[ericmay]

> Because it would help if we were closer to talking about the same thing when talking about a subject

I'll just quibble with this and say that if we're talking about US politics then we are talking about the same thing when we speak of the "left" in the US, because that's what it is regardless of the state of the rest of the world.

I also am not sure there is much value in arguing about how much more "left" some countries are. The fundamentals aren't really different until you talk about communists (and if that's what you're talking about, I abhor communism and don't want that in my country). If you're talking about universal healthcare for example, you're not really talking about something radically different between "more left countries" like the colloquial Sweden, it's just a matter of degree of difference.

[cmrdporcupine]

Ok if we're using "universal healthcare" as a minimum definition of "left wing" (for what it's worth I wouldn't accept that, since even Bismarck's right wing authoritarian Prussia had a universal system) that just supports my argument. Universal healthcare is off the table by both parties in the coming federal election. Biden is against it, so is he left wing? (No, sorry, the "public option" tack onto Obamacare doesn't count)

The reason this matters is because as long as Americans accept this false polarity they are missing choice. Not just because they're a two party system, but because their two parties are defined along an ideological axis that misses entire policy choices. And Americans have been mistakenly educated to believe that "socialism" = "government involvement", and that it is an extreme 'left' pole of the political spectrum, and as such they are increasingly ending up with dysfunctional state systems that do not serve the populace.

That and being able to speak to the rest of the world about politics is why clarity of terms here is, I think, important

[dragonwriter]

> Ok if we're using "universal healthcare" as a minimum definition of "left wing" (for what it's worth I wouldn't accept that, since even Bismarck's right wing authoritarian Prussia has a universal system)

I think universal healthcare is a suitable minimum definition of left wing despite that, since a minimum definition is “without this element, a thing cannot be left wing” not “with this element, a thing must be left wing”.

> Universal healthcare is off the table by both parties in the coming federal election.

No, it's not, whether you are referring to the Presidential or Congressional elections, both of which are federal elections in and, unlike in most parliamentary systems, are separate-though-concurrent elections where the candidate platforms even from the same party have no necessary alignment.

> Biden is against it,

No, he's not.

> so is he left wing?

No, he's a center-right neoliberal, just like the rest of the dominant faction of the Democratic Party, and up through at least the early 90s the dominant faction of the Republican Party, too.

A sizable minority of the Democratic Party, though, is (mostly center-)left, though, and they are a not-insignificant factor in Democratic policy stances currently (US major political parties are effectively multifaction coalitions, and just like any coalition the policy preferences of the dominant faction aren't always those of the coalition.)

> (No, sorry, the "public option" tack onto Obamacare doesn't count)

While I don't particularly like it, being part of the more-left-than-Biden part of the Democratic Party, the public option proposed by Biden as recently fleshed out by the Biden-Sanders joint policy group is, in fact, a proposal for universal coverage, not to dissimilar from some other OECD countries, all of which have universal healthcare but far from all of which have public single-payer like Canada's Medicare or public provision like the UK NHS.