[AsyncAwait]

> I'm going to assume you're not in the USA.

Am not, but follow the politics there closely.

> Washington DC is over 70% Democrat

Am not talking about the actual place "Washington DC", am talking about it as a seat of power, the seat of government. The politicians in the House and Senate and their leanings.

> which is our left wing party

The Democratic Party is nowhere near "left-wing" by what most of the developed world understands that to mean. The Democratic Party has policies equivalent to the Conservative Party in Britain, (The Conservative Party is a right-wing party).

It is precisely because of the extremely right-wing ideology of most lawmakers in Washington that you have moved to such a position where the center-right, (Democrats), are called "left-wing" and the far-right, (Republicans), are refereed to as "center-right". Only in the USA. You don't have a viable left-wing party over there.

There's people like Bernie Sanders and AOC that are what I'd call center-left, but because how far right the acceptable debate in the USA has shifted, they're "socialists".

[_khhm]

AOC literally refers to herself as a socialist https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/01/democratic-sociali...

[dragonwriter]

AOC is not part of the dominant faction of the Democratic Party; both major US parties are basically broad coalition, the Republicans basically Right to Far Right (with he latter being currently dominant) while the Democrats are basically Center-Right (dominant) to Center Left. (The “Democratic Socialists” within and aligned with the Democratic Party are more Social Democrats by any non-US standard than actual Socialists.)

There is effectively no real representation of the left, beyond the center-left, in US electoral politics.

[AsyncAwait]

You misunderstood, again.

Yes she does, because she's working within the American context. What I am saying is that she would not be refereed to as"socialist" in much of the rest of the developed world. She is only a "socialist" because of how right-wing the USA political context is.

An easy way you can tell, even as an American, is that she's not advocating for abolishing capitalism and seizing the means of production, which are the central pillars of socialism. She's advocating for some social policies that have been common elsewhere for decades.

[allannienhuis]

I'm no student of politics, so I could well be way off base, but isn't 'abolishing capitalism and seizing the means of production' central pillars of communism, not socialism?

[AsyncAwait]

> isn't 'abolishing capitalism and seizing the means of production' central pillars of communism, not socialism?

Depends. Socialism has a wide variety of forms. Some are closer to communism than others. Whether we talk about socialism, or communism, more "worker-control" over resources is usually a central pillar of both. It's just that the closer one gets to communism within socialism, the more "means of production" they support turning over to the worker.

It's worth noting that even the USSR did not refer to itself as communist, it was simply 'on a path there', if you will.

From all I know, in the US they think of this when they think "socialist". There's little difference in their mind. I simply wanted to dispel the notion that somebody like AOC is anywhere near "socialist" in the Soviet sense. What she's advocating for is just to import some social policies as per the Nordic model, but not to fundamentally change the existing system to be closer to USSR, which is what many on the right seem to imagine.