US Democrats are not leftists
Found this graph online for anyone who might still be confused. I think this makes it much more clear.
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Found this graph online for anyone who might still be confused. I think this makes it much more clear.
The Overton Window is known to many but still most can't see how it shapes acceptable politics. What's left and right in the US is shifted so far right from most other democratic countries.
I think it's important to recognize the Overton Window is shaped by what is acceptable to voters. This means that the present state of affairs can only be the result of one or both of these scenarios:
Enough of the US voting population leans far enough right to move the window, or
Political policy is being dictated by forces other than what voters find acceptable.
No. It's shaped by what's acceptable to the media, politicians, and their owner donors.
Much more often than not, the vast majority of voters don't get to choose beyond harm reduction by choosing the lesser evil. Which is still an evil.
Yup. 🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
#2 it has always been #2 except sometimes those "forces" want the same things or the "forces" that agree with something the public also happens to agree with have a win for a minute
What you'll notice online is that a lot of these people who want to move the overton window understand this, so their goal is to remove the left from the voting population. There are a lot of ways to do this. You can require ID to vote, and then invalidate trans people's IDs. You can gerrymander so the votes don't count. You can just plain old kill people. You can make it very unpleasant to vote. You can suppress candidates who represent the left wing from winning primaries. And if you're really clever, you can make up a propaganda line that convinces leftists it's in their own interest not to vote.
Bernie isn't far left by international standards, but I wouldn't put him in the centre. Nobody in the centre is trying to make radical changes to things. What Bernie is proposing is pretty radical compared to where the US currently is. And, I think if those reforms actually passed, he'd still be trying to move things even more to the left.
And Biden as "far right"? It has lost all meaning if you're applying that label to him.
Idk. Simping for a fascist ethnostate sure doesn't seem left to me.
... and it's just a meme, homie.
It usually takes more than one thing to label somebody left or right.
And "it's just a meme" is how we ended up with a meme in office twice.
Do you realize how insane our politics are for people to think of supporting a genocide as just one thing on a list of policies?
Yo, the only reason Hitler is considered right-wing, because he wanted to lead the German nation to prosperity. Stop purity-testing!
/s (in case it's not obvious)
Genocide Joe still was a right-wing politician. With his hwole political legacy.
... wait a second... you think Trump became president, because of leftists not con&idering the Dems anything but right wing? Lol.
Twice, so far
He stopped a rail worker strike for safer working conditions, then six moths latter there was a massive derailment and an environmental catastrophe in Ohio. You would call that left?
Biden was a pro-business Blue. I’d put him a couple steps left of center for his green energy initiatives though.
I think politics is a bit of a spectrum in reality, so not everything politicians do fit nicely on a left/red bar chart when we’re trying to talk about where they stand.
All his green initiatives were catering to private business though. Tax breaks and subsidies with little conditional restraints. If you want left wing green energy initiatives, look at how China does it.
Do you mean that supporting a genocide is a centrist policy?
Genocides come in all colours :/
Yeah they sacrificed nuance for effect - but the scale tipping to the right is still effective. A more informative version with brief explanations of what ‘center’ and ‘left’ and etc. are would be great too.
The right-left divide is a fabrication meant to obscure the fact that the actual division is capitalist-socialist. Do you support the owning class, or do you support the working class?
Yeah capitalism isn't interrupt about free markets and competition or investing in yourself. It's about the ownership class, and the labour class (those that work for the owner class, make all the money and get proportionally none of it). Companies are mini monarchies where you get no say in the policy, the ownership of the company is usually passed on to descendents, you live half your life abiding by the mini monarchy. You vote outside of work, but not at work, work is not democratic. Even so, governments are not mediators between workers and elite, the people that end up in government are of the elite class and have their own interests in mind. We only have our labour rights and aren't complete slaves today because of very strong socialist movements during and after the great depression and ww2. They compromised with some socialism to avoid complete socialism, but these movements are of course not too frequently mentioned in history lessons
This 100% - it's part propaganda.
The funny thing is - to support the working class is to support the owning class. Because when people have more money, they spend more which makes company profits increase and stock go up.
It's more like "stupid retards who only want to hurt people vs. people who want to help people".
Personally, I want to help the working class by getting rid of the ruling class and make owning capital a community thing instead of an individual thing.
