Suppose you believe homosexuals should have the same rights as heterosexuals. Suppose, further, you believe that the state should intervene to discourage pollution; that the death penalty is a moral blight; that drug abuse should be treated as a social problem, not a crime. You favour taxing the rich to aid the poor, public funding of education, public pensions, and a public health care system -- with no user fees. You are for a guaranteed annual income, and an open door for immigration. Would it surprise you to learn that you are a conservative -- even a neo-conservative?

You are, or at least you would be said to be, if you also harbour a belief that competition and consumer choice are good things; if you think that public debt has grown to unsafe heights; if you prefer that a dollar should be worth a dollar from one year to the next. Perhaps you also think that tax rates might be cut. But that's bonus points.

The fact is that there are a great many people who would agree with both these sets of ideas: liberal on social issues, conservative on economic. Yet the language of "left" and "right" still supposes this to be impossible. It is simply assumed that if you subscribe to the conservative position on any one particular issue, you must have taken the lot -- or, indeed, that even if you haven't, it is enough that you should have sinned the once.

Things are tough already for genuine, self-identified conservatives, who believe in a great many strange things but must suffer the indignity of being chastised for beliefs they do not hold: that greed is good, that life is about shopping, and so on. But the language begins to be emptied of all meaning when the same epithet is applied to people who would never dream they were "right-wing." It is odd enough that people should want to identify themselves in such knee-jerk terms as "right" or "left" without the label being foisted upon the unsuspecting.

We have reached the stage where virtually the entire Canadian political spectrum is now commonly described as tilting to starboard. Not only the Reform party, but also the Conservatives, the Liberals and even some sections of the NDP are all said to have wandered well off to the right. It might occur to someone to ask: right of what? Even supposing the term had some coherent basis in usage -- say, in a preference for less government spending rather than more -- it can still only be measured relative to some yardstick.

Do we mean they are to the right of the public? But how can this be, when it is the public that votes for them? Do we mean they are to the right of other parties? Well, yes, but where are they on the spectrum? It is not much use to be told that one is to the right of, say, Linda McQuaig, when just about everyone on earth shares the same affliction. Yet that is the implicit equation in much public discussion: if you are not on the left, then you must be on the right.

To say that all parties are on the right is not only to obscure the very real differences they may have on all manner of social and political issues. It is also to suggest that there is still some fundamental intellectual divide on the great questions of economic organization that have consumed much of this century. The truth, as painful as it is for many to admit it, is that there is not.

There may once have been a debate on whether to adopt a policy of free trade, or whether it was worth the trouble of bringing deficits and inflation to zero. But now that these are all a reality, there is no constituency for returning to the previous state of affairs, just as no one is going to renationalize CN, or reregulate the airlines, or any of the other commanding heights that were once the object of such furious battle.

But that doesn't mean the right has won. For equally, there is no constituency for scrapping medicare, or despoiling the environment, or abandoning the poor to whatever fate befalls them. On these and many other issues, it is the left that has won. If there is a large degree of consensus in matters of socio-economic policy, it is one in which right and left share equally. We like the wealth that a free-market economy creates. We also believe it should be shared.

I realize this is greatly troubling to many people, who have organized not just their thoughts but their lives as a conflict of right and left, and for whom any suggestion of consensus in these matters smacks of an attempt to stifle dissent. But is it? Who says politics has to be about economics? Democracy used to be a controversial idea. Yet no one complains that the debate about democracy is being suppressed.

Isn't it at least possible that we might have come to a consensus on an economic model, just as earlier we settled on a political model? Maybe the right hasn't taken over. Maybe we just agree.