- cross-posted to:
- mop@quokk.au
- cross-posted to:
- mop@quokk.au
Found this graph online for anyone who might still be confused. I think this makes it much more clear.
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In other western democracies, the US democrats are seen as the equivalent of the local conservative parties.
There is no real US equivalent for European leftist / social-democratic parties. The US republicans, on the other hand, are like the borderline illegal Nazi / nationalist rightwing parties that Putin built up and strengthened in the last decades all across Europe
The Overton Window is known to many but still most can’t see how it shapes acceptable politics. What’s left and right in the US is shifted so far right from most other democratic countries.
I think it’s important to recognize the Overton Window is shaped by what is acceptable to voters. This means that the present state of affairs can only be the result of one or both of these scenarios:
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Enough of the US voting population leans far enough right to move the window, or
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Political policy is being dictated by forces other than what voters find acceptable.
the Overton Window is shaped by what is acceptable to voters
No. It’s shaped by what’s acceptable to the media, politicians, and their owner donors.
Much more often than not, the vast majority of voters don’t get to choose beyond harm reduction by choosing the lesser evil. Which is still an evil.
Political policy is being dictated by forces other than what voters find acceptable.
Yup. 🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
#2 it has always been #2 except sometimes those “forces” want the same things or the “forces” that agree with something the public also happens to agree with have a win for a minute
What you’ll notice online is that a lot of these people who want to move the overton window understand this, so their goal is to remove the left from the voting population. There are a lot of ways to do this. You can require ID to vote, and then invalidate trans people’s IDs. You can gerrymander so the votes don’t count. You can just plain old kill people. You can make it very unpleasant to vote. You can suppress candidates who represent the left wing from winning primaries. And if you’re really clever, you can make up a propaganda line that convinces leftists it’s in their own interest not to vote.
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I don’t think the US is the outlier that people think it is. Other “democratic” nations are undergoing the same political issues at the behest of the same economic interests.
With the major difference that those nations have a lot more social programs to combat poverty and homelessness, and have health insurance that doesn’t bankrupt people. That really helps with social cohesion and prevents larger scale radicalization.
And yet we’re witnessing a similar large scale shift to the right across many of those same unnamed (but presumably European) nations.
Which is the working of targeted propaganda spread by the legacy and social media and not an innate function of “democratic” nations.
The propaganda that you speak of has much deeper cultural roots than any democratic principles in any of these nations.
The right-left divide is a fabrication meant to obscure the fact that the actual division is capitalist-socialist. Do you support the owning class, or do you support the working class?
Yeah capitalism isn’t interrupt about free markets and competition or investing in yourself. It’s about the ownership class, and the labour class (those that work for the owner class, make all the money and get proportionally none of it). Companies are mini monarchies where you get no say in the policy, the ownership of the company is usually passed on to descendents, you live half your life abiding by the mini monarchy. You vote outside of work, but not at work, work is not democratic. Even so, governments are not mediators between workers and elite, the people that end up in government are of the elite class and have their own interests in mind. We only have our labour rights and aren’t complete slaves today because of very strong socialist movements during and after the great depression and ww2. They compromised with some socialism to avoid complete socialism, but these movements are of course not too frequently mentioned in history lessons
This 100% - it’s part propaganda.
The funny thing is - to support the working class is to support the owning class. Because when people have more money, they spend more which makes company profits increase and stock go up.
It’s more like “stupid retards who only want to hurt people vs. people who want to help people”.
Personally, I want to help the working class by getting rid of the ruling class and make owning capital a community thing instead of an individual thing.
Bernie isn’t far left by international standards, but I wouldn’t put him in the centre. Nobody in the centre is trying to make radical changes to things. What Bernie is proposing is pretty radical compared to where the US currently is. And, I think if those reforms actually passed, he’d still be trying to move things even more to the left.
And Biden as “far right”? It has lost all meaning if you’re applying that label to him.
Idk. Simping for a fascist ethnostate sure doesn’t seem left to me.
… and it’s just a meme, homie.
It usually takes more than one thing to label somebody left or right.
And “it’s just a meme” is how we ended up with a meme in office twice.
Do you realize how insane our politics are for people to think of supporting a genocide as just one thing on a list of policies?
Yo, the only reason Hitler is considered right-wing, because he wanted to lead the German nation to prosperity. Stop purity-testing!
/s (in case it’s not obvious)
Genocide Joe still was a right-wing politician. With his hwole political legacy.
… wait a second… you think Trump became president, because of leftists not con&idering the Dems anything but right wing? Lol.
Twice, so far
He stopped a rail worker strike for safer working conditions, then six moths latter there was a massive derailment and an environmental catastrophe in Ohio. You would call that left?
Biden was a pro-business Blue. I’d put him a couple steps left of center for his green energy initiatives though.
