>What America calls leftists is considered pretty centrist everywhere else. They’re so afraid of empathic policies it’s no wonder the country is falling apart.
Maybe on economic issues. On certain social issues it's definitely not "centrist" and arguably further left than other developed countries.
I agree, but would add that many issues (left and right) here are more extreme. I think two things are a self-reinforcing cycle driving both ends of the political spectrum to extremes. First, hyper-partisanship has emerged where it was formerly held in check by social norms within our political institutions. Second, US politics has become a national pastime, replacing sports and other things in our attention. Everyone is able to be part of the commentator class by virtue of social media (I cite this thread, including my comment, as an example of this).
Normie centrist views tend not to garner much attention either in traditional media or in online forums. Instead, we tend to focus much more on the issues that clearly and quickly establish our membership and bonafides in a particular group.
The same extreme-voices-get-heard feature gets recapitulated through our political system. Especially the rise of getting primaried from the left or right. Break ranks with your side? Get primaried. The result is that, to get heard over the fray, political candidates need to articulate more extreme views and stick to them.
Lots of words have been spilled about how various electoral reforms could get us out of this mess. For me, I believe ranked choice voting and open primaries represent an optimal trade-off between "legal, and plausibly implementable" and "yield biggest improvements to electoral system." A major complaint against ranked choice voting is that it tends to bias for more moderate centrists, which I think would be a not-bad problem to have.
For economics (both sides) healthcare, labour, "defense", energy, firearms, speech, religion and basic human rights, both main parties in the US are far right by Western standards (and true outliers for most).
It's really only identity politics where the left is actually on the global left, and then it's far-left.
>For economics (both sides) healthcare, labour, "defense", energy
Those are arguably closer to "economic" than "social". Energy is plainly economic. Even healthcare and labor at the end of the day, boil down to dollars and cents (ie. how much people are paying for healthcare and how much they earn).
>speech
Having the strongest free speech protections in the world is "far right" now?
>religion
The Republicans might be "far right" on religion, but I don't see how the Democrats are. They can certainly be more secular (think the CCP), but at least they're not obviously religious. Compare this to the UK and Denmark which have state regions, and the christian democratic union in Germany.
>basic human rights
Clarify. "basic human rights" has been muddled by the left to include mean stuff like "healthcare", as well as the right to mean "right of babies not not get aborted" and "kids not being groomed".
If you think the UK state religion is in any way relevant to this then you are sorely mistaken. The Church of England has little to no influence on daily politics and is a historical oddity. All political parties, left and right, are essentially secular. Religious politicians basically have to keep their faith quiet while gaining and maintaining office. Blair is a good example of this.
> It's really only identity politics where the left is actually on the global left, and then it's far-left.
That rings true, but how did the US get here? How did identity politics suddenly come to be the most important thing, bringing the world order to its knees?
I don’t actually think it’s far left though. And they are certainly much less effective than other socially liberal parties in Europe.
In the UK it was our right wing party that legalised gay marriage, for example.
Europe is a lot more woke than the US (and a good thing too)
The American left seems to be very focused on making sure nobody will ever need to feel even the slightest bit offended or pressured. Best intentions, I'm sure, but I don't think that's an achievable or even a desirable goal. A healthy society requires a certain amount of peaceful friction.
Europe seems to be following America's lead (as we always do/did), but it hasn't reached the same extremes and probably won't, imho.
US is still pretty far-right on social policy by the standards of most of Europe. This is an average, there’s lot of outliers such as even the proper left in France being weird about Muslim dress.
Identity politics is on the right in Israel. In a general sense I think it might not belong on the same spectrum as redistributive policies or militarism.
That's true to an extent, but President Biden also maintained a de facto open borders policy which undercut wages and drove up housing prices for US union members. This was deeply unpopular with the union members that I know. I'm not trying to start a debate on the merits of various immigration policy options, just pointing out that union members perceived this as a lack of support.
The biggest win the Republicans and billionaire class ever had was convincing the American public that left == liberal. It's not. Blue hair, trans flag, black lives matter, pro-palestine, etcetera; these are socially liberal stances. "Left" doesn't mean any of these things for the rest of the world in a conventional sense. Left means unions, workers rights, socialism or sydicalism; generally, power to the workers/99%/people rather than the capatilists/monarchists/regime.
Americans should continue to conflate socially liberal and economically left-wing at their own peril.
It's worth noting that labor unions have mobilized all over the globe in solidarity with Palestine. Given that the main bone of contention in this country is continued material and financial support to a military campaign it feels odd to lump in with "social liberalism".
>Left means unions, workers rights, socialism or sydicalism; generally, power to the workers/99%/people rather than the capatilists/monarchists/regime.
Everyone claims they're the true voice of the 99%. Trump, despite being a billionaire, claims he's defending Americans workers by imposing tariffs and deporting undocumented immigrants. More broadly the right claims that they're fighting against the "elites" in the media/academia/corporations/"deep state".
It was surreal watching Trump, the man who has made his very name into a corporate product, campaign against Hillary Clinton with claims that she's too influenced by corporations. And, somehow, our politics managed to get even stupider since then.
Well yeah, plenty of developed countries are xenophobic and bigoted in terms of same sex marriage still. I’m curious what “social issue” you are imagining that is represented by the american left but not the european left otherwise.
