right lines. This traditional political spectrum is defined along an axis with conservatism ("the right") on one end, and socialism ("the left") on the other. (In the United States, the term liberalism refers to a wide range of left-of-center politics, with the left edge corresponding to what in Europe is commonly termed social democracy; in Europe, this same term liberalism can refer to a wide range of center-right to left-of-center politics.) The term left and right was also used to describe politics in China starting in the 1920s until the 1980s, although the issues often were very different from the ones in Western nations.