I'm not sure how left this is: "If there's actual conversation on there, it's probably just a bunch of people with Wonder Woman avatars assuring each other that America is Already Great™."
What do you mean? This is _precisely_ what I'd expect. Hating on (neo)liberals like Hillary Clinton is damn near ubiquitous on left forums these days, as is dismissing what they perceive as shallow identity politics and conflating liberals with the right.
Like, you literally couldn't have picked a better quote to sum up the left's views in 2017, and then you captioned it with "I'm not sure how left this is".
Agreed, I have a comment down below expressing frustration at exactly that. I was just speaking on the terms that the parent comment was: liberals aren't very popular these days on the left _or_ the right, and as such aren't very well-represented in hard-left forums.
That being said, I wouldn't really classify Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama as all that leftist. In the two-axis model, they're sort of straight down-the-middle centrist liberals (like me!)
There is nothing centrist about Clinton or Obama or even the Democratic party, they're right of center. That's why Sanders was so incredibly popular, because he espoused true liberal beliefs, and something that hasn't been heard or represented in a long, long time.
Treating left as if it has some inherent, context-free meaning is ridiculous. If you're going to define a spectrum, the context matters, and the context we're currently discussing is American politics.
You may as well say that American politics only contains extreme leftists, when compared to the rest of American history.
Sure it is, leftism occupies a spectrum of economic and social ideals, which the US left (led by the DNC) falls uniformly outside that spectrum. I mean Monarchists are left of fascists, but that doesn't make monarchists leftist just because you compare them to something further right.
Just because your system is dominated by capitalists doesn't make the rest of the spectrum irrelevant, and redefining the conversation to fit into your narrow band is what has led to the frustrations with the American situation.
The American left is not left when considering the entire spectrum of left-right political ideas, and you don't get to suddenly chose to define something as leftist within the context of your narrow window of acceptable thought, it must encompass all ideas.
Eh, not really, Hillary Clinton is way to the right of most non-US western politicians. It's just that the US skews so heavily to the right to begin with that she seems normal.
It's why confusing the Democrats, a party whose dominant faction is a center-right one with the left is a problem, but its not really a problem with reducing politics to a single axis (that is a problem, in general, though its actually not that inaccurate when it comes to US politics.)
Hillary is center-right by international standards, and the radical left treats her as such. You won't find many leftists praising Clinton, even if some of them voted for her out of desperation.
I think that most anarchists and leftists are opposed to the Democrats as well as the Republicans, seeing them as similarly center-right on most meaningful issues.
It does sometimes result in funny moments like this where the critique of American liberal Democrats could easily come from either side.
Like, you literally couldn't have picked a better quote to sum up the left's views in 2017, and then you captioned it with "I'm not sure how left this is".