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Narrator: The left did not, in fact, get everyone's basic needs met.
Both Democrats and Republicans have been moving steadily to the right for the last 40 years. So Democrats are now where Republicans were in the 1980s: friends of banks, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And the right has moved all the way into an insane asylum.
Whoever told you Democrats are leftists told you a big BIG lie. With some exceptions, like Bernie, and maybe AOC, most democrats are centrist, or even "economically right wing".
People not realising this is what's so baffling.
Narrator: The left did not, in fact, get everyone’s basic needs met because it hasn't been in power for nearly half a century. And incidentally, every time it was represented in government there were major strides in "getting everyone's needs met".
Don't believe me? Do a Google search for "most liberal/leftist US presidents", click any of these listicles and try to find the most recent leftist president. Notice how there isn't a single one more recent than 1969?
For most of you reading this, the last actual leftist government predates your parents' birth.
1969
For most of you [...] this predates your parents’ birth.
Why did you have to make me feel old
Meeting everyone's basic needs isn't even far left. This is how far the Overton window has shifted to the right. Meeting everyone's basic needs is left-of-centre. Far left would be state owned and controlled everything, redistribution of wealth via any means necessary, all public services fully state funded and free for all at the point of use.
Far left would be state owned and controlled everything, redistribution of wealth via any means necessary, all public services fully state funded and free for all at the point of use.
"Socialism is when the government does stuff, and communism is when the government does all the stuff. What is a mode of production?"
God I fucking hate how the capitalist authoritarian states of the last century managed to gaslight everyone into believing this shit.
It's from the USA perspective. People not dying of easily preventable diseases, or children not going hungry, are extreme left for them.
Many of us would disagree with that, but in aggregate we’ve just elected “burn this motherfucker down with us inside” instead of the alternative who was still way too far to the right for most of us here on Lemmy, so you are unfortunately correct.
If you proposed children not going hungry to some of my conservative relatives, even in a room of mixed company they would say out loud something like “why should I have to pay to feed the kids they can’t afford because they can’t close their legs or put down the crack pipe long enough to get a job?” (Racist dog whistle very much intentional)
Americans are so far to the right that minimum wage, affordable housing, free schools and healthcare is considered "far left". These are given and common sense in the rest of the world 🤣
In developed countries*
I'm not sure if the USA qualifies for that status
Even in developing countries, governments do their best to provide free services for those in dire poverty, especially those considered "poorest of the poor".
The more... favorable right wing points I've heard are more along the lines of "I've busted my ass for what little I have! How dare you ask me to pay to subsidize the lives of people who aren't trying to work?"
Completly ignoring the fact that better welfare programs should help them to not have to work so damn hard for so little in the first place. Or the fact that the welfare cliff and other various systemic problems make it that much harder to get out of that pit no matter how hard you're trying.
It's not even quite "fuck you, I got mine" because so many of them barely "got theirs" as is, which makes them even more protective. The ones that do have, have latched on to this idea of the entirely self made man, which ignores all the public welfare systems they used on their journey. Like schools, or roads. You can hardly exist in modern America without using multiple tax funded public works/welfare things every day.
Then you add in the hard spun rhetoric that taxes they already don't want being taken from them might be paying for things they personally disagree with and things get extra firey.
Meanwhile the richest people on earth have spent more money than is comprehendable on convincing people that going after rich peoples' money will just make everything more expensive for the normal folk.
But that would imply that they were currently leaving potential profits on the table. They're already charging absolutely as much as they can, and constantly trying to shift it higher. I'm sure they'd still fuck us on the way down, but we're never going to fix things unless we find some way to adequately tax the rich.
The "barely got mine and defending it" thing really sticks in other ways too.
When I wanted aid for school "sorry, we ran out. Should have gotten here earlier."
When I wanted to get food stamps "sorry, you don't meet the qualifications on a technicality."
When I finally got Medicaid but couldn't use it "not enough spots for you to be seen, sorry."
Many times the administrators that gave me this news implied it was because too many people asked for it. Being young and stupid (and let's face it, indoctrinated), it made me put the blame on the other people asking for aid. If there were less people that asked for aid, I wouldn't be starving and sick. I thought that I was more worthy of the aid because some people are cheating the system and I deeply resented them.
