Found this graph online for anyone who might still be confused. I think this makes it much more clear.
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
Certainly feels that way
Bernie on the wrong side of centre.
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.
Rage bait post
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?
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.
This 100% - it’s part propaganda.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The ‘left right spectrum’ is a harmful concept because it makes communism seem like an extremist position even though it’s in the best interest of 99% of people, and only unpopular due to billions and billions worth of red scare propaganda by the 1%.
I am a centrist!
Me 
There is no left or right anymore. There are only fascists and antifascists.
so… left and right then?
Which are basically just synonyms for left and right.
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
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.
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.
https://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, 2024Oops, shit. I was off by about an order of magnitude on the death toll. Still, though.
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?
Forgive my propaganda learning, I thank you good person.
Always has been, it’s only that now the violence turns inwards.
Those are just different words for the same things.
They’re not, but your antifascism meter is mis-calibrated.
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.
E: whoops, those two sentences were so contradictory I could only remember the second by the time I was responding.
Every political discussion is civil until you say “maybe states shouldn’t exist”
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.
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
Oh hell nah. Biden was FDR 2.0!!!
👀
Democrats of the 90s were Republicans of the 80s.
