Since we are profoundly affiliative creatures, we are attracted to labels. Most are labels which would be rejected by the political group identified. It’s unlikely that a group of concerned ecologists will like being labelled as “the eco mob.” But it works to identify them as a definite “not Us”—for people who don’t want to take climate change issues seriously.
Again, it’s not likely that groups called “the far left” and “the far right” are likely to use these labels to identify themselves. In this case, however, a doubt may linger. And many people are happy to accept the labels as appropriate if the “far” bit is dropped.
It’s a tribute to the power of the affiliation motive that some people are happy with terms like “left” and “right”—when it suggests that all political objectives can be placed in a single dimension, on a line stretching in just two directions.
If so, what are the directions? How do you distinguish between “left” and “far left” (or “right” and “far right”)? You could say their distance from the “centre”. But this is just begging the question. Towards what, actually, are people (or their views) moving when they move further “left” or further “right”? More justice? More state control? More freedom? … (For an example of the sort of gibberish that comes from taking these labels seriously, see the Wikipedia entry on ‘far-left politics’. 
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Or is all politics just class war?
One way of avoiding the issue is to adopt an analysis like mine of economic classes, and to say that the left want to advance the interests of the working class, and the right want to preserve the interests of the owning class. And there have always been movements against vested interests—going back to the Romans. The problem with this is that the label “far right” is regularly used of groups which are predominately—in some cases almost exclusively—made up of working-class people.
(Some enlightened commentators argue that such groups are being misled, or even brainwashed, by their leaders. Patient attention to the facts shows that these “leaders” are not leading anything. They are simply repeating from the platform what the members of these groups have been saying to one another for years.)
It’s worth remembering that Hitler’s party was “The German Workers’ Party.” Later, “The National Socialist Party”—and it wasn’t just socialist in name. “Capitalists” were excoriated—as in Goebbels’ final (unfinished) film—and not only because so many of them were Jewish. Some German industrialists made money during Hitler’s rule, but only under state socialist control. And the (“Aryan”) working classes escaped the poverty they were trapped in during the Weimar Republic.
What is more, right now, in England, the “Reform UK” party is attracting the same social groups as helped Hitler to power.
“Populism”
In order to free themselves from absurdity, some commentators use labels like “populist”, instead of “right-wing” or “far right.” Is this term any more than a nasty way of saying “popular”? Wouldn’t it be more useful to find labels which actually identify the particular political goals which attract people?
Vested interests, round the world, are as safe as they have been for centuries. Isn’t it time to drop the fantasy of one-dimensional politics, and to locate multiple political goals in three-dimensional space?