Simple way to distinguish right and left wing
People use the terms right and left wing with only an intuitive understanding. This post clarifies.
Right wing:
a. Low empathy for people having difficult lives or difficult experiences, and victim-blaming; e.g. women and GBV (claiming that "they wear the wrong clothes"), the poor are to blame for their own poverty because they're "lazy" or they "must pick themselves up by the bootstraps".
b. High levels of individualism and self-pride, insistence on the notion of being "self-made", disregarding their social context and accidents of birth.
c. Low levels of tolerance for change. "Conservative" means to conserve or resist change, to preserve. Insistence on "traditional family values", or "religious morality" or some "glorious past" which we want to "go back to" (MAGA). E.g. women's place is at home maintaining the home.
d. Small government, low levels of government intervention (usually). People must fend for themselves. E.g. government should not tell me to use a vaccine because I have bodily integrity and liberty as to what to do with my body. Right wingers support big government against other groups (e.g. waging war), but not against themselves.
Left wing:
a. People need government support. If the government advocates a mass rollout of something, vaccines say, you should support it, because it aims to a general social good. Hence the insistence on masks, because masks stop you infecting OTHERS.
b. You are part of a group and your successes and failures are a function of the group, society, culture or country that you are born into. It's a pro-social position also called "collectivism". E.g. if you are rich it is probably because you had rich parents who taught you to manage money etc.
c. Liberal attitudes to change, meaning if situations are bad, regardless of whether they are traditional, they must change. So, if women have hard lives due to being forced by tradition to maintain a home, they must be freed to be allowed to pursue careers and not be forced to maintain the home.
d. Big government (usually), people should not have to fend for themselves because society is a mesh in which weak points affect everyone. Government has a legitimate concern about individuals spreading disease and wrecking society so they have a mandate to impose vaccines. However, they generally don't support waging war.
Authoritarian vs Libertarian
Political positions are not just divided into left/right. As we can see above, in (d), they also differ on the extent to which government can justifiably intervene, that is, the extent to which the government is authoritarian or libertarian, that is, whether it intervenes in the individuals' rights to self-determination or not.
A useful way to think of this, then, is the political compass model: https://politicalcompass.org/
If you are left wing authoritarian, then you are communist.
If you are right wing authoritarian, then you are fascist.
If you are left wing libertarian, then you are anarchist.
If you are right wing libertarian, then you are neoliberal or libertarian.