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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting how much soft power the political left in America has, despite being about 50% of voters.

Hollywood, Silicon Valley, academia, and the news media all lean left. This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to do anything in these areas that might counter their preferences.

I think all this soft power actually hurts the left in America, because our country's default state is a bit of an echo-chamber. It's possible to go to university, watch movies, read the news everyday, and have no idea what the other half of the country is thinking or saying.

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It's worth noting how much actual political power the right in America has, despite being about 50% of voters.

The Senate and electoral college favor them massively. This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to change any laws that might counter their preferences.

A business that is heavily involved with local government has to sweat Republican politics, a business that is heavily involved with technology, the media, or other forms of nonstate power has to sweat Democrat politics. I guess it would be nice if companies could simply focus on getting their job done and not have to sweat anyone's politics at all.

Politics is the the practice of how to organize society. There's no such thing as an apolitical entity. At the most basic level, just the fact that corporations exist is itself a political decision.

Sure, with a sufficiently expansive definition of political everything is, but in the comment above, "politics" meant "dealing with the preferences of." So the local Republican politician would want stuff if you wanted to build your chemical plant, maybe a new baseball field, maybe campaign contributions. Your Democrat-aligned hosting provider would want you to not run the center of operations of their enemies. You are using politics in the academic sense, where two kids playing tag are engaging in politics, but that is not the only thing that "politics" can be used to describe. Companies should follow the law, not politics.

Companies should do what their owners want per capitalism. If that's politics, the company should do politics.

Sure, but the political system should not be such that the owners of the companies have anything to gain by wanting their companies to do politics.

The only way that could ever be the case is if taxes ceased to exist. Until that point, there will always be lobbying for lower taxes.

Your objection really seems to be engagement in culture wars.

Companies have to obey laws and laws are written by politicians. Unless you think companies should be above the law they cannot, and should not be expected to, avoid thinking about politics.

Thinking about the law is a world away from thinking about politics. Companies should think about how to comply with regulations, but they should not be biting their nails over whether the candidate who's backing their chemical plant will give a speech about Marijuana decrimininalization that's convincing enough to secure him the position necessary to force the local regulatory body to change the acceptable limits on effluents so that it becomes possible to continue running a process on an old line.

It sounds like you are suggesting that regulations should never change. Is that what you mean?

No. That is not what the other person said.

Did you accidently respond to the wrong comment?

What the person said was that a chemical manufacturing company should not be "biting their nails" over some random Marijuana decrimininalization speech, that a random candidate is making.

At the end he was talking about changing the rules on effluents. I guess I just doing understand what he is trying to say.

Why should the rules on effluents be related to marijuana policy? They shouldn't be. Why are the rules on effluents related to marijuana policy? Because politics works according to public sentiment attached to individual leaders and their parties, and the leaders and parties bundle together large packages of unrelated policies. Hence a chemical plant owner becomes interested in issues that have absolutely nothing to do with his businesses, or even his business' externalities.

It would be nice if it were possible to be apolitical but in many respects it isn't depending on the nature of your business and that's a reality I think some people are reticent to accept. Corporations exist to make money and there isn't an industry out there that doesn't actively lobby in their interest.

Turns out being `apolitical` is kind of a myth.

Banning speech by half the population is not "soft power" anymore in the world we live in.

When did half the population have their speech banned?

The whole argument is so silly. Trump could snap a finger and have cameras ready to air on national TV whatever he wanted to say.

If Valve bans me from Steam for my language is that also violation of my free speech or is it their right to protect their platform?

> snap a finger and have cameras ready to air on national TV

You do realize both ABC and CNN literally went live and said they won't air his speech, right?

God I hope so. He got his 15 minutes his whole wasted life.

Worth noting that Valve is one of the few companies that makes a conscious effort in favor of freedom of speech. They refuse to moderate for ideological reasons and not just cost.

It depends - is Valve also claiming liability protection under section 230 as a information service provider?

Being an information service provider with Section 230 protection doesn't obligate that provider to allow anyone to post anything.

No, but it should make the platform similar to a public square. Taking a government grant of liability protection should come with obligations to the public.

> Taking a government grant of liability protection should come with obligations to the public.

Why? That's a serious question.

The reason liability protections exist for information services is because information services can't exist without them. It's not possible for an information service provider to be strictly liable for what their users post while having anything like a reasonable quality of service or cost. Think 10 hour moderation queues to post on Instagram, which costs $15/month, and requires using your driver's license or other photo ID to sign up so they can forward libel suits to you.

