In popular forms of government, politics tends to coalesce around a set of issues that are debated in the public and in front of the public. There’s a framework within which these topics are debated and the political factions represent the positions on those topics. This framework is the consensus. A range of answers has been deemed acceptable and anything the lies outside that range is considered fringe or heretical. This is the natural response to the challenges faced by democratic political systems.
In the West, the political parties tended to coalesce around economic schools, like communists, various flavors of socialism and flavors of market socialism. These were in the range of the political consensus. Libertarianism has always been fringe in Europe and in America, communism was always a fringe position. The result is the main points of contention in political fights were over economic policy. So much so that social policy and foreign policy have often been framed in economic terms.
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