[asveikau]

I will risk some downvotes to point this out...

You must be confused. There is no left in this country. The Dems are a center right party shifting rightward over the last few decades in line with the general rightward shift in most national officeholders.

For all this deriding of "the left" I hear from my righty friends I cannot name very many authentically leftist officeholders or party leadership. Instead, that party just offers what used to be considered Republican plans (like Gingrich or Romney's views on health care, or the Reagan/Bush tax policy)

[dragonwriter]

> The Dems are a center right party shifting rightward over the last few decades in line with the general rightward shift in most national officeholders.

That's not entirely true; the Democratic rightward shift pretty much stopped around 2008, plus or minus a little bit. It's dominated by a center-right faction, but it has a substantial (and resurgent over the past ~decade, after having been in retreat since the late 1980s) faction that is somewhere between center-left and left (but not hard left.)

[asveikau]

I think worldwide the rightward shift really accelerated in the timeframe you're talking about and the years that followed, when seemingly every elected person of seemingly all persuasions started to love austerity.

And in the US, the Obama years were tempered from day 1 by the crowd that wanted to moderate a perceived left counter-push which never materialized in legislation. Witness Obamacare is not and never was seriously proposed to be single payer, it has always been a 1990s GOP alternative to single payer.