[wutbrodo]

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".

[tray5]

If I'm being honest it's because the American left really isn't leftist at all, and I think that Americans are becoming aware of it

[blowski]

Which just goes to show that reducing politics to a simple "left-right" axis is part of the problem, and not particularly helpful.

[wutbrodo]

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!)

[pfarnsworth]

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.

[tray5]

The entire democratic party really isn't leftist, outside of the heavily skewed American ecosystem, they're centre right.

[wutbrodo]

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.

[tray5]

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.

[tomjakubowski]

You're confusing "the American left" with the Democratic Party. The US left exists, it's just terribly unorganized and has little political power. Their opposition has simply done a better job of marginalizing them compared to left movements in other countries.

[Domenic_S]

That's just not a meaningful distinction. Technically correct, probably -- useful? Nah.

[pamqzl]

> 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

No it doesn't. I mean the single-axis "left" and "right" classification is fairly meaningless to begin with, but you don't get to be the one who decides where is where.

>I mean Monarchists are left of fascists

Not really. I mean, this is another example of where the "left-right spectrum" is completely useless. It's like asking whether Mars is north of Winnipeg. Monarchism and fascism aren't even the same type of idea.

> The American left is not left when considering the entire spectrum of left-right political ideas

What is the "entire spectrum" of ideas? What's the left-most possible idea you can think of? What's the right-most possible idea? What's the exact centre? You can't define these things, because the spectrum is meaningless. But if you're talking in the context of American politics, then you can put "the centre" roughly in the middle of what the general opinion of the population believes, i.e. somewhere between Republicans and Democrats, and work from there.

Trying to compare between different countries is fraught with difficulties, however, because the relevant issues are very different in different countries. Let's compare the US to Australia, for instance. In Australia, both major parties and the majority of the population are in agreement on the idea of universal government-funded medical care, which puts them to the left side of US politics. On the other hand, in Australia both major parties are in agreement that any illegal immigrant found in the country should be deported, which puts them both to the right side of US politics. The Australian position on gun control would be left-wing in the US, while the Australian position on inheritance taxes would be right-wing. It's simply not possible to say one is left or right of the other, because the controversial issues are very different.

[chongli]

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.

[dragonwriter]

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.)