Draconic NEOUS Democrats are not leftists
Trying2KnowMyse[theyWhy is Bernie Sanders shown as left-of-center? Solid right-centrist at best.
apfelwoiSchoppenThe 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.
Sarah Valentine (she/her)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:
Enough of the US voting population leans far enough right to move the window, or
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. 🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
GrailWhat 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.
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.
WildmimicWith 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.
☂️-
MulligrubsDemocrats 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!!!
👀
Digit's kinda all I was trying to say with lemmy.wtf/post/34844222
No matter where you are on the left, they’re not there.
Because that’s not even left.
not my left - Lemmy.wtf
I love these three socialist lemmies. So I’m posting this here. Not sure how well or how mixed a reception this will get here. Not sure if the right place to post it. Plausibly shall step on some toes (with the bottommost instance of “not my left”) a bit. And I imagine there may be some responses nitpicking that 3 of the "not my left"s are more left than “my left” ~ to which I say, misses the point. Anyhoo… enjoy, or don’t. I strive to protect your freedom to receive things however you wish. Love that bitch called interpretation. ;D But I do hope it sparks some interesting thought, discussion, and maybe even is a useful tool. At the very least, it’ll help (a bit) to explain what I mean when I keep saying “not my left”, to those who misrepresent the authoritarian left as “the left”, or even really really misrepresent by calling the nowadays so-called “liberal” (left side of authoritarian right) as “the left”.
Rowan and Martin were a comedy dua that were fairly liberal and got William F. Buckley, a notable conservative, to appear on their show by promising to fly him to Los Angeles in a plane with two right wings. I am quite sure that the US has been flying with two right wings for longer than lthat.
Leftist everywhere else means RABID ANARCHIST
If your anarchist is rabid, make sure to contact the local animal control and get them vaccinated.
There is no left or right anymore. There are only fascists and antifascists.
If only more than one of those were pictured.
The only ones that want us to believe that are the fascists. If they can keep us fighting each other, we won’t be able to fight them.
lmao, agreed.
Those are just different words for the same things.
They’re not, but your antifascism meter is mis-calibrated.
Why did George Washington lead the continental army again?
To avoid taxes on “owning” people:
none of those whose misfortune it is to have slaves as attendants will visit the City if they can possibly avoid it; because by so doing they hazard their property
when slaves who are happy & content to remain with their present masters, are tampered with & seduced to leave them; when masters are taken at unawar[e]s by these practices; when a conduct of this sort begets discontent on one side and resentment on the other, & when it happens to fall on a man whose purse will not measure with that of the Society, & he looses his property for want of means to defend it—it is oppression in the latter case, & not humanity in any; because it introduces more evils than it can cure.
it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptable degrees
Whoever apprehends the said Negroes, so that the Subscriber may readily get them, shall have, if taken up in this County, Forty Shillings Reward, beside what the Law allows; and if at any greater Distance, or out of the Colony, a proportionable Recompence paid them, by George Washington
Forgive my propaganda learning, I thank you good person.
it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptable degrees
Honestly, I could see this as being better than the alternative – better than having a Civil War. Especially if it was started during Washington’s time.
Say, just pass a law that says no new slaves can be imported and anyone born after the law passes is not born a slave, no matter the status of their parents. Then, (hopefully) slave owners don’t get all violent over losing their ‘property’, and slavery is slowly abolished in the country over the course of a generation.
Is it as good as complete, total, and immediate abolishment of slavery? Hell no. But if it could have ended slavery without a war that killed millions, maybe it’s worth it. Especially if it was done in Washington’s time, such that slavery would already be essentially over by the time the Civil War would have otherwise started. So, on the balance, less people suffering under slavery overall. Pragmatism?
Oh well, who are we kidding? The slave owners would never have allowed such a law to stand, and they’d start a different Civil War about it if nothing else worked.
Oh wow, defending a slaver for wanting to keep his slaves? I wasn’t expecting to actually encounter one in the wild today.
Oh come off it. I’m not defending the fucker. Just saying that a slow, gradual abolishment of slavery that started much earlier might have been an overall better outcome, with fewer people enslaved and fewer people killed over it.
Kill all slavers.
That is indeed a very nice goal. But is it practically achievable?
Yes, start with every prison guard in the US.
Smart. If you take out all the guards first, they won’t be able to throw you in prison for doing it.
Just for reference. It was more than I thought.
Our national estimate is 698,000 Civil War deaths. This is substantially higher than the conventional historical estimate of 618,000 but lower than the most recent estimate of around 750,000 deaths based on a 1% census sample.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2414919121
New estimates of US Civil War mortality from full-census records
Joan Barceló, Jeffrey L. Jensen, Leonid Peisakhin, and Haoyu Zhai
Edited by Margaret Levi, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; received July 25, 2024; accepted September 25, 2024
Oops, shit. I was off by about an order of magnitude on the death toll. Still, though.
ZiggyTheZygoteYou know how some international cuisines have to cater to the taste of the country they’re operating in? Like Chinese or Mexican food, if they don’t add a lot of sugar in the ingredients, US people won’t eat it. Same with leftism. If they don’t add a little bit of right, they can’t cater to the political palate of the average Joe.
And this, of course, is by design. The American people are heavily propagandized and indoctrinated.
Abso-fucking-lutely. Also the rest of the world has been propagandized for decades through Hollywood. I was guilty of believing some things for years, the main one was that freedom of speech in the US was sacred and honoured. I was naive.
See, we have to support genocide because we can’t win without it!
Later:
Stupid fucking voters won’t accept the genocide we worked so hard on!
Yeah. But the only thing in this world that any centrist has ever supported or will ever support is the genocide in Palestine.
They abandon literally every other policy at the slightest pushback. They support genocide and absolutely nothing else ever.
You guys understand that this is subjective?
They may not be left enough for you personally but they represent the political spectrum of in the US.
It depends. We Americans have been propagandized against “socialism” and “communism” for over a century, so in media discourse, this might be the political spectrum. But when polled on issues, apart from party identity, Americans support policies far to the left of any politician. Universal health care is perhaps the canonical example.
Yeah but how can you elect progressive representatives if the population is not progressive.
There’s some good evidence that Sanders would’ve won. And Mamdani did. The population can be progressive when progressive candidates are allowed to run.
You’re saying the population is more progressive than the candidates the dems put up? That’s quite the claim.
Do you think that Trump won because the democrats didn’t alienate enough minorities? Maybe they weren’t supportive enough of genocide?
And a trivial one to verify, since a 2024 poll found 62% of Americans support a single-payer health care system. And, recall that same-sex marriage achieved majority public support before Democratic leaders, like Obama and Clinton, shifted their stances to support it.
booty [he/him]I see you stopped reading after the first sentence of the comment you replied to. I present you with the second sentence, which I implore you to now read:
But when polled on issues, apart from party identity, Americans support policies far to the left of any politician. Universal health care is perhaps the canonical example.
Sickos [they/them, it/its]Incorrect. The US is incorrect and needs to change. This will not be given up.
No it’s not subjective, that’s an idealist notion. These words have actual meaning beyond discourse. Our economic and social reality is defined by class struggle over real material contradictions. Politically left people actively support the large majority of humanity who make up the oppressed classes trying to liberate themselves. The actions of the political right keep the oppressed down. The right is materially useful only for a tiny majority of brutal oppressors. That’s the world we live in. It applies in every country. Just because the right is stronger in the US, than in practically every other country, doesn’t make half of them suddenly left.