Requiring strict liability on the part of information service providers will likely drastically reduce the amount of free speech. Because they're going to aggressively take down/reject anything that has the slightest possibility of them getting sued. They won't suddenly morph into the town square because an unmoderated Internet town square is a filthy, ugly place that repels users and advertisers and hurts the bottom line.

"Requiring strict liability..." which is why I did not write that.

I would propose that moderation decisions be logged and reviewable on demand (at the plantiff's cost) in front of a reputable arbitrator of the platform's choice.

I have no idea if this is a good idea or not. If it makes some plaintiffs feel better that they're being heard, great. But I don't believe it would substantially alter the status quo. Anyway, you do you my friend.

Is that even possible at any sort of scale?

if the plantiffs pay, I think so. All the platforms would need to do is log the moderation decisions they already make.

> is Valve also claiming liability protection under section 230 as a information service provider?

What part of Section 230 do you think had any bearing on the issue being discussed?

Section 230 is a valuable grant of liability protection, and thus morally obligates platforms to act as a public forum. At the very least, moderation decisions should be written down and reviewable by a third party. The law should be reformed to reflect that.

> Section 230 is a valuable grant of liability protection, and thus morally obligates platforms to act as a public forum.

That makes no sense, since the entire, explicit purpose of Section 230 was to free platforms from preexisting disincentives si that they could be free to “restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected” without incurring liability that would otherwise attend such editorial control.

You are literally suggesting that the price of Section 230 protection ought to be not doing the things to which Section 230 protection applies in the first place.

Also, I think it's wrong, in any cases, to think of Section 230 as a special grant of liability protection, any more than the preexisting different liability of distributors from that of publishers is a special grant. It's a recognition that online media enables models that would not be practical with the media for which the traditional liability roles for content developed, and that venues for content which wasn't pre-screened in detail but over which largely reactive editorial control was exercised was all of technically and economically practical on the internet, inconsistent with the premises of the classic publisher vs. distributor liability analysis, and already, at the time the Act was considered, starting to be stifled by application of the traditional publisher vs. distributor rules. We don't force bookstores to be neutral platforms to be free of publisher liability, because we recognize that bookstores aren't naturally going to be pre-screening content at the detailed level print publishers will, and it doesn't make sense to stifle them by forcing them to. 230 is the same idea, just for a business activity that didn't exist when the common law of liability was evolving.

That's why section 230 needs to be re-written. I'm fine with moderation, and I'm fine with sites that publish user-generated content defining their own content rules. What I'm not fine with are rules that are unevenly enforced in order to play favorites. I would reform section 230 so say that you must post the site's user-generated content rules, and you must post a moderation log. The moderation log would consist of the list of moderation actions taken and the accounts affected, and the time. Any moderation action that appears to not align with the stated content policy should be reviewable by a third party accredited arbitrator, at the plantiff's expense. The net effect of this scenario would be to cause the sites to write down detailed rules about content, and enforce them fairly on all sides. Right now there are simply too many flagrantly biased or inaccurate moderation decisions on these sites, and many of them seem to be motivated by political or economic reasons. It's one thing to ask that sites be the "public square" because of the huge gift of liability protection that section 230 grants. This argument has not held up in courts. It's a totally different thing to require sites play by their own rules, and hold them accountable for each hypocritical moderation action that genuinely hurts the "little guy"

That'd be true, if it happened.

Plenty of conservatives left on Twitter.

One set of influencers is elected and held to account, the other is largely unaccountable.

First, the first set isn't a set of influencers. They directly legislate law.

Second, the other is accountable to the same laws as anyone else.

> One set of influencers is elected and held to account

Are they, though?

> the other is largely unaccountable

No the market will hold them to account.

The Senate is split 50-50, but the 50 Democrats represent 41 million more people than the 50 Republicans:

https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1352293847385124864

If voting in this country wasn't suppressed at the local level by Republican state governments, the federal government would look very different. It would be much more diverse and representative of real Americans, not just white male Americans.

The Democratic Presidential candidate has won the popular vote in the last 7 of 8 Presidential elections[0], with the Dems having, on average, about 5 million more votes for those 8 elections. It's empirically fair to say the right represents about 45% of voters (which makes their power even more noteworthy).

