Fortunately, most non partisans recognize the complexity of the world reaches far beyond the limits of what one political viewpoint is able to encapsulate.
> Sawant has advocated the nationalization of large Washington State corporations such as Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon[62] and expressed a desire to see privately owned housing in "Millionaire's Row" in the Capitol Hill neighborhood turned into publicly owned shared housing complex saying, "When things are exquisitely beautiful and rare, they shouldn't be privately owned."[63] During an election victory rally for her City Council campaign, Sawant criticized Boeing for saying it would move jobs out of state if it could not get wage concessions and tax breaks. She called this "economic terrorism" and said in several speeches that if Boeing moved jobs out of state, the workers should take over Boeing facilities and bring them into public ownership. She has said they could be converted into multiple uses, such as production for mass transit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kshama_Sawant#Economic_policie...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/seattle-councilwoman-urge...
In particular, look at two aspects of the animation for "Political Polarization of the American Public, 1994-2014": First, notice that the line for Median Democrat moves only to the left. Second, put your pointer or your finger over where the line for Median Democrat is in 1994 and compare that to where it ends up in 2014. Then do the same for Median Republican.
edit: Here's the version of it that goes to 1994-2017 -- you can clearly see what happens from 2015 to 2017 as well:
https://www.people-press.org/interactives/political-polariza...
Becoming more "consistently liberal" and less "mixed" is essentially the definition of moving to the left.
> Hell, even moving more to the left isn't necessarily, depending on where one starts from, and the early 90s are not exactly known to be a left-wing era in the US
As opposed to what preceded that, i.e. Bush/Reagan?
Arguing that Democrats aren't far to the left of where they were 25 years ago because at that time they were much closer to the center than where they are now is just conceding the point by rephrasing it.
"Far-left", at least everywhere I've seen the term used, is not relative to a previous position the same population held, but relative to the overall political spectrum. It's essentially "in the subset farthest to the left one can possibly be".
Who exactly fits into the far-left is arguable, but generally abolition of large-scale private property tends to be a requisite.
The extremes also expose the flaws of that spectrum to begin with, because your average anarcho-capitalist would no sooner want to live under Hitler than Stalin. But we've somehow managed to categorize as "far right" both the proposition that no one, including the government, should ever use force to coerce anyone to do anything, and simultaneously the proposition that the government should use lethal force to stamp out homosexuality and racial impurity and wrongthink. And on the other side, that far-left at the same time means both granting equal access to power and resources to everyone and granting total economic authority to an all-powerful central government. And that the government should use lethal force to stamp out wrongthink. In that sense far-anything is just a useless general-purpose pejorative, so if it's going to mean anything then it isn't very useful for it to mean that.
So I tend to think a more useful meaning is something like the category exemplified by AOC as compared to the category exemplified by Bill Clinton.
And that's fine, because if we're discussing US politics, then Europe's definition of far left is rather irrelevant.
It doesn't mean anything to talk about positions or shifts over time without some kind of a baseline.
> Communism is viewed favorably by more than one-in-three Millennials (36%), up 8 points from 2018.
> About one-in-five Millennials (22%) believe that “society would be better if all private property was abolished,” compared to 1% of the Silent Generation.
Also, far left is a relative term.
LGBT rights are orthogonal to communism, you can have a state that murders anyone who is gay and one that enforces universal gender reassignment and both could be equally communist. Nationalizing the electricity grid and ISPs isn't orthogonal, but the 'far leftists' in the US either don't mention it at all, or mention it so far in their list of demands there will be no political capital left for it even if world revolution happened tomorrow.
And I question whether your premise is true. About 22% of millennials surveyed stated that “it would be better if all private property was abolished.” https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/2019-annual-poll
What supporting communism means is when a communist shows up on the ballot box, you are likely to vote for them. That in itself is a huge shift from the older generations.