the ideological basis underpinning the interests of each is quite different.

The ideological basis underpinning the interests of each is irrelevant. All that matters are actions.

A critical failure of both the left and the right is that it's so painfully easy to seduce people with promises and rhetoric.

The only useful basis for judging true interests is action. If actions are authoritarian (and let's not pretend that Mao and Stalin were anything other than dull-witted king wannabes, no matter what their rhetoric said) then the ideology is also authoritarian.

The goal is egalitarian society, but we also have to consider Principal-Agent issues; incentives need to be in place to reward hard work, ingenuity and so forth, or you will not get hard work or ingenuity.

Fer sure. But sometimes it seems very hard to tell the difference between rewards and the gratuitous enjoyment of unearned privilege.

The key takeway for me is that there is a single reliable process by which societies fail and destroy themselves. The process is identical no matter what rhetorical clothes it dresses itself in, or what enemies it claims to hate.

Concentration of power and resources reliably poisons every culture it happens to. The only possible result is oligarchy, and a subsequent failure of resilience and the ability to deal with real-world challenges successfully.

I think we need to get past the old descriptions - left, right, communist, conservative, etc - and make the common problem the issue it is.

We could also do with getting this narrative into politics and law, so that unlawful concentration and appropriation of more than a reasonable share of anything - money, power, media ownership, land - is explicitly forbidden.