I don't think I would say Hillary Clinton was to the left of Joe Biden. At least he had Lena Khan and a strong FCC. Something I don't think Clinton would have ever done. I would reverse those two.
For that matter I don't know if Obama is to the left of him either.
There is no left or right anymore. There are only fascists and antifascists.
Which are basically just synonyms for left and right.
Why did George Washington lead the continental army again?
To avoid taxes on “owning” people:
Forgive my propaganda learning, I thank you good person.
Honestly, I could see this as being better than the alternative -- better than having a Civil War. Especially if it was started during Washington's time.
Say, just pass a law that says no new slaves can be imported and anyone born after the law passes is not born a slave, no matter the status of their parents. Then, (hopefully) slave owners don't get all violent over losing their 'property', and slavery is slowly abolished in the country over the course of a generation.
Is it as good as complete, total, and immediate abolishment of slavery? Hell no. But if it could have ended slavery without a war that killed millions, maybe it's worth it. Especially if it was done in Washington's time, such that slavery would already be essentially over by the time the Civil War would have otherwise started. So, on the balance, less people suffering under slavery overall. Pragmatism?
Oh well, who are we kidding? The slave owners would never have allowed such a law to stand, and they'd start a different Civil War about it if nothing else worked.
Just for reference. It was more than I thought.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2414919121
New estimates of US Civil War mortality from full-census records
Joan Barceló, Jeffrey L. Jensen, Leonid Peisakhin, and Haoyu Zhai
Edited by Margaret Levi, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; received July 25, 2024; accepted September 25, 2024
Oops, shit. I was off by about an order of magnitude on the death toll. Still, though.
Oh wow, defending a slaver for wanting to keep his slaves? I wasn’t expecting to actually encounter one in the wild today.
Oh come off it. I'm not defending the fucker. Just saying that a slow, gradual abolishment of slavery that started much earlier might have been an overall better outcome, with fewer people enslaved and fewer people killed over it.
Kill all slavers.
That is indeed a very nice goal. But is it practically achievable?
If only more than one of those were pictured.
The only ones that want us to believe that are the fascists. If they can keep us fighting each other, we won't be able to fight them.
lmao, agreed.
E: whoops, those two sentences were so contradictory I could only remember the second by the time I was responding.
Those are just different words for the same things.
They’re not, but your antifascism meter is mis-calibrated.
These memes remind me of my high school religion teacher (I went to Catholic school in Canada, "religion" was what you would call Civics) who introduced the political spectrum. He wrote the usual line across the chalkboard with left/center/right labels, and explained what they were. Then, he extended the chalk line to the right, off the board and onto the wall, and continued past the corner onto the next wall. He was about half way to the back of the room before he started writing down names of any of our political leaders at the time. I don't remember most of the names from 30 years ago, but Conrad Black was on the back wall.
Every political discussion is civil until you say “maybe states shouldn’t exist”
Democrats today are Republicans of 1980s-90s, in my opinion; without a doubt in regards to corporations and billionaires specifically.
"The New Deal" is a dim memory of the beforetimes
Democrats of the 90s were Republicans of the 80s.
That ratchets been going for decades!
In a sane world centre would be 'status quo making decisions based on objective reality' yet somehow even the idea that we should base our decisions on verifiable data is like super extreme gay communism left by current standards.
No way fr? It's like being a liberal doesn't make you a leftist and that you can definitely be a right wing liberal
You can indeed be a right wing liberal, it is however more difficult to be a left wing conservative
is being a left wing conservative even possible?
If we consider one of the key value of the "left" being progress, I think it is difficult to concillate both.
Not really no, closest is a Moderate Conservative, which is just any conservative with a leaning towards the center
I am of the opinion that green are very often left wing conservatives.
I thought they were communists
Not on lemmy, where being left means you have to absolutely and entirely go along with whatever the others feel should be a leftist belief. Purity tests all day every day, followed up by literal campaigns and concerted efforts by other "leftists" against the offending people.
See the whole online boycott war being fought against .ml because the owners ran afoul of something. Lemmy is just as stupid as other social media but has a different demographic, which makes it at least for the time being more palatable.
A "conservative" leftist would probably be someone who generally agrees on economic theory but has a less open and progressive view towards social issues such as marriage rights or immigration.