The US left wing is far more supportive of trans rights, particularly youth gender affirming care, than its counterparts in Europe. For example, I do not think you'd see a Democrat outside of a swing district publicly say, "It's very important that we protect female-only spaces," as Keir Starmer has. Also, while on the campaign trail he said he wouldn't scrap the proposed ban on teaching young people in England about transgender identity in school, saying, "I'm not in favour of ideology being taught in our schools on gender," language not too dissimilar from the Trump administration's.
> For example, I do not think you'd see a Democrat outside of a swing district publicly say, "It's very important that we protect female-only spaces," as Keir Starmer has.
Maybe a year or two ago…the political landscape has shifted drastically in recent years and months.
California governor Gavin Newsom has a new podcast, and recently told Charlie Kirk (yes, he invited Kirk to pander to the young white male voters) something along the lines of “trans people shouldn’t play sports”.
That's not what Gavin Newsom said. What he actually told Charlie Kirk is that it isn't fair for women to have to compete against biological males. You can disagree with him but don't misrepresent his position.
Yes, that's my point. And there are many Labor MPs that are to the right of Starmer on this issue. The party that's closest to the Democrats (and arguably slightly more left on the issue though not by much) are the Lib Dems, and they got, what, 12% of the vote?
Also, do you not think American right wing media is not capable of whipping up panics? This feels like special pleading.
Outside of trans rights though, it’s hard to see what issues the us left is to the left of Europe on.
What’s more, we actually have left wing parties in power and using govt machinery to advance what would now be called ‘woke’ in the us.
Which? Be clear, because the only ones I hear you dogwhistling here are Trans folks rights or Black folks rights if you are vaguely referencing "social issues" and generally America's historical context there is Pretty Dang Bad.
There is nothing dogwhistleable here, US leftist race policy is a huge outlier in the Western world and I would hesitate to call it "liberal". Once someone groups people into racial groups and treats them like interchangeable Lego bricks by color, they have left any pretense of liberalism, which by necessity considers an individual to be the smallest and most vulnerable minority of them all.
That’s been shared a lot on social media but those posts tend to leave out the context that this was only in technical language around IVF, not a broad change, and that it was intended to resolve confusion around what “mother” means in the context of what goes on a birth certificate in the case where a same-sex couple means the child has two mothers.
Thanks for clearing that up, it really changes the story for me. This actually came up as only 4% reported by the left in Ground News' weekly Blindspot Report [1][2]. It only lists one left-leaning source, also from USA Today [3], but not the one you linked, one critical of the measure. I guess Ground News really didn't help here in guarding against bias. That's pretty disappointing.
I get being against this sort of thing, but it’s wild to me how people are SO against something so inconsequential (official language on government forms or whatever) that they’re willing to instead support a party that’s actively pushing us into authoritarianism.
Like sure some inclusive language is silly, but it’s a lot better than losing our national parks, destroying our social safety nets, celebrating cruelty to immigrants, and ripping the constitution to shreds in the process.
My feeling is that people aren't much against something inconsequential per se, instead they are against something that's out of their status quo and that question some underlying values they haven't ever questioned themselves (for example: genders).
Instead of being curious why exactly some people are proposing something that challenges their worldview they instead immediately allow their fear to take over, and reject the change.
It's the same pattern that non-accepting parents of gay children tend to go through when their kid comes out of the closet; in that case a lot of them have a change of heart into acceptance because they love the person, over time they are able to overcome the fear and understand a new worldview.
Not so much for the masses with flames being fanned by politicians wanting to capitalise on that fear, they are kept in fear, they are told to reject any attempt to educate them, the messaging calls it "evil" or "not from God" or "only for betas", adapted to the audience's most chauvinistic identity (religion, machoism, etc.).
Since it's easy to manipulate those into hating whatever is the bad-word-du-jour then those same politicians can attach any policy with "combating bad-word-du-jour" and a lot of the believers won't question it much.
It's disheartening because even though I'm quite progressive and leftist (in the European sense), I still believe that conservatism is necessary to balance out the discussion, unfortunately it's also an ideology intrinsically bound to the fear of change, a feeling very easy to be co-opted by power-hungry people.
It's an ideology that rejects rationality and almost completely embraces emotion (fear), which is rather ironic since its most fervent followers want to believe they are the most reasonable and logical ones.
Whether a birth certificate for a same-sex couple in the IVF case mentions "mother" or the less ambiguous "inseminated person" is indeed fully inconsequential for the vast majority of the American public.
Changes in official government paperwork to be more inclusive are very much not "control of language and attempts to assert control over its use and definitions".
I mean, you could describe the Trump administration's executive order requiring government agencies to stop using Gulf of Mexico and instead use Gulf of America as simply "changes in government paperwork." But I think it's obviously also an attempt to change the language.
I wouldn't classify it as "changes in government paperwork" since the EO defined the official name for a geographical feature, very different from some law changing the usage of a term in a government's form. Quite a different level and degree, if that's out of consideration everything can be reduced to some more general form to be played as equivalent.
I also DGAF about the renaming of the gulf of mexico relative to essentially any of the other, much more consequential actions the administration is taking.
> the recent proposal to change the word "mother" to "inseminated person" in Wisconsin state law
Life gets easier once one realizes that talking points like this are at best missing all important context, if not outright deceptive. Other examples would be the "They spent $X studying OUTRAGEOUS_THING"
The exhausting thing is doing to required research to point out to people that the outrage pornography sound bite they're screaming about is, of course, completely fake and designed to enrage them.
Then they thank you for the information and go on to completely believe the next one with no pattern recognition whatsoever.
Maybe on economic issues. On certain social issues it's definitely not "centrist" and arguably further left than other developed countries.