[0] year,dem_candidate,dem_votes,gop_candidate,gop_votes

1992,Bill Clinton,44909806,George H. W. Bush,39104550

1996,Bill Clinton,47401185,Bob Dole,39197469

2000,Al Gore,50999897,George W. Bush,50456002

2004,John Kerry,59028444,George W. Bush,62040610

2008,Barack Obama,69498516,John McCain,59948323

2012,Barack Obama,65915795,Mitt Romney,60933504

2016,Hillary Clinton,65853514,Donald Trump,62984828

2020,Joe Biden,81268867,Donald Trump,74216747

The electoral college actually favored Biden this time. He got 57% of EC votes, which is much higher than his share of the popular vote.

This is all pointless anyway for a union of states. Germany is underpowered compared to Luxembourg in the EU by design -- the same is true in the US. Should California ever go back to being conservative, as it was until Clinton, it will disadvantage Republicans just the same.

> The electoral college actually favored Biden this time

I think we're operating on different definitions of "favored". The definition I'm using (and which most of the English-speaking world uses) is "have a fundamental advantage". He won the electoral college narrowly. He won the popular vote handsomely. That's a sign of a thumb on the scale in a pretty fundamental way.

> He won the electoral college narrowly. He won the popular vote handsomely.

He didn't though. He won 57% of the electoral vote and 51% of the popular vote.

Another way of looking at it though, is he won the electoral college by a margin of 40k votes (the margin of victory in the states that mattered). He won the popular vote by a margin of 7m votes.

You're a pretty famous person, so we know you are smart enough to know that nothing above 50% matters.

"Favor" only matters to extent it helps a candidate get over 270 EV.

Sorry, you're saying the US should be more like the EU?

50 Senators are Democrats or caucus with them, and the Electoral college just put a Democrat in the White House -- so you can't really make such a claim with a straight face.

I said "favors". The 50 Democratic Senators represent 40m more people than the 50 Republican Senators. It's far easier for the balance to tip right than left.

The electoral college was decided by about 40k votes this time, and about 80k votes last time. The popular vote margin was in the millions. That should tell you something about how far the EC is from reality.

"popular vote" has absolutely no bearing on anything in this discussion. The US is not a direct democracy, it is a representative republic.

The 50 senators who represent semi-conservative states represent the same number of states as the 50 who represent more liberal states.

> The US is not a direct democracy, it is a representative republic.

I'm aware of that. And that structure favors one side more than another. This is not a controversial statement - the numbers (y'know, facts and logic) back that up.

States are lines on a map. In the current setup they have more influence than the actual people living in those states. Do you seriously not see how that can lead to disproportionate representation of some views?

So in a one world government China and India should decide what's best for the rest of the world... Got it.

That's a good argument against having a one-world government. Do you want a one-world government? I don't.

> States are lines on a map.

Saying this doesn't make them less important, it just shows a childish attitude. Local and State governments and representation are important parts of the Republic.

Dollars are just numbers in a database. Will you give me all your money? Or is it only certain "made-up" things that are important to you?

> Do you seriously not see how that can lead to disproportionate representation of some views?

Yes, and straight up popular vote leads to the same thing. That's why we have a system that is a combination of popular vote and state vote.

* The People are represented by the House.

* The States are represented by the Senate.

* Both are represented by the President.

Seems like a well-balanced system to me.

> Local and State governments and representation are important parts of the Republic

Why? What even is a state, if not its people? What even is a local or state government, if not the people in the city or state? Can you even have a state or a state government if there are no people in the state?

What's special about the state or state government specifically that it should get its representation separate from the people it governs? Are the state or state government's aims and objectives different from the people of the state? If so, why, and what legitimacy does it have? If not, why have it represented?

Moreover, if this was really and actually true, why was the 17th Amendment passed? Why aren't senators still chosen by state legislatures, or nominated by governors and confirmed by legislatures? Why does the state get represented twice (Senate and EC) but the people only get represented once? Isn't that an imbalance?

> Seems like a well-balanced system to me.

Because it favors your side. You'd be singing a different tune if it was the other way around.

> What's special about the state or state government specifically that it should get its representation separate from the people it governs?

The United States is a union of states. The people have representation at the federal level, and the state level.

> Are the state or state government's aims and objectives different from the people of the state? If so, why, and what legitimacy does it have? If not, why have it represented?

No. The people of the state are the state, not the government of the state. Again, the state gets representation because we are a union of states. And local governments get representation at the state level. There are many concerns of a people, and we have people representing those concerns at different levels of government, from local to state to federal. Otherwise we could just have a single person represent everyone.

