this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Left-wing can be relative to the nation. The most meaningful faction of American "left" is the Democratic Party. The global definition is based on socialist vs capitalist ideological splits, in which all forms of ideological liberalism are right wing or, in the case of social democracy, arguably what centrist actually means.
The Democratic Party is therefore left-wing internally and right-wing globally, thus people saying "America does not have a left wing."
Leftists are socialists. It is not relative. Democrats are not leftists. Bernie Sanders is, as a democratic socialist. You are not "An American leftist" because you like billionaires existing but don't want to genocide brown and gay people. That's just liberalism as it is supposed to be.
This is also why a leftist would deny that "liberalism" is left wing. Liberalism is a broad ideological judgement and can be assumed to be using the global standards as a result, America does not have sole claim to defining it. So American liberals are the American left, but liberalism itself is right-wing.
This really isn't that complicated if you know the basic meanings of the words in question, which is why liberals find it so confusing. Liberalism is the status quo position of the American electorate and moving beyond it requires education while going along with the binary party politics does not.
Edit: this was supposed to be a response to the first comment instead of me telling OP things they already know
The entire population except for fringe groups of terminally online leftists: Yes.
We need to start calling liberals what they are. Conservatives.
And we need to start calling the conservatives what they are. Authoritarian elites.
Go touch grass. You’d rather divide the left instead of unite and push back against actual fascism. Only people who say this sort of shit are people who are chronically online and completely disconnected from reality
Get your head out of your ass. There's a reason why Progressives keep getting frustrated. We're literally the liberals reaching across the aisle and voting for conservatives. It's not condemnation, it's just reality.
And I'll vote for a conservative who supports freedom over an authoritarian any day. If anything it's admirable that that both the liberals and conservatives in the party work together as well as they do.
We are the freedom party. And the other party is authoritarian.
Democrats should actually do that. Maga vs conservative. It would be a huge marketing win.
I don’t understand the difference and I don’t think I ever will
Liberals view the status quo (the underlying mechanisms of the government, economy and society) as sacrosanct, legitimate, that it just needs to and will allow itself to be tweaked a bit, that the rules must be followed lest we collapse into chaos.
Leftists view the status quo as widely illegitimate, that a vast multitude of the rules which society operates by are contemptible and functionally evil, and are willing to break the rules to meaningfully change society, that often the entire point is that breaking rules is the only way to establish newer and more just ones.
...
Liberals view Leftists as an extreme part of their fold because they often have similar goals.
Leftists view Liberals as often sharing goals, but as ultimately delusional, magical-thinking self righteous fools, as their methods of achieving these often similar goals are laughably naive, impotent and ineffective, thus functionally making them into conservatives.
that's the biggest difference between the two groups: the leftists are at least vaguely aware that something in our system is not right and the liberals don't care to pay attention because they're too busy trying to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table.
I think the best way to put it is that a leftist is someone who believes that workers should own the wealth that they create, while a liberal is someone believes in "socially progressive causes" without examining the underlying systems that bring about the necessity of "socially progressive causes".
For example, a liberal would want more woman CEOs, while a leftist would want to get rid of CEOs.
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