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Comment by covermydonkey | Hacker News Reader

As a South African all of this is fascinating. Especially the shift of where the "center" is.

It seemed every American not on the left is called "far right" from where I am sitting.

Half a dozen of my friends have moved to the States and a few have scolded me for my understanding saying that plenty of centrists are labeled far right.

I'm beginning to glaze over the label now. It doesn't hold any sway for me because it is used so flippantly.

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Because the American mainstream left became bananas. The Democratic and Republican parties would still be right-wing/conservative all across the world except in America, but the woke/sjw/faang crowd is socially hard-left also all across the world (not in economics or international politics, they are very conservative there,even hawkish). So, for example, me, a very leftist third world person has now more in common with your average mid-westerner republican than with a coastal google employee.

Your average Republican is going to be more authoritarian-leaning and hawkish than the not-actually-left FAANG caricature you're describing.

Republicans are pretty unlikely to support such leftist notions as democratizing the means of production, whereas your average FAANG employee just might.

> It seemed every American not on the left is called "far right" from where I am sitting.

From my perspective as a German, you have the centrist democrats that swing quite a bit in both directions, and the republicans who swing from center right to "makes our local right wing extremist party drool"-right.

I can confirm that. The whole political landscape in the US is skewed to the right and has always been. So are their political positions, e.g. the word "social democracy" plays almost no role and "liberal" either means "extreme left" or, even worse and more incorrect, is used as a synonym to libertarianism by white supremacists and neo-Nazis who disguise themselves as "libertarians."

I guess it's the result of having a two-party system.

> As a South African all of this is fascinating. Especially the shift of where the "center" is.

> It seemed every American not on the left is called "far right" from where I am sitting.

What you are seeing is polarization. At the current moment, a lot of the Republican party has moved away from more moderate Republicanism and more towards Trumpism, which is a far right movement.

Fact is that more Republican Congress members voted to punish a moderate Republican like Liz Cheney for voting to impeach Trump, than voted to remove Marjorie Greene from committee assignments for claiming school shootings and 9/11,were a hoax and that California wildfires were caused by a Jewish space laser.

It's not that anyone who isn't left is now considered far right. It's that a lot of people who were more moderate Republicans in the past, have moved much farther to the right. There are more people on the left side of the political spectrum that moved father out too, but not enough to even nominate one of the far left candidates for president.

Left has the reins of power, so they don't need to pretend they care about tolerance, freedom, or the rule of law anymore.

And you say that after 4 years of a right-wing presidency and after at least 8 of right-wing legislative overstepping.

We all know Merrick Garland should be on the SCOTUS. He isn't because a right-wing senate didn't allow a black president to nominate him.

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