> Why does the state get represented twice (Senate and EC) but the people only get represented once? Isn't that an imbalance?

The People are represented twice as said before (House and EC). The EC is the House + Senate. So no, it's not an imbalance.

> Because it favors your side. You'd be singing a different tune if it was the other way around.

I don't have a side. I vote for policies that I agree with, which has changed over time. Party support of certain issues has changed over time as well.

I am pretty tired, however, of people crying about foundational aspects of my country because they lost an election. I think the increasing concentration of power in the federal government is a bad idea.

> people crying about foundational aspects of my country because they lost an election

It's more a genuine concern that continuing on this path will result in a federal government whose policies don't reflect the views of the vast majority of the nation. You can already see this on issues such as cannabis.

> The People are represented twice as said before (House and EC)

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree that the EC adequately represents the people, since it takes the Senate numbers into account.

States are sovereign entities that made a choice years ago to join together in a federal union. The parameters of that union are spelled out in the Constitution -- you remove that Constitution at peril of the continued existence of that union.

Amendments, like the 17th, are one way to change that union, with the consent of those members of it -- but if you push too far there won't be a union any more, because a portion of those states will walk away from a union no longer defined as they define it.

> if you push too far there won't be a union any more, because a portion of those states will walk away from a union

As the lopsidedness of representation grows ever more pronounced, it increases the probability that federal law and policy will diverge significantly from the views of the majority of the nation. This will likely increase disenchantment with the federal government even further, which is just as great a danger to the union. Surely you agree that this situation isn't ideal either, even if the Constitution says it's supposed to be like that?

They already have.

If the people don't want things to be that way, they can pass amendments to change it.

They can't though. The states that would lose representation have the most incentive to block amendments. Amendments aren't done by referenda.

Amendments are done by the consent of 2/3s of the states, as is spelled out in the document that governs the union of such states.

If you don't want to call that a "referenda", I think you're incorrect, but it doesn't really matter.

States != people. People have to vote directly in order for it to be considered a referendum.

It's a referendum of the states, as was agreed to by the states when the union was formed.

It doesn't have to be people voting directly. It shouldn't be.

Seem more accurate to say:

  * electoral districts are represented by the House [0]
  * states are represented by the Senate

which then begs the questions

  * who represents the people as a whole (if anyone) ?
  * who or what does the President represent?

[0] since representatives are elected solely by the voters within a district, with no reference to voters in any other district.

> , it just shows a childish attitude

So that you can understand how your contribution is being consumed by others: when I came to that sentence fragment I stopped reading and down-voted your post. The remainder of your contribution might have been insightful... but I'll never know.

Yeah, the obvious thing is to split LA, and New York into 5 different states each, so that the liberals gain more power in the senate.

The state level representation of the senate is very arbitrary

I think the constitution bans splitting states. I was looking into combining the dakotas and it doesn't seem possible because of that clause.

And then TX will split into five states.

We can do that all day to no real effect.

This is false. The left now has the Senate and the Presidency.

The electoral college does not matter. They go the way their states go as was made quite clear in the last election.

EDIT: Of course it matters how the voting system was designed. The EC votes the way their State votes.

The forefathers intended for states to have some say in the matter. We are a representative democracy. That is how the system was designed.

You can not seriously argue the EC doesn't matter when the republicans have won the popular vote once since 1988 yet have held the presidency for 3 terms.

> The left now has the Senate and the Presidency.

The key term is "now". After getting about 40m more votes. Be honest. Is that balanced?

Was just pointing out it's quite clear that the nation itself is left leaning. That's honest by the numbers.

To say the Republicans have any kind of advantage right now except for maybe the courts is incorrect.

They had to lose by 7 million votes to actually lose, I would say they have quite advantage.

As another user said: "The Senate is split 50-50, but the 50 Democrats represent 41 million more people than the 50 Republicans"

We are a representative democracy for a reason. It was designed that way.

You can't change the rules of the game because you're losing.

The United States was designed as a representative democracy on purpose by the forefathers. That is fact.

> We are a representative democracy

And the argument is that this democracy isn't sufficiently "representative", since it doesn't represent everyone equally. Indeed that's an explicit non-goal.

> You can't change the rules of the game because you're losing.

But you can agree that the rules of the game are rigged against one side. You don't get to deny that just because you're winning.

