Political thought is a high-dimensional space. Many of those are correlated along an axis that people call right/left.
When someone says that right/left is imaginary, what they are often really saying is that they prioritize dimensions in that space that are not strongly correlated with the right/left axis.
Or they’ve observed that policy changes after a change in government are less extreme than they hoped and chalk that up to corruption or insincerity rather than checks and balances in an adversarial system.
Tribalism being what it is, people can mistake the forest for the trees and think that the convenient shorthand we have for a correlated set of values is more strongly defined (more “real”) than it actually is.
When someone says that right/left is imaginary, what they are often really saying is that they prioritize dimensions in that space that are not strongly correlated with the right/left axis.
Or they’ve observed that policy changes after a change in government are less extreme than they hoped and chalk that up to corruption or insincerity rather than checks and balances in an adversarial system.
Tribalism being what it is, people can mistake the forest for the trees and think that the convenient shorthand we have for a correlated set of values is more strongly defined (more “real”) than it actually is.