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Comment by offby37years | Hacker News Reader

No true Bolshevik.

Words have meanings.

Not any more apparently. Fascist, socialist, communist, alt-right, neoliberal, etc. just mean whatever they need to quickly slur someone with them. Hell ever Marxism seems like it doesn’t actually refer to anything Marx or his contemporaries ever said anymore. Did you know Bloomberg is a Maoist?

Fascinating how the site obsessed with their pseudo-intellectual superiority can’t add anything other than downvotes.

I agree. Unless we are talking about avowed actual Nazis or card-carrying Communists, much of this extremist labeling can be reduced to identify ‘enemy tribe members.’

Imagine a discussion board where you could not use any -ism.

But meanings vary depending on region, education, political background.

Science, direct experience, is about as concrete as it gets.

No. The NYT has a liberal bias. Not a left bias.

Well what's "liberal" here? As someone not from the US, liberal means to me what people in the US call "libertarian" or "classical liberal"; and I thought "liberal" is what you call people from the democratic party, who are left-leaning statists AFAICT. Are you just saying they aren't communists? Because communism is what's normally called far-left in most of the world.

The US is a very right wing country. If you're not from there then there's a good chance that the Democratic Party is more right wing than your countries major right wing party.

Exactly. Other countries' liberal will match the NYT.

Really we need a venn diagram with like 10 different circles to describe the distinction between what is meant by liberal and what is meant by left here.

Liberal, in this case, when contrasted against the left usually describes the politics of the neoliberal and neoconservative (and often a mixture of the two) wing of the Democrat Party. In other words, liberals are considered a sort of right wing - pro-market/pro-capitalism - of the Democrat party. On the other hand, you have the “real left” which represents anti-capitalist and pro-labor ideals (this is a smaller faction and it’s more of a gradient that leans toward democratic socialism than full abolishment of capitalism). There are certain cases where (parts of) the neoliberal and left wing align - for example the various identity issues. That’s the “progressive” part of the party.

But yes this is all very confusing because we have only recently developed language in US politics to describe these differences and they have not really hit mainstream political discussion. That and we have one mega party that represents many different views.

> we have only recently developed language in US politics to describe these differences and they have not really hit mainstream political discussion.

Well, we are just rediscovering the language used in the rest of the world the whole time, as we fix one side of the Overton window while the other side of it stretches like crazy.

What would you say are the three biggest policy differences between right and left or democrat and republicans?

Policy differences are kind of hard to track and it gets abstract. Are we talking about the superficial policy differences (i.e. the ones we see in CSPAN performances) or those that represent the the interests of the corporate backers of each party? Sometimes the performative stuff aligns with the backers’ interests (e.g. democrats and immigration).

At the end of the day I’m mostly checked out from US politics. There is how I think things ought to be and reality. Reconciling the two will probably take many more years of reflection.

Mostly my interest in politics at this point is the internecine conflicts that arise in the various subcultures of political thought online.

I ask because I can’t remember the last time I heard of a policy disagreement debating the merits of two approaches to the same problem. Both sides don’t even see the same problems.

Will be interesting to see what policies Biden goes for I guess.

I am using the proper international definition of "liberal". The NYT certainly has a very US ideology, but it best fits liberal in the rest off the democratic world.

The Guardian is left of the NYT, for example.

> In the United States liberalism is associated with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal program of the Democratic administration of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whereas in Europe it is more commonly associated with a commitment to limited government and laissez-faire economic policies (see below Contemporary liberalism).

https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism

Do you agree with this?

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