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> The left wants to include all of the traditionally divided groups on the surface but want's to divide those groups on new terms, gender, class, politics themselves(if you aren't with us you are against us)

I actually disagree in this portrayal of leftist politics. A lot of these labels are people embracing themselves and actually acknowledging who they are and who others are and that’s fine. Being gay, trans, a person of color, disabled, etc. is acknowledged and embraced in leftist politics. I rarely see this sort of acknowledgement and celebration outside of a leftist worldview or a leftist pandering.

Sure, I mean the nazis were embracing their shared arayan heritage.

Choosing some innate quality you can't change as a focus of your politics is inherently divisive, the fact that it is empowering to some sub groups misses the point.

That's precisely it, the nazis were embracing one singular shared heritage and killing people who didn't fall into it. This is precisely the opposite of the lefitst viewpoints, where you can announce your differences on your twitter bio as your identity and people are expected to acknowledge and celebrate them. "Afro-latina they/them autistic" and other announcements are pretty common along these lines are pretty common in a way I don't see outside of leftist circles.

"Embraced":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white#Reacti...

White lives don’t matter. As white lives: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/25/abolish-wh...

The goal of the left isn't to divide the population on gender and class, it is to make the already existing divisions apparent as that is a pre-requisite to actually fix them. Which is why leftists would call it ...-consciousness, because the goal is just to make people conscious of the already existing differences and then to heal them.

The basic idea of modern leftism is that strongest, base distinction in society is class, but that there are other existing divisions that need to be bridged before class itself can be fixed.

If it is not readily apparent to you, the US is already divided based on gender, class, and race, and the right party (really both of them) promote policies that would actually increase these gaps. They would ignore them in their rhetoric, but augment them in practice. Whereas the left augments them in their rhetoric, but seeks to minimize them in practice.

> They would ignore them in their rhetoric, but augment them in practice. Whereas the left augments them in their rhetoric, but seeks to minimize them in practice.

I'm going out on a limb I suppose, but that isn't how political parties work. Outing myself as an engineer, if I wanted to increase/minimise something in practice I would start with a survey of the academic literature on times where the thing changed radically. Then I would attempt to replicate those conditions. Then I would assess the outcomes using pre-defined measures of success.

No political party works that way. Both wings of policies work near-exclusively with sounds-good-to-people-who-vote strategies. In particular, speaking cheerfully from the right, I've never seen a leftist "minimise [divides] in practice" strategy that looks like it started from a historic survey of what worked. I expect there are similar complaints about the right. I've never seen a political solution assessed for effectiveness, and most of them aren't effective.

I would argue both sides do attempt "literature surveys" but they're often tainted by the desire to justify their goals. It turns out you can twist numbers to mean whatever you want and both sides are guilty of this to some extent, though at the moment the pants-on-fire award seems to go to the right. If taken far enough, however, one gets to the level of trying to debate truth itself and "what is objective fact" which gets hairy...

If you read leftist literature, there are many attempts to do exactly that. It's just that in the US the left has essentially no power, it's shared between a centrist Democratic party and a right Republican party.

That being said, there are a lot of ineffective tactics in the left, because there is a lot of infighting (see the XKCD article on standards, as another commenter suggested), and very loose organization.

Well, I'm not really all that concerned with what the leftists do in literature. I'm concerned with what they do in power. If we don't actually have any in power in the US, then the only answer is "no data".

(And "literature" is a pretty poor way to try to refute the claim, which is what leftists do "in practice".)

The GP mentioned an engineering process and literature review. I answered their questions about how these problems are approached and what the process is. I think that's fairly adequate.

If you want to know what any politician will do in power, the process is to see what they are proposing, and to see what others with the same ideology do in practice in other places. If you want to know what the left would do, I suggest doing this.

> a centrist Democratic party and a right Republican party.

As right-biased as the two parties are economically, someone wanting to reduce immigration still has no-one to vote for. Even Trump gave nothing but rhetoric and unpopular, ineffective clampdowns on statistically negligible immigration sources, as any graph of US yearly immigration numbers will show.

