[heyjamesknight]

> and it's not even left from a European perspective.

This is a meme that needs to die. Its just not true.

The Democratic party in the US is right in line with Labor/Socialist/Whatever Mainstream Leftist Party you want to point at in Europe. It has members who end up on various sides of the left-wing spectrum. There are no "far left" parties in the US because we have a two party system.

There are obviously topics where this is not true. But that goes both ways: almost no country on Earth has the level of abortion access that the Democratic party in the US demands. And there are examples of European right wing parties who fight for zero abortion access, which is not the GOP platform currently.

[Amezarak]

Yeah, there are just so many mismatches it doesn't make sense.

- Nearly all European countries have and support a very high consumption tax (VAT). In the US, nobody would be really for this (although some conservatives favor such taxes), but US liberals would be extremely against it due to the regressive nature of consumption taxes.

- The majority of EU countries institute voter ID laws, something supported only by conservatives in the US. States with voter ID laws almost always allow some valid voter ID to be gotten for free, but they are still opposed by liberals.

There are plenty of other examples when you start thinking about it.

[p_ing]

We have entire 100% Democratic-run states that use regressive consumption taxing to fund the State government.

[dns_snek]

What is actually a meme is this need to squash the entire universe of unrelated political beliefs into a single axis of "left vs right".

The Democratic party is just as, if not more socially progressive than many European "left wing" parties on certain issues, that's true, but that's not what anyone is talking about. Issues like abortion and LGBT rights concern personal freedom, they're orthogonal to the left-right axis.

When we say that the Democratic party is to the right of every European left-wing party, and to the right of most right-wing parties, what we're talking about are the economic policies that affect the lives of everyday people.

US democrats can't even get behind table stakes leftist issues like universal healthcare, social safety, progressive taxation, and wealth inequality. They know who pays for their re-election campaigns and who controls the media - it's not the working class. Democrats aren't leftist, they're liberal, which is a night and day difference.

[acoustics]

Democratic Party voters seem to be more aligned with Euro-style socialist policies, but among elected Democrats this is a small minority view.

European socialists usually advocate for direct state ownership of certain industries, sector-wide union contracts, universal (not means-tested) child allowances, fully public health care, wealth taxes, free college, etc. There are a handful of elected Democrats that sign on to some of these views, but these have never been in the actual party platform, since the mainstream of the party roundly rejects these. Democrats are only somewhat radical in certain social/bioethical issues like abortion and LGBT rights (although the latter is being tested, with some influential Dems defecting); otherwise, the better European analogue would be Macron's Renaissance party (formerly En Marche), the UK's Lib Dems, the Nordic countries' social liberal parties.

[Amezarak]

I don't think there's particularly good alignment even on that "axis" (it isn't really an axis, because most things are not inherently one or the other.) A good example of that is the "sector wide union contracts" thing. The default "leftist" position in the US is that things that apply to an entire sector should be legislated rather than negotiated by workers

The US does have child allowances, by the way - during Covid, it was even increased and paid out monthly instead of annually. Increasing it as of late seems to be an "R" policy, at least on the Trump wing.

Are there European countries that offer free college regardless of academic achievement during high school?