Paternalistic conservatism
The term right-wing socialism is a term used by some free-market right-libertarian movements and politicians to describe paternalistic conservatism as they see it supporting paternalism and social solidarity as opposed to individualism, commercialism and "laissez-faire" economics. They argue that paternalist conservatism supports state promoted social hierarchy and allows certain people and groups to hold higher status in such a hierarchy, which is conservative. The term is also used—more commonly, but distinctly—to refer to moderate social democratic forms of socialism when contrasted with Marxism–Leninism and other more radical left-wing alternatives. In "The Communist Manifesto", Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels criticised the "Philosophy of Poverty" by the anarchist writer and theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as representing conservative or bourgeois socialism. Military socialism, guild socialism, agrarian socialism and some forms of Christian socialism are also termed right-wing socialism by various authors.
Left–right political spectrum
A number of significant political movements—including feminism and regionalism—do not fit precisely into the left-right spectrum. Though nationalism is often regarded as a right-wing doctrine, many nationalists favor egalitarian distributions of resources. There are also "liberal nationalists". Populism is regarded as having both left-wing and right-wing manifestations (see left-wing populism and right-wing populism). Green politics is often regarded as a movement of the left, but in some ways the green movement is difficult to definitively categorize as left or right.