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Defining the Left in the USA
DouglasDanger
PennsylvaniaRegistered User regular
PennsylvaniaRegistered User regular
How do you define the Left in the USA?
The USA skews considerably more conservative, both economically and socially, than most of the world.
Issues like gun control, quiltbag rights, reproductive Rights, healthcare, anti trust laws, workers rights, consumer protections, and many more, the USA is considerably further right than anywhere else on the planet that claims to be a representative democracy.
Do you define the Left in the context of the USA, or inline with the rest of the planet?
Is Bernie Sanders a leftist, or is he a somewhat liberal centrist?
Is Biden a centrist or a conservative?
The USA skews considerably more conservative, both economically and socially, than most of the world.
Issues like gun control, quiltbag rights, reproductive Rights, healthcare, anti trust laws, workers rights, consumer protections, and many more, the USA is considerably further right than anywhere else on the planet that claims to be a representative democracy.
Do you define the Left in the context of the USA, or inline with the rest of the planet?
Is Bernie Sanders a leftist, or is he a somewhat liberal centrist?
Is Biden a centrist or a conservative?
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Furthermore, "the rest of the planet" has just as much of a kaleidoscopic interpretation of what "The Left" is as the US. I would agree that the us both overuses "liberal" as a synonym for "left" and "progressive" and has historically lacked a traditional social democratic/labor party equivalent to the ones in Europe (note that some of these parties however are certainly to the right of the Democratic party when it comes to things like immigration and the previously listed reproductive and LGBTQI rights). Had the US socialist party not been dismantled through various state and political acts during (and in the wake of) the world wars it may have been a different story.
Bernie is comfortably in the social democratic tradition, an FDR Democrat "at worst," and to call him a liberal centrist again displays a myopic and ignorant perspective on what goes on with other countries.
It's the very unfortunate LGBT+ acronym.
OP has forgotten that India exists while writing the post...
edit: the OP question isn't really answerable because of the fundamental flaw inherent in assuming the rest of the planet defines it the same way - Brazilians and Indians and South Koreans and Germans do not share a leftist definition. But I still think it should be considered within the context of the electorate where it operates. My left is not your left, but that's OK. We have different history, internal stresses, and political drivers, we should have different definitions.
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Yeah let's not forget the whole Kashmir thing going on right now, in addition to the myriad Intra-Indian affairs.
Also I learned this year that abortion isn't fully legal in New Zealand (excepting extreme circumstances like rape/incest, health of mother, etc). New Zealand, where Jacinda Arden is PM and they're overseeing a gun buyback program!
Divorce wasn't legalized in Ireland until 1996. Abortion wasn't legal until this fucking year and even then only until week 12.
See Brexit in the UK, the French and German persecution of their Muslim minorities, etc.
That OP is just one big "see me after class" hot take honestly.
Woah! Awesome, thanks!
Abortion rights in NZ isn't great if you're poor.
If you can afford the time/effort/money to doctor shop you're fine.
Which is terrible, and should be fixed. But you can understand why there hasn't been a super hard push to fix it.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
This is why I'd never call a lot of the Dems Leftists: they are not fundamentally aligned with the movement, they are Liberal Market Capitalists. That is not Leftism.
That said, I think the term "left" is pretty vague in general, so the thread could probably benefit from trying to define the term itself. People talk about being "left" on issues like immigration and gun control (this one is even more confusing because socialists tend to be more pro-gun than liberals), but it's not entirely clear to me what abstract feature those issues share with collectivist vs capitalist economies. Political economy is the only arena where the dichotomy seems wholly sensible to me.
Traditionally it's been not all of these things in many places and even none of these things sometimes.
I think trying to break this down into a simplistic left-right framework really breaks down completely the instant you go multi-national. There's a lot of variation in political culture between even similar countries.
I mean social liberalism has been a thing since the 19th century, and while that certainly entails class conflict (or at least class tensions) with the working classes who would gravitate to labor/social democratic (or even outright DemSoc) parties, I certainly think there are liberals who are sympathetic to the labor movement. Now I would state emphatically that not all liberals are leftists, but some liberals? I would say they're at least left-adjacent.
Denmark's social Democrats (now governing the country in a coalition) were ready to do a fascism lite this year on folks immigrating to the country, and it was the liberals who pushed back on gross things like confiscation of folks' possessions and holding foreign nationals convicted of crimes offshore.
You have authoritarianism versus libertarianism, right?
There's a lot of snark and sarcasm here that I don't think is helpful.
