Found this graph online for anyone who might still be confused. I think this makes it much more clear.
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.
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.
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.
Genocide Joe still was a right-wing politician. With his hwole political legacy.
Twice, so far
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)
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?
Bernie on the wrong side of centre.
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
Certainly feels that way
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.
No one really gives a fuxk about palestine at this ppint except agitators. The world is bigger than israel amd palestine
Palestine didn’t happen in a vacuum.
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:
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Enough of the US voting population leans far enough right to move the window, or
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Political policy is being dictated by forces other than what voters find acceptable.
#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
the Overton Window is shaped by what is acceptable to voters
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.
Political policy is being dictated by forces other than what voters find acceptable.
Yup. 🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
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.
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I don’t think the US is the outlier that people think it is. Other “democratic” nations are undergoing the same political issues at the behest of the same economic interests.
With the major difference that those nations have a lot more social programs to combat poverty and homelessness, and have health insurance that doesn’t bankrupt people. That really helps with social cohesion and prevents larger scale radicalization.
And yet we’re witnessing a similar large scale shift to the right across many of those same unnamed (but presumably European) nations.
Which is the working of targeted propaganda spread by the legacy and social media and not an innate function of “democratic” nations.
Rage bait post
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.
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.
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
There is no left or right anymore. There are only fascists and antifascists.
Why did George Washington lead the continental army again?
To avoid taxes on “owning” people:
none of those whose misfortune it is to have slaves as attendants will visit the City if they can possibly avoid it; because by so doing they hazard their property
when slaves who are happy & content to remain with their present masters, are tampered with & seduced to leave them; when masters are taken at unawar[e]s by these practices; when a conduct of this sort begets discontent on one side and resentment on the other, & when it happens to fall on a man whose purse will not measure with that of the Society, & he looses his property for want of means to defend it—it is oppression in the latter case, & not humanity in any; because it introduces more evils than it can cure.
it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptable degrees
Whoever apprehends the said Negroes, so that the Subscriber may readily get them, shall have, if taken up in this County, Forty Shillings Reward, beside what the Law allows; and if at any greater Distance, or out of the Colony, a proportionable Recompence paid them, by George Washington
it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptable degrees
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.
Our national estimate is 698,000 Civil War deaths. This is substantially higher than the conventional historical estimate of 618,000 but lower than the most recent estimate of around 750,000 deaths based on a 1% census sample.
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, 2024Oops, 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?
Forgive my propaganda learning, I thank you good person.
Always has been, it’s only that now the violence turns inwards.
so… left and right then?
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.
Which are basically just synonyms for left and right.
This graph needs updating tbh. Bernie is not centerleft lol. And Obama and Hillary are far right as well. Tax cuts, dronebombings, imperialism and so on. The atrocities in Libya, the coup in Ukraine and all the other heinous shit. Don’t let pinkwashing fool you
Them cutting ACORN or giving bailouts to banks in 2008… It’s incredible what good PR does to the perception of these monsters.
Bernie Sanders is center left by all standards. You never had contact with left, or far left.
He is center right by the standards I have put forth, so definitionally not all standards.
Regarding your second point, I’d like to say it sounds like you haven’t had much interaction with leftists or left-wing political theory, considering your response.My grandpas were partisan, my father in Democrazia proletaria, police have pics of me at 4 in a general strike. We occupied schools and fabrics. I grew in a trozkjist family. My friend, you have no idea was it is the left.
Neat! I hang out with communist guerillas and a friend of mine carried out some sabotages when he was young and now he’s a union organizer. Also my dick is larger than yours. Also also you’re not my friend, fuck off with the condescension and, once again, educate yourself. Having family that has been politically involved does not mean you suddenly have an integral understanding of politics.
Considering the many Eastern European chuds I’ve met, it’s honestly more likely the opposite is the case.Edit: I cannot imagine being proud of associating with trots lol. Does explain your lack of political understanding though.
Tou are nist probabky american. One can tell. Never occupied a school, never occupied your work of place, never been in permanent assembly or auto managed context. That is why u understood nothing of what I said. You system is failing you and damaging the world thanks to trotzijist and communist parties in europe we have 36 hours, medical leaves, vacations and worker rights. You guys go bankrupt for an ambulance. That’s why im proud of coming from a certain background. I would suggest YOU to study something. Start with Marx, cowboy.
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.
Removed by mod
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
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.
This 100% - it’s part propaganda.
Could someone clarify the watch this space part?
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.
Well you see, it’s going to do a trick.
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.