Fortunately I grew the hell up and pulled my head out of my ass. It's all a distraction we get fed from the news that other needy people are the reason why we suffer. It's so hard to fathom how much the rich actually waste when all we see is our fellow working class folk.
Getting everyone's basic needs met is more of a centre-left ideology.
Many centre-right parties believe in things like public healthcare, because it has a net-benefit to the economy.
Centrists don't sit in the middle of every issue or make an exact 50/50 compromise on everything. That's a really poor strawman argument from someone who clearly doesn't understand global politics.
I guess you're confused with people in the U.S who think having views somewhere in-between those of democrats and republicans makes you a centrist.
That U.S-specific 'centrism' is really just right wing politics.
Maybe we should stop with left, right and centrist all together.
It's a stupid way of defining politics. If you ask a random person what being left means it can vary from anything between hugging a tree or wanting good health care.
By calling yourself "green" or "social" you are immediately putting a label on yourself and a lot of people won't vote for you because they're too dumb or lazy to actually read into what a party is about. I saw an article here on lemmy that pointed out some moron that voted for Trump in hopes he would save his farm, if he would have read into politics he would have known that Trump was the worst possible choice but here we are...
I'm from Europe and I see the same shit happening here. Call yourself green or left and people will scoff at you.
If there is anything the current "left" parties absolutely suck at its marketing. Call yourself the freedom party or whatever but stop using idiotic terminology that people can't relate to. Almosr no one will vote for the "environment party".
I hate the extremist conservative parties here but i have to give them credit for being able to market their party in such a way that people are literally voting on them AGAINST their own best interests.
Centrists don't sit in the middle of every issue or make an exact 50/50 compromise on everything.
I seriously don't understand how fucking difficult this is to understand. It's why I largely ignore political discussions on Reddit/Lemmy/all social media.
I don't look at one person saying "Murdering 5 year olds is bad", look at another person saying "Murdering 5 year olds is good!" and try to find a way where both are right.
Centrism doesn't mean that you can't choose between democrats and republicans, it means that ideologically, you believe in a balance between capitalist ideas and socialist ideas. For example, you can believe in the Hayekian idea that the many interactions between individuals in the market is better at creating prosperity than a centralized government that distributes all goods and services. But you can also believe that the market can't do everything on its own due to market failures like monopoly power, externalities, assymmetric information. There exists a compromise between the two that is negotiated through politics. A core necessity for this to happen is that democracy is maintained. Democracy is not maintained when elections are bought by companies.
What is happening in the US now is that politics has been taken over by the private market. No economist would have agreed with this (unless they were paid to). It is against everything that we know. This is not a left vs right stance. It's a democracy vs autocracy stance. Autocracy can happen from both the right and left, and it doesn't matter who.
The one thing I dislike about the idea of centrism is the idea that you can't decide on everything because you remain agnostic about every issue. I think a much better idea to advocate for is pluralism: the idea that your opinion on specific issues is not dependent on your politcal stance. Every issue is unique and doesn't automatically identify you with left or right. You can have different opinions on different issues.
It’s funny because from my European perspective there’s no (visible) left in the USA. Democrats are centrist. Sanders could be social democrat. Otherwise I fully agree with you.
Lol that's not the far left's position get the fuck out of here. The first paragraph is describing center/center-left.
Sadly in America meeting everyones basic needs is socialist and too close to Communism for our poor brain washed masses. Sadly the country culture is summarized in "fuck you i got mine" mentality and not community based.
Far left in America just means tax dollars going towards actually helping the people.
Then why anytime we try to do it here in America, we are called progressives, socialists, or communists?
Still waiting on that basic need.
Biden built entire wings onto for-profit hospitals during Covid, while ironically being against universal healthcare. Almost like his donors didn't want it or something.
Biden and the democrats are far left? Come on... As a European, that sounds absurd.
In the US political spectrum, democrats are center-left at most. Compared to European politics, they'd even be considered center-right or conservative on many issues.
Party A... We want to kill 1.000.000 people
Party B ... We want to kill 0 people.
Centrist.... Lets just kill 500.000 people.
Sometimes there IS no centrist position
Americans with their white or black bullshit
That's not even far on the left, that's just some middle of the ground left. Real far left would be burning government buildings while having a heated discussion about the order of the colors for the flag to be raised over the rubble.