> and then to heal them.

Not any more. The left used to be about what different people have in common. Now it's about what different people have different than others.

The first had healing. The second keeps the wounds open and festering.

How did the left shift from what people have in common to what they have apart?

The left has always talked about existing divisions, ever since the late 1800s. Is making the distinction between owner and worker known not highlighting differences?

And of course, once those differences are well known, the left pushes to fix them.

> The goal of the left isn't to divide the population on gender and class, it is to make the already existing divisions apparent as that is a pre-requisite to actually fix them.

Republicans are officially against racism, pro black etc. So look at what people do, not what they say.

Sure. Then look at what the left actually does, and tell me how it makes racial, class, and gender divisions worse. The democrats in the US don't qualify as leftists, as I stated above.

USA really need a political party that isn't 50% lawyers. No other country has such low diversity among politician backgrounds to my knowledge.

I agree. I think some Islamic theocracies have around the same amount of diversity, though :P

Though, the wave of Justice Democrats coming from working class background such as nurses and so on is encouraging

I think that is the point that OP is making, and though I think the overall post is rather salient there might be a better direction for them to take that argument...

Perhaps a better way to look at that particular note is while that's how the right views the left (depending on the camp) the issue within the left is the rampant infighting. Sort of like https://xkcd.com/1095/ . None of these are hard rules obviously but there are a lot of cliques within just LGBT where bi people are hated/excluded from lesbian/gay circles, trans people are excluded from all of the above. Stuff like vegans vs vegetarians, environmentalists vs those focused on social issues, and on and on.

I think the saying "the left fights while the right falls in line" is something that needs to be really driven home.

Agreed. There is indeed massive infighting amongst the left, and obviously a lot of misguided people. But generally and in theory I still disagree on the GP's point that the left aims to divide our society.

It may not be that they intend to divide. It may be the inevitable result of their current strategy. If the way you tell people to think about society is to categorize people by race, sex, gender, etc., then that's... not very unifying. If the central point of your message is that certain groups treat members of other groups badly, that's not just not unifying, that's dividing. (It may be necessary dividing, but it's still dividing.)

Empirical analysis of our current society shows that there are divides and power relations along racial, gender and class lines. If you can't acknowledge them, there is no way to fix them. And most importantly, in practice the left reduces the divide.

If you have a better idea of how to fix it, I'm all ears. But fixing a problem without recognizing it exists is, well, not typically accepted as solid practice.

Take "White Fragility", for instance. Can there be unconscious racism? Certainly. But telling every white person that they are inherently racist simply because they are white... yeah, that's not how you "reduce the divide". (It's also both wrong and racist.)

I don't know what the answer is, but that wasn't it. All that did was tell people that they're dealing with flaming zealots with ridiculously out-there ideas. And it told whites that the author had selected them as being part of the bad guys, without actually knowing anything about them - and therefore that there was no point in engaging with people like the author, since all they were going to get was condemnation, regardless of what the reality was.

The book "White Fragility" was rejected pretty soundly by most leftists, actually. Corporate pseudo-progressives loved it, however. I definitely agree that a lot of people are coopting leftist languages. But ultimately, corporate diversity consultants aren't leftists, they're delusional neoliberals.

Here are criticisms of "White Fragility" from a leftist perspective :

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/racism-george-floyd-racial-ju...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/08/divers...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dig-read-this-not-whit...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0kFTtR34cek

As you can see, there are a lot of them. I definitely agree with your criticism of White Fragility , and so do the vast majority of leftists. I'd attribute the stunningly deficient thinking behind it to trying to explain why we still have the divide starting with the assumption that our economic and political structures are fundamental good, which they aren't, but a less charitable and a bit more cooky explanation would be that it's a classic case of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Interesting. (And, to me, very surprising. I had no idea - I thought leftists embraced "White Fragility".)

Thanks for the links.

I would guess, though, that the author of "White Fragility" at least thinks she's on the left, maybe even the radical left. And I don't think that book helped to reduce the divides we were talking about. (I still don't have any answers for what to actually do. What do you do with people who think they're with you, and who are both theoretically and practically against you? And who label themselves with your group?)

