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you're confusion "the left" with "democrats". democrats are centrist relative to the left.

• RajT88 3y ago
  Indeed "Leftists" mostly vote Democratic for lack of a more viable alternative, but many do not consider themselves Democrats. Even really smart and educated people I know are surprised to discover most voters in the US do not have a party affiliation.
  • pessimizer 3y ago
    There aren't really political parties in the US. In other countries, people pay membership dues to their political parties and get membership cards. Here, we just declare our allegiance to these private organizations on twitter.
    • RajT88 3y ago
      That's not true. We poll the hell out of our populace and ask, "What do you identify as?" That's how we know how people identify. > In other countries, people pay membership dues to their political parties and get membership cards. Here, we just declare our allegiance to these private organizations on twitter. Some states in the US have state-level party organizations which you join and receive a card. Not all.
      • the_only_law 3y ago
        How does these polls work? What’s the selection process? I’ve never been asked what I politically identify as, and I imagine anyone who asks would be disappointed that I would refuse place myself as something fitting whatever binary/trinary categories they have in mind.
        • mrguyorama 3y ago
          Many states allow you to pick a party affiliation when you register to vote, and some require a declared affiliation before you can take part in primaries.
        • shigawire 3y ago
          Generally polling organizations poll a random sample of Americans via phone calls or online polls. There is a lot of process to try to guarantee a representative sample. I don't think a pollster would be disappointed that you don't have a party affiliation. In fact some of biggest emphasis in election season is on independents or undecided voters.
          • RajT88 3y ago
            > In fact some of biggest emphasis in election season is on independents or undecided voters. Exactly. You can look it up on 538 or wherever you like, but all the polls say roughly the same thing: There's more unaffiliated voters than there is voters for either party. Something like 40-45% unaffiliated, with ~25% identifying as Republican and ~30% identifying as Democrat.
    • int_19h 3y ago
      You can pay dues and get a membership card for political parties in US, as well. The difference is that it's not necessary to have access to the primaries in most places.
• graublau 3y ago
  The left in america votes blue no matter because idpol and maybe climate, the only nationally palitable Left ideas since Marxism any class are anathema to USA, particularly since fall of USSR.
  • bdamm 3y ago
    Nah; the 2016 election saw many "leftists" that were dedicated to Sanders go on to vote for Trump.
    • wk_end 3y ago
      I know establishment Dems liked to whine about that, but is there any evidence that this actually happened in meaningful numbers?
      • mrguyorama 3y ago
        [flagged]
      • WhatWorkingOn 3y ago
        I and many other people I know did. I saw Sanders get snubbed and schemed against by the DNC, to the point where Hillary got the questions ahead of time. So many gaffes in this campaign between two "equal" Democratic candidates that we just don't talk about anymore. No, I refuse to play that game and I'd rather burn the place to the ground and suffer together than walk willingly to my own execution.
        • dekhn 3y ago
          [flagged]
        • singleshot_ 3y ago
          “I think I should have more of my richer neighbors’ money and if I don’t get it I’ll vote for trump ahaha” isn’t the own that you probably think it is, but this is very illustrative nevertheless.
• carlosjobim 3y ago
  Will this "true" left you're talking about criticize democratic party leaders for their wars with the same fervor that they criticize republican party leaders? When Trump was campaigning for his first presidency everybody was saying he would start a bunch of wars and nuke the whole world. When none of that happened he had to be a traitor since he didn't start any beautiful patriotic wars. Reality is of no consideration to the uneducated and educated masses. War is peace, peace is war. I will not be mutilated by mortar in a ditch or send my children to die in a trench, no matter who is president. War is a racket, I feel truly sorry for those who suffer and will suffer for following their "leaders".
  • mrguyorama 3y ago
    >When none of that happened he had to be a traitor since he didn't start any beautiful patriotic wars Find me a quote of someone on the left saying Trump was bad for not starting a war
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I bet you if Trump somehow served an extra 1.5 years, you'd have plenty of such people - the ones that today love to use the term "acquiesce" to criticize careful handling of a conflict that could easily spiral into end of the world with one press of a button.
    • carlosjobim 3y ago
      You are misunderstanding. When Trump turned out to not be a crazed war monger, the narrative changed to that he was a traitor taking orders from Russia. If you can't find quotes for that, you are offline. I am fully aware that most leftist (which means most of HN) think that Trump is an insane war monger, even though he served four years as president without starting any wars. Like I wrote, reality does not matter at all anymore to anyone.
      • FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Well, there was an exchange of Missiles with Iran. That almost went full war, until Iran shot back and they were like 'Wuuuut, they can do that?'. And missiles shot at Syrian air base, where Russian/Syrian planes were luckily moved just in time, very conveniently, almost like it was a good PR stunt.
• wk_end 3y ago
  …which is particularly egregious in the context of wars like Vietnam - or even the war in Iraq - which the left was famously outspoken against compared to most Democrats.
• hackernoteng 3y ago
  JFK would be considered a right-wing extremist by todays democrat party (the political powerful left wing, not the average voter)
  • reducesuffering 3y ago
    Well he did try to invade Cuba
    • dekhn 3y ago
      He also put nuclear missles in turkey which were then used as part of the negotiation to get USSR to dismantle their Cuban bases so we wouldn't invade.
