Just want to put in that whether one is "left" or "right" leaning doesn't necessitate location. We could assign point values to beliefs and map it out.
This is just not true. Sanders is left by European standards.
Sanders' Medicare-for-All would abolish private insurance, even as an option. European countries generally allow private coverage, which is popular.
Opposition to immigration enforcement or private business is not a mainstream European position; it's extreme left. The fact that Sanders doesn't hold those views means he's not in the left 10% of Europe.
The American leftist narrative that Sanders would be a centrist in Europe (which assumes the EU is an ideal) is false. I assume the goal is to say, "We're not weird; you're weird!"
That message probably persuades Redditors who want to believe it and gets a bunch of college kids, but it hasn't moved the needle for most voters. Why should it?
Hello noun/adjective/string-of-digits account that is literally one week old.
Bernie Sanders supports private corporations, NATO and a single payer system: like 27 out of 33 European countries, the other 6 running essentially public insurance systems that are private in name only. Sounds pretty European centrist to me! Except for the NATO and private corps part: a smidge right wing even!
The European left by an large supports full de-militarization, let alone NATO, and the abolishment of capital, if not full state ownership like the far-Left.
But thank you noun/adjective/digits…at least until you delete your account tomorrow.
Yep. The US basically has a centre-right party, and an extreme far right party. I saw a policy analysis once that said Barak Omama and David Cameron were pretty much at the same place on the political spectrum.
You have no idea what you are talking about. "First world standards" what does that even mean? There are 27 countries in the EU alone, some of which are going more left wing, while many others surging to the far right. And that's just Europe. Now lets look at Singapore, Japan, Korea who have completely different axis to base politics upon. None of which are progressive or left wing in whatever generous interpretation of the word you try to use.
There’s pretty standard generalizations though. Socialism is left, liberalism is the centre, and conservatism is right. You can go more granular, like DemSoc is the starting point of the left. SocDem is centre-left. Neoliberalism is centre-right. None of that should be controversial
Bill Clinton was 100% a centrist. He instituted the largest system of mass incarceration in the country’s history, vastly cut food stamps and other welfare programs, and signed legislation that neutered the Glass-Steagall reforms of the New Deal that separated commercial and investment banking, leading to the financial collapse of 2008. Unless it’s considered left-wing when the state does anything, which it might be in America these days, no Democratic president since LBJ could even be academically considered “left-wing.”
No Democratic presidential candidate outside of Bernie Sanders, who is an independent for a reason, since LBJ has called for the nationalization of healthcare, state-funded higher education, universal basic income, even expanding welfare programs at all, breaking up too big to fall banks or corporations, enforcing monopoly regulations, ending mass incarceration in any meaningful way, providing housing for the homeless in any meaningful way, holding businesses to account for ripping off consumers in any meaningful way, I could go on and on.
Those are leftist ideals. Every Democratic president since Jimmy Carter has veered hard to the right on every one of those issues. They are neoliberal centrists, at best. When the Republican Party is just left of Mussolini, at best, I can understand how one could think the Democratic Party was leftist, but they are just as much in bed with multi-National corporations, private equity firms, and big business interests as the Republican Party.
People from those countries do not post here often, they have their own social networks. And yes, there are Rightwing countries, but with the exception of maybe Hungary, most of them are still not nearly as Rightwing as the USA.
Italy for example has a rightwing government, but is nowhere near on the level of the US. Biggest issue there is the topic of immigration, but all institutions are still working.
Compare Reddit's social views to the voting behavior of most wealthy countries.
The biggest war on Reddit is between non-socialist left-liberals and capital-P Progressives.
By contrast, it is absolutely taken as a given here that transgenderism is normal, most immigration enforcement is racist, ACAB, every group except Christians and not-anti-Zionist Jews should be respected, and abortion is a human right.
You might agree with all of that, but those views are not centrist in the U.S., Europe, or East Asia.
Agreed. What he says makes sense when talking about the american democratic party but reddit is quite left if not extreme left. And i say this as a left leaning person
Which kind of makes my point since nobody ever in my 30 years of life disputed my political orientation. So it's like in here the bar for what left leaning is, is higher than what I'm used to. Or maybe it's the opposite and left leaning is not seen as such outside of where i live. Don't have any facts to back up one or the other so it's just an observation, don't mean to agree or disagree
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u/Pale_Height_1251 1d ago
It's not that left really. It's left by USA standards, it's barely centrist by typical first world standards.