More precisely, the salient fact is that people can no longer articulate and express what ""left" and "right" are in political terms, but rather treating this as a puzzling fact and investigate empirically the objective changes in society and social practices which produce this result, they just talk about language and concepts and how to formulate things in a sexy way. That's fine and good, but it doesn't solve the problem at all. The real problem is different: the incapacity to specify a positive alternative project that could solve modern social problems, beyond re-mixes and re-hashes of old themes, a facet of the ideological crisis of the "third age" of capitalist development reflecting the terms of class conflict. If, instead of creative postmodernist re-mixes, people were to concentrate on what previous thinkers actually said, within the context in which they said it, some new progress could be made. And if they would in addition do some empirical research into objective trends, more progress still would be made. And if, finally, they would acknowledge the importance of social theory, rather than waffle about narratives or religion in an ideological way, then we would get a real answer.
J.