I think politics is a bit of a spectrum in reality, so not everything politicians do fit nicely on a left/red bar chart when we’re trying to talk about where they stand.
All his green initiatives were catering to private business though. Tax breaks and subsidies with little conditional restraints. If you want left wing green energy initiatives, look at how China does it.
Do you mean that supporting a genocide is a centrist policy?
Yeah they sacrificed nuance for effect - but the scale tipping to the right is still effective. A more informative version with brief explanations of what ‘center’ and ‘left’ and etc. are would be great too.
These memes remind me of my high school religion teacher (I went to Catholic school in Canada, “religion” was what you would call Civics) who introduced the political spectrum. He wrote the usual line across the chalkboard with left/center/right labels, and explained what they were. Then, he extended the chalk line to the right, off the board and onto the wall, and continued past the corner onto the next wall. He was about half way to the back of the room before he started writing down names of any of our political leaders at the time. I don’t remember most of the names from 30 years ago, but Conrad Black was on the back wall.
I don’t think I would say Hillary Clinton was to the left of Joe Biden. At least he had Lena Khan and a strong FCC. Something I don’t think Clinton would have ever done. I would reverse those two.
For that matter I don’t know if Obama is to the left of him either.
There is no left or right anymore. There are only fascists and antifascists.
Which are basically just synonyms for left and right.
Why did George Washington lead the continental army again?
Always has been, it’s only that now the violence turns inwards.
Those are just different words for the same things.
Every political discussion is civil until you say “maybe states shouldn’t exist”
Never have been.
The true irony being that anyone who ever thought the upper version was the US political spectrum also likely has no idea about a century of Dixiecrats and how Southern conservatives after the Civil War all aligned as Democrats as a “Fuck you” to Northern Republicans - Lincoln in particular. IIRC, it was post-LBJ era and push to get Nixon elected that finally flipped the labeling back, which should tell you all you need to know about him and the conservatives.
Democrats today are Republicans of 1980s-90s, in my opinion; without a doubt in regards to corporations and billionaires specifically.
“The New Deal” is a dim memory of the beforetimes
Democrats of the 90s were Republicans of the 80s.
Oh hell nah. Biden was FDR 2.0!!!
👀
In a sane world centre would be ‘status quo making decisions based on objective reality’ yet somehow even the idea that we should base our decisions on verifiable data is like super extreme gay communism left by current standards.
Certainly feels that way
That ratchets been going for decades!
No way fr? It’s like being a liberal doesn’t make you a leftist and that you can definitely be a right wing liberal
Yeah in the rest of the world Liberalism is a right wing political philosophy. Just because you believe in the words of Voltaire doesn’t make you a left wing. Liberals aren’t even center left progressives.
I would say that most liberals are right leaning. They’re not willing to stand up for leftist values. When people “accuse” them of wanting open borders they backpeddle like crazy.
You can indeed be a right wing liberal, it is however more difficult to be a left wing conservative
is being a left wing conservative even possible?
If we consider one of the key value of the “left” being progress, I think it is difficult to concillate both.
Not really no, closest is a Moderate Conservative, which is just any conservative with a leaning towards the center
I am of the opinion that green are very often left wing conservatives.
I thought they were communists
Not on lemmy, where being left means you have to absolutely and entirely go along with whatever the others feel should be a leftist belief. Purity tests all day every day, followed up by literal campaigns and concerted efforts by other “leftists” against the offending people.
See the whole online boycott war being fought against .ml because the owners ran afoul of something. Lemmy is just as stupid as other social media but has a different demographic, which makes it at least for the time being more palatable.
A “conservative” leftist would probably be someone who generally agrees on economic theory but has a less open and progressive view towards social issues such as marriage rights or immigration.
What you define is segregation : a society where progress benefits me, but not you, because you are different.
What i define is how most actually socialist or communist countries of the past were organized though. See for example the GDR, socially just as conservative as most other countries at the time; to the point that the formerly GDR part of germany is now a breeding ground for far right political power.
My point is not that socially conservative ideas have merit, but that they are not inherently ideologically incompatible with wanting a not-capitalist economy. And that we do ourselves little good by constantly falling back into the old leftist trope of never being able to achieve political power because everyone only agrees on like, 90% of issues.
You are mixing a lot of things here : capitalist vs anti capitalist regime is not this same as progressive/conservative politics.
If you believe social progress should benefit only you and not me, you are not progressive.
And I’d like to point out that all regimes you mention are not different from any other : they all had a ruling class. This is, again, not progressive.
And as I pointed out in an other comment: studies suggest that Totalitarianism is not about left or right, because they use the same concepts to validate their ideologies.
Who is this guy in right side from Trump?
Stephen Miller
Peewee German, the Nosferatu
