MGuy wrote: ↑Thu Nov 07, 2024 12:15 pm
We don't have a left wing party in America. There's right Republican party and center right Democratic party.
Sort of. You're living under the neoliberal consensus, which is lowish taxes for rich folks, minimalist but thorough regulation, the WTO, and attempts to make government nominally function more like a business via contracting. It's a reaction to the over-proscribed economic stagflation of the late 70's and early 80's under Bretton Woods and the last of the gold standard, which did hurt poor people quite badly, so was popular with the left immediately thereafter.
Low taxes have not gone well for the left, but still, it's the whole, "how's the water" thing.
That
feels very "right wing" compared to "democratic socialism", for instance, but the Democratic Party largely support minority rights, immigrant rights, women's rights, religious freedom, the rule of law, an apolitical civil service, various social safety nets, and so on, and so on, which are all extremely left wing concepts. Sure, it's all kinda corrupt and the endless war footing fucks everything and the depths of "well meaning" racism hidden on the left and the ancient electoral system are both difficult to work around, but still.
It's about the rights of man (and the rights of women), as it were, vs the privileges of wealth (or gender, or race, or religion).
Sure, there's right wingers in the Democratic Party, various senators and governors don't actually walk the talk at all, think it's just about being polite, but you know, almost entirely, as a party, they are the left. They totally work with the socialists, just won't let one run the show.
But there's also a right wing party there in the Republican Party, and they openly hate on black folks, women, immigrants, all of that. Killing women because their pregnancy didn't go well. Denying very basic human rights to transgender folks (with gay folks to follow real soon now). Casually stripping the vote from tens of thousands of black folks. Creating brownshirt type citizen militias to literally hunt immigrant families out of their peaceful lives. And on top of that, are hugely into privileging the richest few people in the country, literally handing Musk the keys to all sorts of governance, just because of how rich he is, and going all cray-cray with the religious stuff, to regulate poor people's private lives to weird, arbitrary, and heavily punitive standards, while further deregulating the activities of wealth.
That's what those words mean.
Like how populists are actually people who hate on the privileges of the top few and the rights of poor minorities at the same time. The reign of terror in the French revolution is the type definition of that concept. The working-man's party, if you will, tends to rule by violence due to the inherent hate and lack of big money to control things that way. Literally everyone wants that big chunk of that vote, the left and right split it normally, populists are quite rare as they do very poorly in a modern pool of left and right wing parties, but they worked great against the pure right wing states that preceded them.
Centrists aren't a thing, that's just what turncoats call themselves. A man with a D by his name who votes for the Rs whenever it matters, he's just an R. They get a lot of press for being such disingenuous shitheads.
Sure, it's weird that the Republicans used to be the left wing, and Democrats used to be the right wing, and they still use some of that language each because history, but they're not that now and haven't been for about 50 years. They'd been swapping bit by bit for a long time before that. Civil rights bill, all that, eh. Radically left.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