I'm happy you find the links useful :)

There is definitly a lot of cognitive dissonance amongst people such as the author of White Fragility. The best solution for them is figures such as Chris Hedges, Richard Wolff, Cornell West, and Bernie Sanders. I think ultimately the issue with this lies upon the media - the views of the left are constantly misrepresented, and leftists such as Chris Hedges are outright banned from the media - he was fired from the NYT for opposing the Iraq War. Ultimately what you have to do is to build local organizations, vote very heavily in local primaries to get people such as AOC elected, start unions. It's a very difficult fight. You'll notice too that people such as DiAngelo in the mainstream media will generally attack leftists on aesthetics and ignore their points, like what happened with Sanders.

Additionally, people politically have tried to label themselves as leftists (including the Nazis - they called themselves National Socialists as they were signing deals with Krupp to make unions illegal and preparing to execute members of the Socialist and Communist parties). When those people have hegemony, it's a difficult fight.

Ultimately I think the basic distinction between leftists and people that pretend to be leftists is always economic. If you get the platform, the best attack vector is to focus on how useless their ideology is to fix economic issues, and how these economic issues are the engine of racism. If you manage to get them to admit that their economic policies do nothing to help the poor and the common man, it becomes very easy to call them out as not a leftist. But getting that platform is exceedingly difficult, even when you're a professor in economics at MIT, a Pullitzer prize winning journalist, the most popular politician in the US (see : Bernie Blackout), or an acclaimed doctor in Philosophy and influential critic of Obama (such as Cornell West - if he was a Republican he'd get twenty times more airtime).

I disagree with the idea that asking people to stop treating other groups badly, if they are in fact doing that, is divisive. I would argue it's the opposite of divisive.

However – and I say this as someone who identifies as a progressive – I agree with the sentiment that we have a problem on the left with both the over-application of purity tests and with lack of discipline, both of which I think are alienating, but neither of which are inherent to liberalism.

Asking people who are treating other groups badly to stop is necessary, whether or not it's divisive.

Telling all of a group that they're treating other groups badly is, I argue, divisive, in two ways. First, it defines the accused group as being a unity which is against the other group, which is also defined as a unity. That's dividing people into those groups.

Second, it's peeling off allies from the other group. People react by thinking "If you're going to lump me in with the oppressors, without knowing a thing about me, then screw you. I'm out. I don't want anything to do with your crusade."

I agree with your second paragraph.

Yea, I don't think it's really accurate even if it's sometimes the unintentional result. It's frustrating because I really appreciate the rest of the perspective they're offering.

Paraphrasing you back to yourself: "the goal of the left isn't to divide on gender and class, it's to highlight existing divisions"

So we agree then.

No. The goal of the left is to fix the existing divisions. In order to do so, their existence and extent needs to be laid bare.

I agree that many people hold this well intentioned goal. The reality I have seen is VERY different.

Care to give examples? US Democrats aren't leftists, they are just normal neoliberals.

“It' funny to me that both sides of american politics would claim they agree with this while saying it's the other side who wants to divide people and they are both right”

I think this paragraph is spot on.

I often like to ask people how they would feel if the “other” side had done/said the same thing “their” side is doing/saying now. Most often it seems people get mad at who does or says something and no matter what it really is. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs and will harm the country more and more. They are already setting up the groundwork for half the population not believing the outcome of the next election which will erode things even further.

> The right causes more damage in the short term in my opinion, things like immigrant detention camps

I'm not so sure that immigrant detention camps are specifically a "right" issue. Mandatory detention was initially authorized by Bill Clinton in 1996.

It's certainly gotten a lot more media attention (and executive Trumpeting) under the current administration, but the roots are by no means new nor exclusively right, recent media and meme focus aside.

Well they convinced you that there are two sides, so they're having some effect on the narrative.

