| My perspective from the Netherlands... The way I see it, the US has two "lefts". Traditional left/progressive values would include things like affordable healthcare, worker protection, progressive taxation, livable wages, the like. Importantly, for all. The Democrats don't seem to deliver on any of these basics long achieved in many other western countries, therefore I agree that they are neither left nor progressive. By comparison, not even our main right wing party (VVD) would be as conservative as the Democrats on the matters above. So locally, we would see the "left" Democrats as near far-right. That's one huge gap. (as a weird complexity, over here "liberal" means right-wing. In the US it means left-wing. yet since US left-wing is in fact right-wing, I guess it does add up) The second type of left in the US, I do consider truly left. It's hard to put your finger on it, but it includes identity politics, the "woke", down to even marxists. Clearly they are on the rise, at least in media and institutes. Yet they are now in an unhappy marriage with the core of the Democrats, which as we established is right-wing. Good luck with that. For the record, here in the Netherlands we largely reject that type of left. So I agree with most of what you said, except for the Silicon Valley part. You're going to be super surprised how the biggest supporters of extreme left policy are in fact rich comfortable people. I'll refer to one of the most mind blowing tweets ever produced (now deleted). A co-founder of Twitter took issue with the founder of Coinbase disallowing political discussion in the workplace, and tweeted: "When the revolution comes, me-only capitalists like X will be the first to be put against the wall. I'll be happy to provide video narration." The extremity and cruelty is impressive, but the truly shocking part is that the person tweeting it has a net worth of 300M. |