Just because something was designed for a specific purpose a few hundred years ago doesn't mean it serves that same purpose today. Situations change. The Constitution was designed to be amended.

"representative democracy" does not require the structure of the US senate, nor state districting policies, nor the electoral college.

There are many other representative democracies that do not have any of these "features".

Also, I thought a reply ago, you stated that the left was winning, not losing.

It was designed to be unfair. The small states threw a fit at the constitutional convention so now we're stuck with this bs. Why does representative democracy mean some people are more represented than others? Why can't everyone be equally represented in a representative democracy?

Right? "We are a representative democracy" is some Orwellian doublespeak. It leaves out "But some people are more represented than others."

"All votes are representative, but some votes are more representative than others."

You bring up Orwell. Both sides can get to extremism pretty easily. Both conservatives and liberals easily become dictators. Power corrupts everyone.

This has nothing to do with Orwell. Im not sure why you bring him up.

The forefathers designed the system this way. I agree with the way it was designed. It prevents big states like California and New York from calling all the shots.

I agree with the forefathers. You do not. Simple.

> Im not sure why you bring him up.

Because saying "it's a representative democracy" is doublespeak. If you have one person representing tens of millions and another person representing a small city (~150k people), and they have the same vote, it's not meaningfully "representative". Saying "it's a representative democracy" doesn't tell you anything about the fairness of the system.

> I agree with the way it was designed.

Because it favors you. It would be a bad system even if it was the other way around (i.e. it favored the other side).

> It prevents big states like California and New York from calling all the shots.

I'm still to hear a good argument for why it's better for small states to call shots instead.

> I agree with the forefathers. You do not. Simple.

I'm fine with that. They were as fallible as anyone else and could not have foreseen that their system might have flaws. There's no need to deify them and think that everything they did was right.

The electoral college absolutely does matter and absolutely does favor right wing politicians (for now). Every state gets a minimum of three electoral votes regardless of their population, so as a result, a single vote in a sparsely populated state like Wyoming has up to four times the influence that a single vote in a densely populated state like NJ has. The current political make-up of the country is such that right-wing politicians find far greater support in rural areas and thus are favored by the electoral college. So far only right-wing politicians have managed to win the electoral college without winning a majority in the popular vote.

Similar logic applies to the Senate: regardless of population every state gets two senators. Right-wing senators have received fewer actual votes (by individual voters) than left-wing senators for years, yet in that time right-wing control of the senate has been more common than left-wing control. Right now the split in the Senate is 50-50 (Vice President, a Democrat, breaks the tie) but the total number of votes cast for Democratic senators was much higher than the number cast for Republicans.

You literally have to deny reality when you deny that the electoral college and the senate represent a structural advantage for Republicans right now.

Reality is that the Dems own the entire congress and the presidency right now.

Reality is we are representative democracy. The forefathers deliberately designed it that way.

Reality must line up with your arguments. It does not.

If what you say is true, Trump would most likely be president right now.

Dems own entire cities with the largest population centers. Dems have better organized grassroots. Dems have California and New York, the main stream media.

What advantages you speak of are moot compared to those ones.

We are a representative democracy and we always have been.

Yes, we should change the system. It was a compromise that is now well outdated.

Appreciate your honesty even if I disagree. I like the way it is setup. It stops the big states from pushing around the little ones too much.

The entire premise of a republic is that power is checked and balanced. The aim is not to represent the "will of the people", because the will of a majority is frequently to oppress a minority.

The EC was more than a compromise, it was an integral part of a system that prevents too much power being handed to any one institution or demographic. And forcing national candidates to appeal to a multitude of states rather than a handful of cities has a moderating effect.

If anything, what's outdated about the EC is we need more checks on the political influence that is centralized in cities because the founders didn't anticipate urbanization.

And the current system allows the minority to oppress the majority. I don't see how that is better. What we actually need is ranked choice or proportional representation so that we can have more than 2 parties.

If it were a dichotomy as you suggest, it might also be worth looking at why “conservative” or “right” leaning groups have not made inroads in these areas.

I believe it is because to be break out successful in any medium that demands an array of skill you must not discriminate against people: The company must not have or create a forum for a culture of exclusion.

That is to say, it should not matter if a person is gay if they are skilled in acting, coding or teaching. They are welcomed for their talent.

However, these “right leaning” groups typically are at best on the back foot of accepting the reality of diversity. And are often financially backed by people who seek to make laws that restrict the freedom of others to protect some existing homogeneous power structure.