It's like history repeats itself. In Weimar Germany you had the fascists who wanted to persecute and scapegoat minorities and immigrants, but then the far left was also super intolerant of the fascists and actually killed some of them in street brawls.

The truly wise group were the conservatives who were repulsed by both sides but willing to work with the fascists.

For some historical perspective, generally, populist revolutions throughout history, especially in the West, have been leftist, the French Revolution, American Revolution, Mexican Revolution. Right wing revolutions tend to curtail rights like the Iranian Revolution. And the all time greatest threat to the world has been a right wing populist revolution; the rise of Nazi Germany - which thankfully was defeated.

This is a completely worthless, ahistorical comment.

> French Revolution,

How did that turn out?

> American Revolution

There is no definition of leftism that would include the American independence movement. The conception of leftism didn't even exist!. My head is about ready to explode.

> Mexican Revolution

See French revolution.

>And the all time greatest threat to the world has been a right wing populist revolution; the rise of Nazi Germany.

Pick up a book on the Weimar Republic some day, you might learn something!

> Right wing revolutions tend to curtail rights like the Iranian Revolution

'Tend to'

I have been repeatedly informed that the Iranian revolution was a liberation from the Western Imperialists & therefore left-wing (yes, seriously).

Strangely omitted are the Russian, Chinese, & Cuban revolutions. I wonder why?

Frankly, I'm shocked the mods let this topic survive on the front-page for this long. It's a honeypot for every kind of crank to show up and start arguing (myself included) In summary, you guys need to put down the IDEs & start reading actual history books (not wikipedia & and half-assed bastardized regurgitations of Chomsky)

> The conception of leftism didn't even exist!

Left is progressive, right is conservative. These terms can and are applied to historical events retroactively.

> Pick up a book on the Weimar Republic some day, you might learn something!

How is this a refute?

> Strangely omitted are the Russian, Chinese, & Cuban revolutions. I wonder why?

Neither Russia nor China are considered the West. But why don't you tell us. I can only guess your argument is that left wing revolutions are totally worse than Nazis.

How was the American Revolution leftist? What even was this cohesive American Revolution. If anything it was the constitutionalists and it sure does not seem like the modern left is too excited about that racist document written by slaveowners.

Strange to see the American Revolution called leftist. And it wasn't a revolution in the sense of the French Revolution, of course. It was a province proclaiming independence.

The Nazis got elected, they didn't start a revolution. The Russian Revolution is missing.

> Strange to see the American Revolution called leftist

The American Revolution was absolutely leftist in the traditional sense right as "support of the monarchy" or conservative and left as "royal abolitionists" or progressive.

Of course, this maps a little awkwardly onto modern American politics. For example, the Americans of the 1800's were progressive in a lot ways, but they kept supporting the system of kidnapping Africans for slaves (and chattel slavery in general) for a lot longer because they benefited so greatly from it.

> The American Revolution was absolutely leftist in the traditional sense right as "support of the monarchy" or conservative and left as "royal abolitionists" or progressive.

But that wasn't it at all. They didn't revolt "because kings are shit", they revolted because they believed the British parliament (where the anti-royalists had won against the royalists in the English civil war) didn't give them adequate representation. It was motivated by an unbalanced relationship between economic ability and political participation, not because of ideology.

Sure if you define anyone who wants to change things as leftist all revolutions are tautalogically leftist.

Neo Nazis want to change things too. Does that make them progressive leftists?

> Sure if you define anyone who wants to change things as leftist all revolutions are tautalogically leftist.

Most people understand this to be the case, _unless_ the revolution is _reactionary_ which is traditionally conservative.

> reactionary denotes "a movement towards the reversal of an existing tendency or state" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary

Interesting. Had never heard of that before but it seems to make sense in most cases. I still think american neo nazis are a counter example. They aren't really trying to go back to something that ever existed.

> The Nazis got elected, they didn't start a revolution.

Nazi's killed their political opposition, especially Communists.

Do you believe that killing political rivals makes a movement a revolution? Is Assad in Syria running a revolution?

