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To those unfamiliar with Noah Smith, he is a leftist and very, very blue.

• khuey 2y ago
  Noah is only a leftist if anyone to the left of Attila the Hun is a leftist. Noah is very much a neoliberal.
  • spencerflem 2y ago
    adding to this: From the wikipeida: Smith has appeared on the Neoliberal Project's podcast multiple times[21] and was labeled the "Chief Neoliberal Shill" by the group in 201 And to be completely clear, noeliberalism and leftism are NOT one and the same. Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism. "Smith has expressed disagreements with socialism and communism". Calling Noah (Or Biden, Or most mainstream democrat politicians) leftist is totally incorrect and one of my pet peeves that online commenters tend to do.
    • AzzieElbab 2y ago
      "Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism"—but that is just communism. No other ideology seeks communism as a goal, and socialism is just a stepping stone to communism, or at least that is what they taught me in my Soviet high school.
      • spencerflem 2y ago
        Yeah, imo communism is a subset of leftism, which includes other ideas all of which are defined by a general opposition to global free market capitalism. I'm sure there's better definitions too, but neoliberals are not a leftist in any of them.
        • AzzieElbab 2y ago
          But you defined leftism as a subset of communism. Not the other way around
          • spencerflem 2y ago
            I've tried to describe it as a general opposition to current laissez-faire capitalism, if it came out differently I'm sorry
            • komali2 2y ago
              It could come from the misunderstanding that Communism is the only alternative to global capitalism, which isn't the case.
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      • pixl97 2y ago
        > or at least that is what they taught me in my Soviet high school. You ever stop and think that the authoritarians may have been lying to you?
        • AzzieElbab 2y ago
          Of course, that is how I knew the communists wrote those books.
        • contextfree 2y ago
          Lenin more or less defined "socialism" to mean that
      • dragonwriter 2y ago
        > "Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism"—but that is just communism. No other ideology seeks communism as a goal, and socialism is just a stepping stone to communism, or at least that is what they taught me in my Soviet high school. Outside of communist thought (wherein socialism is a stage on the route to communism—and the only concrete stage to which there is a roadmap in most communist thought, though different schools of communism have different maps), socialism is a thing sought in its own right by socialists who are not communists. Obviously, its unsurprising that a Soviet high school would only teach the dogma of the particular brand of communism then currently held to be orthodox in the USSR, but that's a rather limited view.
    • komali2 2y ago
      > Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism. Not necessarily true, see: anarchism. There are certainly anarcho-communists, but not every anarchist is a communist.
  • DEADMINCE 2y ago
    Leftist simply means someone on the left side of the political spectrum, despite attempts to gatekeep the term as something more specific.
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