      • asdff 3y ago
        Other way around. He put missiles in Turkey and Italy, USSR responded by putting missiles in Cuba, then both parties agreed to deescalate and withdraw. Then of course a few years later none of this matters because ICBMs become a thing and the soviets and americans can just launch over the north pole.
        • dekhn 3y ago
          (for the record, I did not mean to imply the temporal ordering you suggest I did)
    • nonethewiser 3y ago
      And he was critical of the CIA and FBI.
• wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  I think everyone is confused of what is the left / right. Traditionally the left has been associated with social policies (stemming from socialism/communism vs capitalism) And there always was a part of the left which was anti-war, and always was a more "totalitarian" version of the left that felt it was morally justified. But in every society the meaning of left and right has been fluid.
• bboygravity 3y ago
  You're missing the point that left/right/democrat/republican religions are a divide and conquer strategy to distract from the realization that there is no democracy.
  • dekhn 3y ago
    Uh, no? Left and right are generalized terms used to describe political philosophies. Democrat and republican are terms used to describe political parties- those parties don't fully overlap with left and right, and in fact the parties have completely changed their overlap over time. We (Americans) live in a representative democracy (for choosing public officials) and that democracy gives a great deal of influence and power to capitalists/industrialists (the "racket"), which has been absolutely successful in establishing and maintaining the existence and wealth of the country. If you want to argue there is no democracy, find another person to argue with; my premise begins with the US being a representative democracy.
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
      It is a representative Democracy. I vote directly for all of my representatives. Anyone arguing it's not is moving goalposts or arguing No True Scotsman.
      • mistermann 3y ago
        For semantic clarity: are you saying that it ticks the boxes for being a "representative democracy", but not extending the meaning of the word representative to encompass representative of the will of the constituents? > Anyone arguing it's not is moving goalposts or arguing No True Scotsman. With this be considered rhetoric?
        • 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
          I have a government that I choose through voting. It's not complicated.
• jasmer 3y ago
  The missing artifact from the comment is that Republicans and Democrat Left/Rightism as we understand it is a modern thing established (edit: I should say 'consolidated' - because the shift started earlier) under Reagan. The 'Democrats' were very popular in the South in the 1950's among people who would now refer to themselves as 'conservative'. (Edit: look at the electoral maps for mid century US - Democrats/Republicans were not Left/Right) Not that Left/Dem are different things today, they are effectively the same, it's just that policy is constrained by the other side, which has a dampening effect on legislation.
• pessimizer 3y ago
  This isn't true under the current terminology, where Democrats have assigned themselves the title of "the left" with the enthusiastic agreement of Republicans. And while that's a new situation, we're also currently experiencing a vast majority of people who identify as "left" falling under two categories: Obama socialists, who were enthusiastic supporters of candidate Obama and were disappointed in the absolutely traditional run of his presidency, esp. its second term; and Clinton socialists, who went along with the catastrophe of the 2016 Democratic primary because they let themselves be convinced that while they mostly agreed with Sanders, H. Clinton was the only one who could defeat Trump (and they resent the party for this.) These aren't intellectual positions at all, they're just soap opera stuff. If they've picked up anything about political economy, it was because they were in left-wing spaces during the rise of the Sanders campaign. As far as I can tell, all they took away from it is the slur "tankie," which they think has something to do with Tienanmen Square and should be screamed at anyone anyone to the left of Bill Kristol.
  • Aloha 3y ago
    Tankies are the people who I'd loosely call neostalinists, they're seemingly for a Soviet style violent revolution of the proletariat - they're also the people who are often reflexively anti-american, and pro-russia, because america is the force of imperialism. There are many socialists who are fine with achieving socialism via electoral means those people are not tankies - tankies are generally not okay with waiting for that.
• telotortium 3y ago
  I don't think so. Yes, Democrats (and American progressives in general) don't emphasize socialism as much as the traditional left or some European parties. However, they're generally still sympathetic. Moreover, while American progressives don't worry so much about economic egalitarianism, they very strongly believe that minorities earning less than whites, female earning less than male, etc. is wrong, and are willing to enact things like reparations, affirmative action,and the like to counterbalance that. In the ideal progressive utopia, CEOs would still be paid hundreds of times more than the average worker, but representation of minority race, female, non-straight and trans people among CEOs and other prestigious positions would occur at least as much as their representation in the population, regardless of their ability, and if cis straight white males are represented less than their proportion of the population, that's just gravy, and maybe justified revenge for their dominant position in the past. In fact, wokism is even more egalitarian than Marxism - the latter says from each according to ability, to each according to need, but it was generally expected that the jobs requiring higher ability would be staffed by people of higher ability. In general, it's obvious that identity politics forms the core of the political class of today's Democratic Party (especially the young), and equally obvious that America is the innovator that other progressive parties follow in this respect. America also has thrown itself into gender politics with particular enthusiasm - gender transitions, even of minors, are a cornerstone of American progressivism today, even as progressive European countries have rolled that back to an extent. I will concede that Europe leads in the other main aspect of current-day progressivism, the Green movement, although American progressives are avid followers.