So lack of traction in these industries is because you can’t constrict the talent pool to fit a narrow idea of what a completely equally protected human is and expect to get enough talent to be very successful.

Down voters might find my comment above as not a new idea: The Economist began advocating for Gay Marriage in 1996.

This 2004 article includes discussion of the benefits of acceptance: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2004/02/26/the-case-for-ga...

Hold on, they lean Democrat, not "Left." I know it sounds pedantic, even subjective, but it's very important to point out that the Democrats are pro-business, not particularly pro union, they are pro Wall Street, and they generally are pro Defense spending and engaged in wars abroad in every term going back thirty years. The fact that they talk about race and gender could arguably make them "culturally left" which very much makes them feel left-wing, even radical to some. A European, or almost anyone else in the world would call them centrists or center-right.

Silicon Valley is right-wing on economics and defense of monopoly, and left when you talk about race and gender equity in the board room.

You can see echoes of this on HN where many people support restrictions of speech if they come from a private platform ("laissez-faire" approach to private property), but still call for a shut down of hate speech and a correction of "misinformation".

The Democrats' cultural mores center around postmodernist principles of "language makes reality" "there are power imbalances" "the power imbalances intersect around race and gender" and finally "correcting how we talk about these topics will help the marginalized." ... But, we're reminded, Twitter and AWS and Facebook are private property, and you should read and follow the TOS ("laissez-faire").

not to take away from your point and be too pedantic, but i think maybe left and liberal are being conflated?

actual bonafide leftists have very little real political power in ths u.s afaik...

Yeah, as far as I can tell, America doesn't have any meaningful left-wing politics of any kind. There's not a single left politician elected to any federal office anywhere in the nation, for example.

Hollywood (the industry funded by the US Military to put pro-military-industrial-state advertisements into movies) is not "left leaning" in any meaningful way. "News Media" all lean either slight-right (MSNBC, NPR) to hard-right (Fox News, NYT, WSJ). Silicon Valley is primarily driven by right-leaning "libertarian" conservative types (at both big corps and small startups). Democrats are largely all conservative (in that, Democrats of 2021 mostly all hold identical views to what Republicans used to hold in the year 1998)

We do have a few centrist politicians and groups (Bernie Sanders / AOC+Squad, etc), and a few centrist movements (rights for LGBTQ+, or "Defund the Police", for example, is largely politically-centrist initiatives).

But I'm not aware of even a single left-leaning politician in any federal elected office. For example, no elected federal politician is advocating for the nationalization of all private corporations, or elimination of all for-profit entities, or for a complete cap on individual wealth, or for giving Hawaii back to the aboriginal Hawaiians, or anything like that, that could be considered a full-left position. (But meanwhile, on the right, there is a meaningful ultra-far-right political movement arguing that we should ignore replace democratically-elected officials with dicatorships, for example. And that group has elected members sitting in the House + Senate today)

> But I'm not aware of even a single left-leaning politician in any federal elected office. For example, no elected federal politician is advocating for the nationalization of all private corporations, or elimination of all for-profit entities, or for a complete cap on individual wealth, or for giving Hawaii back to the aboriginal Hawaiians, or anything like that,

so, given this, that NPR is right-leaning, and bernie/AOC are 'centrist', am I correct in your assessment that basically just about only bolshevism counts as 'left'?

Not an American, but

> NPR is right-leaning

Yes.

> bernie/AOC are 'centrist'

Yes. Though I would describe Sanders as left-of-centre (apart from her stance on the environment, Ocasio-Cortez is quite the centrist).

> am I correct in your assessment that basically just about only bolshevism counts as 'left'?

No. There is an entire range of actual leftist politics and economics that Americans tend to utterly refuse to engage with in good faith - the Cold War really did a number on that country's collective sense of a political spectrum. Left/right are instead essentially reduced to only being about social issues like abortion or LGBTQ rights, with some lip service paid to the environment.

"Imperialist capitalism, but make the marginal tax rate somewhat higher and appoint more minorities" is not leftism.

I don't know why this is getting downvoted. As an American, all of the above seems completely correct.

This is silly. Sanders is left. AOC is left. Many are left-leaning.

No one advocates a monarchy either, but that doesn't mean no one is "right-leaning".