The Nazis went wild with murdering everyone they didn't like after they got elected (not that they weren't into violence before, but Hitler's attempt at a revolution failed in '23, Hitler was convicted and went to prison). They got elected on a populist vote, but that's not a revolution. Revolution != getting elected by normal proceedings.

> ...killing political rivals...

> ...got elected on a populist vote...

To my mind, a violent populist movement is a revolution.

It's not contentious term for me.

20th century Communists, of course, were famously tolerant of their opponents.

> between 1933–39, with 30,000 communists executed and 150,000 sent to Nazi concentration camps.

If you're talking about American democrats and republicans, it's better to say "the far right" and "the not as far right". AFAIK, US politics does not have a "left" that has any power.

The vast majority of US democrats in the house and senate, if they were in Canada, would be members of the Conservative party.

Do Conservative Canadian politicians like to bomb other countries where they have no business.

Very strongly disagree. This again is a thing which both sides would claim equally. The right would make the same claim in terms of the left holding all of the power and how their party has been diluted and forced left.

You are just saying you fall left of the equilibrium point of the democratic party.

There is not a major political party in the US that advocates for an employment guarantee, banning private property, or withdrawing all armed forces from around the world. These are positions you would expect from a range of left parties in a parliamentary system. There is however a party that wants to let your employer fire you for any reason whatsoever. It's not even close.

> banning private property, or withdrawing all armed forces from around the world

US democratic party is not a flock of angels... but they're certainly not idiots.

Maybe just start by not protecting war criminals.

This has of course nothing to do with the original question, where they fall on the spectrum of political opinions.

The democrats are roughly center-right when you look at it in comparison to major countries across the world. See e.g. https://qz.com/1748903/how-2020-us-democratic-candidates-com...

Right, but what kind of conclusion can be made here? Is US too right? Or Europe is too left? Or both are off and the optimal society requires much lefter/righter policies?

I'm not sure you can draw any conclusion here. (Except, seemingly, "I don't like this, don't have any rational argument, and so should downvote" ;)

The only one that you can make, based on the data, is that US politics trend much further right than many other places, and that talking about "Democrats" and "the left" in the same breath doesn't make any sense in a global context. They just aren't.

And I think that is very relevant when you want to talk about US politics. It defines the available spectrum.

Where outside of North Korea, Stalin or Mao had abolished private property or has a full employment guarantee?

> advocates for an employment guarantee, banning private property

Why would there be? These are ridiculous goals. North Korea has open doors if you want to defect. I've heard it's pretty nice over there.

"There is not a major political party in the US that advocates for an employment guarantee, banning private property, or withdrawing all armed forces from around the world. These are positions you would expect from a range of left parties in a parliamentary system."

That's a pretty loose definition of 'major'.

Parliamentary systems sound pretty shitty then - keep in mind the Golden Dawn, UKIP, and any one of the perennial "let's deport all the Roma" parties also counts as a major political party under your definition.

Looking at different ideologies, the Republican has many fascists, the Democrats has no communists and only a tiny minority dare criticize capitalist. That pretty much settles it, the US has no leftist party.

The generally accepted definition of a leftist is someone that opposes capitalism. There is no real political force in the US that opposes capitalism, so the US doesn't have a left. It has a center, and a right-to-far-right,

Its too bad that, for many people, fascist has just become the default insult for people you don't agree with politically. It actually has a very specific meaning. Read the wikipedia article on fascism and you will he hard pressed to find an actual fascist in the public sphere on any political level.

I agree that the words "fascist" and "fascism" have practically been worn out by misuse and overuse, but Trump has mutated the Republican Party into something that, to my eyes, meets most common definitions of Fascism, and looking at the wikipedia article you mention seems to confirm my thoughts on this: they describe fascism as "a form of far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalism" and mention protectionism, and economic interventionism, and opposition to liberal democracy, among other things. I would be interested to hear how the Trump administration is different in concept from the description outlined by the wikipedia page.

There are people in the Republican party that believe in the white Genocide, that Jewish billionaires are financing genetic warfare against white people. Their solution is essentially fascism.