What you define is segregation : a society where progress benefits me, but not you, because you are different.
What i define is how most actually socialist or communist countries of the past were organized though. See for example the GDR, socially just as conservative as most other countries at the time; to the point that the formerly GDR part of germany is now a breeding ground for far right political power.
My point is not that socially conservative ideas have merit, but that they are not inherently ideologically incompatible with wanting a not-capitalist economy. And that we do ourselves little good by constantly falling back into the old leftist trope of never being able to achieve political power because everyone only agrees on like, 90% of issues.
You are mixing a lot of things here : capitalist vs anti capitalist regime is not this same as progressive/conservative politics.
If you believe social progress should benefit only you and not me, you are not progressive.
And I'd like to point out that all regimes you mention are not different from any other : they all had a ruling class. This is, again, not progressive.
And as I pointed out in an other comment: studies suggest that Totalitarianism is not about left or right, because they use the same concepts to validate their ideologies.
Damn you're hilarious, any more jokes in there?
I would say that most liberals are right leaning. They're not willing to stand up for leftist values. When people "accuse" them of wanting open borders they backpeddle like crazy.
Yeah in the rest of the world Liberalism is a right wing political philosophy. Just because you believe in the words of Voltaire doesn’t make you a left wing. Liberals aren’t even center left progressives.
Who is this guy in right side from Trump?
Stephen Miller
Peewee German, the Nosferatu
In other western democracies, the US democrats are seen as the equivalent of the local conservative parties.
There is no real US equivalent for European leftist / social-democratic parties. The US republicans, on the other hand, are like the borderline illegal Nazi / nationalist rightwing parties that Putin built up and strengthened in the last decades all across Europe
Could someone clarify the watch this space part?
Entering that space is risky. For politicians it means endless primary challenges from the right with bottomless campaign funding.
For individuals it means being fairgamed by right wing watchdogs. Online harassment campaigns, doxxing, swatting, squealing or falsifying info to ICE, etc.
Pretty obvious but what this country needs is a surge of real leftist politicians. Not that a far left loonie is more moral than a far right loonie. What we need is balance. Its what is missing from every bill and every law.
Chasing "balance" is how we got here in the first place.
Ha ha ha ha.
Thanks mate.
Well you see, it's going to do a trick.
Now watch Schummer fall in line with Trump, now that the Iran war has begun. This is how we know he was never a lefty!
fuckin' Schomer Yssrael ass dork. the fact that all us ashkenazi are as related as we are means he's probably my cousin makes me want to slap him so fuckin' hard. acting like israel speaks for me, and he speaks for israel, therefor he speaks for me? unacceptable. what a huge fuckin' dork
Disillusioned since 'Hillarycare" scandal 1993. US is run by popularity. Social media seems to run the head space of every US citizen.
Id say biden is center and bernie is left. Bidens policies were often more left than obamas. But its also hard to but them on the same scale that was made for european politics. Biden actually had a few policies which msde trans peoples lifes better while on other fronts supporting policies that would be pretty far right in europe. Europe is generally more economic left while the us is maybe more left socially but idk its quite complicated. Also mamdani isnt on this but same with him. Id say hes center left. Definitely not full left or how trump likes to call him a radical leftist.
Being more left wing than a right winger does not make you a centrist.
The annoying thing here is that there is a relative and an absolute notion of leftism, and it's really hard to get a good grasp of what actual centrism and actual leftism looks like when your entire context consists of people who consider anything slightly left of full blown fascism "centrist" or even "left wing".
he's center-left in the context of american politics. his policy positions would basically be in alignment with Germany's FDP which is centre-right
In some respects. The FDP would never subsidize green technologies on such a scale though.
"We have to be open to all technologies, so strategically advancing those that make sense and aren't scams would lead to an evil planned economy!"
funny thing is, it wasn't even all that subsidized
some grants and a tax break, the next administration eliminated that practically overnight
Leftist everywhere else means RABID ANARCHIST
If your anarchist is rabid, make sure to contact the local animal control and get them vaccinated.
There is no cure for rabies...
Who is making the claim otherwise? The term tossed around is socialist and more ignorantly communists.
There are still ignorant people out there who think otherwise unfortunately.
Never have been.