Best rule of thumb Ive read was measuring on two axis of equality and central control.
Maybe don't opine in a thread you made that the US is "considerably further right than anywhere else on the planet that claims to be a representative democracy" then?
If you're going to come out guns blazing rhetorically, have at least some receipts in the back pocket.
1) we have a congressional/presidential democracy instead of a parliamentary democracy (or a parliamentary/semi-presidential democracy)
2) our elections are FPTP & winner take all.
1 + 2 ensure that we can only have two viable political parties and those two parties will trend towards the ideological center, except...
3) our electoral system privileges rural and low-density-suburb voters (not merely with the electoral college, but in both houses of Congress as well)
so the ideological mean of the two parties is not the true national average, but one that is skewed much closer to rural voters
As long as rural voters are primarily right-wing (which wasn't always the case in our nation's history, but has been increasingly the case since industrialization), this means that our electoral center of gravity is tilted to the right.
Consequently, it's inevitable that we'll have a centrist party (Democrats) and a right-wing party (Republicans) with no true left wing to balance them out.
This situation could change with significant enough demographic shifts, but don't hold your breath. The advantages (right-wing) party figured out that they can use their disproportionate political power to further corrupt the electoral system, which will allow them to cancel out demographic changes for a long, long time.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Well step one of finding a useful mindset is to break out of this idea that we're the regressive hellhole and everywhere else is way more enlightened and progressive , particularly when 'everywhere else' seems to have left off the largest democracy on earth and most of the ones south of the equator.
that's not snark, I'm being serious here. You can't think that way and arrive at anything approaching a defensible or informative position.
These are where leftist politics has failed to be leftist, essentially where leftist movements have failed to properly identify the intersectional needs of a movement that proposes the socio-economic liberation of exploited people.
I didn't listen to the episode, but on twitter someone posted a clip (I think they said it was on Chapo?) of Michael Moore calling out the bullshit of allowing the framing of the working class as being synonymous with white male who goes to work in a hard hat a lunchbag, and that the working class today is primarily people of color and women.
Leftists still have to live in society, and they're not immune from cultural messaging - and we live in a society that heavily pushes the idea that white cishetero male is "normal".
This seems like it's just some sort of definition shell-game. No True Leftist and all that.
Maybe those those other people just disagree on the basis of those policies while still being left according to a lot of criteria.
And the countries in Europe with a strong social democracy tend to elect conservative parties that would like to repeal those policies as soon as there's any hint of a demographic shift.
I mean it's my definition, so yeah I can in fact define an ideal Leftism and criticise "leftists" that fall short.
This post basically explains it. The politics of a country are going to be heavily influenced by the way governments are created in a country.
Also
This too
I don't know if this is actually true, but I think it is the case that the USA is the most demographically heterogeneous democracy by a long stretch. Most EU democracies haven't had to grapple with issues of race to any significant degree and don't exactly come off as shining beacons of liberalism when they do...
The USA feels to me, like a classical liberalism capitalism flirting with Christian fascism
From my limited perspective, at least
However the presence of populist right-wing movements kinda fucks that old French Estates General paradigm over.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If you're rural or in a red/purple state it can probably feel like that to an oppressive degree. Urban and suburban areas often are nearly 1:1 to the typical Eurocentric democracies a lot of us idolize. What's never really talked about in more than hushed tones is how often their cultural hegemony plays an extremely large role in this. You shake it up, add in some people that don't quite mesh, and suddenly you're looking at the equivalent to a rural Kentuckian GOP congresscritter.
The US isn't the greatest in the world, I won't say that, but we're doing remarkably well excluding this, hopefully, small hiccup.
There isn't really any such thing as "leftist" economic policy, because a fascist can take any left wing economic proposal that is good, exclude minorities, and turn it into a right wing program on the basis of that exclusion.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
We are still so lacking, but because of our enshrinement of white supremacy in our founding (both politically and economically) and the cold-hot-cold (still!) civil war over it, we’ve had to grapple with this issue for longer and more critically than most other countries.
That being said, we missed out on most of the “fun” about religion (we’re trying to catch up bough!).
To ebum’s point, the left currently in the US has to prioritize this.
Egalitarian, yes. Cosmopolitan, no. You can be a rural leftist.
idk, I think it's just different. I haven't been overseas since '04 but I was legit blown away by how openly, casually, unconsciously racist people the UK, Ireland, Germany, and France all were. But you look at the healthcare system and it's completely different.