> If you define the left in some completely novel way, maybe. I don't think it is an absurd notion. The founding fathers maybe wouldn't be outright Montagnards

> If you define the left in some completely novel way, maybe. I don't think it is an absurd notion. The founding fathers maybe wouldn't be outright Montagnards by the original standards of left-right division in the French Revolution that would start soon after, but they would definitively be on the left. The US liberal democratic republic with no official class system and at least a theoretical commitment to individual freedom would be to the left of almost all European governments until the 20th century, if you don't discount too many points for slavery and its aftermath. My opinion, is that the fundamentally leftist ideology of liberal democracy has been so ideologically victorious it is now the centre, so people now talk anything but socialism is right-wing.