AOC is a media figure with a big following, and Sanders has had a cultural influence, but I would hardly say that they're part of the DNC establishment. They're at the fringes. For evidence, Medicare For All is a keystone platform point for them both, and not for the mainstream DNC.

My personal opinion: I don't think Parler is about political left vs political right. There are plenty of folks on the political right who also don't want to be associated with QAnon, insurrection, death threats, and the other stuff that went on in the Parler posts. Don't fall into the trap of boxing this just into 50% vs 50%.

The reality of the US is: 33.7% of Americans didn't even vote in 2020, 34% voted "left", 31% voted "right" (the rest of the votes went to third party candidates). Those who voted on the right are further subdivided into even smaller groups. One of those smaller groups on the political right side includes extremists who attacked the capitol.

Distaste for Parler, due to the actions of some of those extremists who were using it actually crossed political boundaries: folks who didn't vote, folks on the "left" and even folks on the "right". The shunning of Parler isn't about "soft power" on the left its about the fact that a small group of people managed to do something so reprehensible that a LOT more than just 50% of people felt that association with them was tainting.

> It's worth noting how much soft power the political left in America has, despite being about 50% of voters.

This is not technically true. (1) politics is a spectrum (2) the US is generally left leaning as a whole, but the largest demographic designation of people in the US is generally considered moderate.

> This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to do anything in these areas that might counter their preferences.

The population of the US leans left - those outlets are simply a reflection of that. It's absurd to think that all of these elite people who run those companies get together and conspire to keep left ideas alive. If you know anything about the Democratic party you would know they are horrible at creating a coordinated strategy. To think that same party is somehow regurgitating a coordinated theme through commercial means while at the same time having an uncoordinated government strategy is absurd.

> It's possible to go to university, watch movies, read the news everyday, and have no idea what the other half of the country is thinking or saying.

I agree with this but not for your aforementioned reasons. Those echo-chambers exist because communication is no longer at the town square but on social media and messaging apps.

I'm not American but having browsed Parler for say half an hour, if that is supposed to represent 'the other half', then I pray for the country.

I don't think American news media or academia or Silicon Valley skews left. It skews ... urban and educated? Silicon Valley seems libertarian-ish, news and media seems like they do in every other country. From here it doesn't even look like the US has organised, left-wing political actors.

I'd love to live in your reality, but it ain't true. The left isn't the ones storming the Capitol.

When you have polarization along educational and age lines with the left on the higher education and younger side, it's inevitable they'll have cultural power.

> Hollywood, Silicon Valley, academia, and the news media all lean left.

citation needed.

Silicon Valley is a monument to capitalism and most if not all entrepreneurs lean libertarian.

As for the news media, as an example, Fox News has the highest viewership in the US. And for the others, ever thought about why you're not seeing a lot of coverage about unions/worker rights/worker strikes? Don't mistake anti-Trump rhetoric with 'left leaning'..

So I'm not sure we're you're getting your 'data' from.

Fox News has the biggest viewership of a single outlet, and it's right-wing, sure (93+% of viewers self-identify as Republican).

But MSNBC viewers self-identify as Democrat at the rate of 95%, NYT as 91%, NPR at 87%, CNN at 79%.

You need to compare aggregate numbers if you're trying to be fair.

The source for the above is Pew Research Center, Sept 12, 2020, published in this Tweet: https://twitter.com/pewresearch/status/1304908656543178752

Sigh.. Should we forget about the Sinclair Broadcast Group which is the second largest TV station owner in the country and does crap like: https://youtu.be/UOaayej-130?t=34 ?

Saying 'all media is left leaning' is factually false.

So capitalism is right-wing now? Oh let me guess, this is the old "Democrats are actually right-wing", right?

> As for the news media, as an example, Fox News has the highest viewership in the US.

Yes one channel is different than every other, of course viewership is concentrated there -- all the lefty viewers are spread out over the remaining channels.

If the other news channels aren't "left-wing" then Fox isn't "right-wing", and everything is meaningless. There isn't a large population of commies or nazis in the US, despite what the media would have you believe. Both parties are pretty near the center, with some individual outliers.

In what universe is capitalism not an emphatically right wing economic system?

In the universe where way too many Americans think left vs right wing is whether you support reproductive rights or not.

If you read the news every day then you will certainly hear from the other half of the country. I just checked CNN's front page, and while most coverage focuses on the new President, these three articles all feature right-wing viewpoints:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/2024-republican-prim... https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/fact-check-marjorie-... https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/01/21/conspiracy-th...

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