Read up a bit about fascism. You'll find that's it's not just the Nazis in 1942.

> The generally accepted definition of a leftist is someone that opposes capitalism.

This is a very broken and poor working definition. You can be leftist without being anti capitalist. Leftists don't believe in the "free market fixes things" or trickle down rhetorics. Speaking as a left leaning Canadian.

Leftist capitalism would see government regulation over industry which is of vital societal importance. America has bodies regulating food, medicine, construction, and others. Leftist capitalism often seeks to extend regulations to the benefit of the average citizen.

One example is Canada recently forcing telecoms to unlock phones. Another might be provincial transportation services being either government owned or privately owned with a high degree of government oversight. Their prices then remain low with moderate levels of profitability instead of high prices seeking higher levels of profit.

I'd say the majority of leftists believe capitalism needs to be carefully kept in check, with only more extreme believing it should be abolished. Though many do believe certain industries require far more government oversight than they currently have, or that certain things like health care or education should be made into a social service.

Do you believe that capitalism is the best economic system possible that will ever be, and that simply adjusting it will forever be the limit of economic theory? And by capitalism, I mean capitalism, not just markets.

If so, I'd say you are a left-leaning liberal, not a leftist. Economically, you are firmly in the center.

What fascists? All of our elected officials are either left-flavored neoliberals or right-flavored neoliberals. The only exceptions I can think of are one self proclaimed socialist (Sanders) and one libertarian (Paul). Certainly no elected communists.

Europe has a much greater variety of politicians (right and left) than America. The center/left/right paradigm doesn't make much sense here (as much as compressing all possible political positions into a 1-dimensional spectrum makes sense anyway.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_King

As requested, as provided. Anyone who preaches the supremacy of the white race I think can be fairly characterized as fascist.

The majority of Republicans are indeed neoliberals, but there are and have been avowed white supremacists and fascists. Various republican-aligned groups in the US actually cooperated with the NSDAP.

While racial supremacism and facism obviously work well together (especially if you can confuse racial identity with national identity), they aren't actually related and King only seems to support the former. He seems like a rather revolting person from what I bothered to read of the Wikipedia page, but I don't see anything to support "the Republican has many fascists", unless you're going by a suffiently broad definition of "facist" as to include most of the US congress, Democrat or Republican, which doesn't seem to be what you're asserting.

The guy who was repeatedly reprimanded by his own party for it & stripped of his assignments? By this standard, the Democrats are socialists since they won't reprimand AOC. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/us/politics/steve-king-wh...

> Various republican-aligned groups in the US actually cooperated with the NSDAP.

If we're bringing up stuff from the 1930s, you're not going to like what the Democrats were doing from then until 70s.

Steve King isn't the only one, and as far as I know he is still a member of the Republican party.

When AOC shows support to a Marxist-Leninist State and party, and when she loudly claims for the seizure of the means of production, you'll have a point. So far, the most extreme thing she's advocating for is Nationalized Healthcare and investment in infrastructure. I don't really think you can equate that with complaining about the white genocide. Her policies and rhetoric are at the very most that of a left-leaning liberal anywhere else in the world.

So no, your argument doesn't really hold up.

If you're going to claim that the Democrats were collaborating with the Soviets, I'd like to remind you that Mccarthy was a Democrat.

> economic security for all who are ... unwilling to work.

goes slightly beyond investment into infrastructure

Economic security for people who are unwilling to work is a basic feature of most advanced economies. See the BS in Québec, the RSI in France, and so on. There was a time in the US when it was a thing too.

Regardless of whether it's implemented in certain countries, the idea that society must support those unwilling to work seems to be quite far on left side of the spectrum.

The "you don't work - you don't eat" idea is not "rightists". It's just a basic law of nature.

"You don't work - you don't eat" isn't a reality anywhere in the world today. It's not a basic law of nature, it's a delusion. The world doesn't actually work like that.

Do you think that the Republicans are quite far on the left side of the spectrum? Because last I've heard they haven't repealed food stamps yet.

The definition of fascist is not person you don't like.