The true irony being that anyone who ever thought the upper version was the US political spectrum also likely has no idea about a century of Dixiecrats and how Southern conservatives after the Civil War all aligned as Democrats as a "Fuck you" to Northern Republicans - Lincoln in particular. IIRC, it was post-LBJ era and push to get Nixon elected that finally flipped the labeling back, which should tell you all you need to know about him and the conservatives.
's kinda all I was trying to say with https://lemmy.wtf/post/34844222
No matter where you are on the left, they're not there.
Because that's not even left.
https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2024
Rowan and Martin were a comedy dua that were fairly liberal and got William F. Buckley, a notable conservative, to appear on their show by promising to fly him to Los Angeles in a plane with two right wings. I am quite sure that the US has been flying with two right wings for longer than lthat.
You know how some international cuisines have to cater to the taste of the country they're operating in? Like Chinese or Mexican food, if they don't add a lot of sugar in the ingredients, US people won't eat it. Same with leftism. If they don't add a little bit of right, they can't cater to the political palate of the average Joe.
And this, of course, is by design. The American people are heavily propagandized and indoctrinated.
Abso-fucking-lutely. Also the rest of the world has been propagandized for decades through Hollywood. I was guilty of believing some things for years, the main one was that freedom of speech in the US was sacred and honoured. I was naive.
See, we have to support genocide because we can't win without it!
Later:
Stupid fucking voters won't accept the genocide we worked so hard for!
There is more to the world than israel and palestine
Yeah. But the only thing in this world that any centrist has ever supported or will ever support is the genocide in Palestine.
They abandon literally every other policy at the slightest pushback. They support genocide and absolutely nothing else ever.
Bernie on the wrong side of centre.
Certainly feels that way
Who's the guy between Joe and Mitch?
I think its Jeb Bush. Not 100% sure though.
Yeah that's 100% jeb
Who is Joe and Mitch
Biden and Mitch McConnell
Rage bait post
I mean yes and no.
This idea of a spectrum is flexible.
If you have a left and a right, the center is always the median or mean.
It will move. It's not fixed.
There is no blank side.
The center will shift. That's how it works.
No, I think the real answer is that everyone needs to STFU about this whole right vs left thing.
I was listening to my girlfriend give a long monologue about her political views, and it dawned on me: there aren't two "directions" of politics right now.
There is greed, and there is empathy. You either care about wealth and status, or you care about others.
What it looks like after this crisis is solved is a different matter all together.
Edit: yes. Duh. I described leftist ideals. People HAVE leftist ideas. A significant majority of them. The simple solution is to stop making it about left or right.
Proceeds to describe the left and the right.
The other point is that people are too stupid to understand what "left vs right" means. They are entirely overused words now. It's empathy vs greed. That's it. It's simple, it's in terms people understand.
Proceeds to miss the point entirely, and continues being divisive
But I'd rather have your shitty take on my side, than a billionaire's shitty take on humanity as a product
Edit: I appreciate y'all talking with me about it
Is Leninism left? Is stalinism right?
i think most Americans, care about the former rather than latter. almost every discussion is about money and who is better or what because they had more money, who is richer than who, and who has a career and who doesnt, this includes both sides of the spectrum, mostly some D voters i know and observe fit much better with being REPUBLICANS. its more intense in some POC cultures. my peeve is when they keep comparing incomes and careers of people to yours or someone elses, but they fail to see they are the sole cause or lack of upbring/raising they are doing.
Fucking thank you! I'm a little tired of the ideological bashing. When less than 1% of the population is choosing imaginary profit over actually trying to fucking help... I don't give a flying fuck if you're left, right, center, liberal, tankie, anarchist, vegan, or any other number of fucking labels... they're killing us and they ain't concerned about repercussions for being a blight on humanity
Idk how to fix it. I'm just tired of the "blame game", when there's obvious aggressors that need to be humbled. Stop eating your own young and fucking practice what you believe... that we're all in this trying to survive and we aint got much say about how the powers at play decide to be fucking evil
But you, yourself, can decide to focus on the actual people causing actual problems. Retribution is just vengeance-porn, let's focus on one obstacle at a time... like maybe agreeing to disagree, and putting out the fire that's currently burning.
I'm sick of the imaginary divide, when there's a very obvious one that has never been fully squashed... greedy mother fuckers and their twisted worldview
"What could one banana cost? $10?" ...fuck them people, if they can't figure out what it costs to be human
Updated for the one I see fediverse lie often about, and the DNC’s new Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
— Actual Leftist.
this is fucking ridiculous. mamdani and abughazaleh to the right of obama? they're not even to the right of warren. whoever made this is a child.
yar welcom to fix it.
I felt they are both around Obama, ’cause he actually implemented Affordable Healthcare Act in 2010. But blatantly he bailed the ruling class. Both mamdani and abughazaleh don't want to do anything against the ruling class, so they praxis conservative policies: Childcare (state needs more babies), 🏳️🌈 rights (to extract more), public transit (blatantly for income flow), etc. I await to see what they’ll do irt policing. But their stances still maintain the rulers ruling.
the ACA is just an implementation of the mitt romney plan. it was republican made and it's not a government option. the only reason the republicans don't want it is because a black man put it out there.
Reread what you replied, and follow the political logic there. Where does that praxis lie again?
unfortunately i don't follow yours. the reason i didn't even address the rest of your comment is because i think it's pointless, i just wanted to point out a fact because it annoyed me that you think childcare and free buses are conservative policies but the actual healthcare plan devised by conservatives is more left wing. you can make anything conservative if you're enough of a cynical hermit:
universal healthcare? obv capitalists need their workers to be healthy do they can slave away more.
raise taxes on the 1%? clearly the government just wants more cash!
LGBTQ rights? you just want more people to serve in the military and partake in capitalism.
What leftist politics do you even know? Because the sources I am using are both ancient and contemporary.
Conservatism can be summarized in one quip:
Mamdani’s praxis serve the banks and landlords of New York. If private equity & Wall Street remain, his policies are rightwing.
Abughazaleh is further rightwing than Mamdani, because she wants a prosecution class to return to Obama era of politics. It remains to be seen what else she will do if she gets elected at all.
you think mamdani can just abolish the stock market?
Why is Bernie Sanders shown as left-of-center? Solid right-centrist at best.
If he’s left, he can touch the center without his full arm extended
Not a reach to touch the right when you’re not even solidly against genocide.
I hope he’s playing an electoral game on this one because 😬 yiiiiiiish
What, like, the “I still have a chance at the 2028 presidency if I just triangulate this right” game?
This. The left starts at anti capitalism. Imperialism being the highest stage of capitalism means that if sanders isn’t fully against genocide, he’s not left of center.
Palestine didn't happen in a vacuum.
You guys understand that this is subjective?
They may not be left enough for you personally but they represent the political spectrum of in the US.
It depends. We Americans have been propagandized against "socialism" and "communism" for over a century, so in media discourse, this might be the political spectrum. But when polled on issues, apart from party identity, Americans support policies far to the left of any politician. Universal health care is perhaps the canonical example.
Yeah but how can you elect progressive representatives if the population is not progressive.
There's some good evidence that Sanders would've won. And Mamdani did. The population can be progressive when progressive candidates are allowed to run.
You're saying the population is more progressive than the candidates the dems put up? That's quite the claim.
And a trivial one to verify, since a 2024 poll found 62% of Americans support a single-payer health care system. And, recall that same-sex marriage achieved majority public support before Democratic leaders, like Obama and Clinton, shifted their stances to support it.
Do you think that Trump won because the democrats didn’t alienate enough minorities? Maybe they weren’t supportive enough of genocide?
Trump won because he got more votes than the Democrats.
Elected US Politicians represent the political spectrum of electoral US politics? Wow, thanks for the insight.
The full spectrum on a left/right axis in a liberal democracy is actually not that subjective. It’s bordered on the left and right by people who actually reject the liberal democracy: the far left who want to overthrow the system to achieve better equality and conditions for the greater number, and the far right, who want to overthrow the system to achieve stronger privileges for the in-group they belong to.
Indeed, US politicians do not represent the full spectrum of ideas in between those extremes. The political spectrum of the US is what it is, sure, and that’s actually what this meme is all about.
Yes but every commenter in this thread is complaining that their supposed progressive representatives are in fact conservative.
My point is, they represent the spectrum of the US, and by definition some are more progressive than others.