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Comment by yokoprime | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Just wow. The "radical" US left equals the conservative right in many European countries. While you certainly may think Europe is full of "second tier countries", I think it's time to broaden your horizons. If anything the problem is they are ineffective and are poor at keeping file and rank compared to the GOP. The GOP on the other-hand tries to drive the US towards a ultra-conservative future, erasing the separation of church and state.

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This may have been true sixty years ago, but certainly not today. The conservative right in European countries is turning hard-nationalist in response to massive net immigration. Simply look to the campaigns of Zemmour and Le Pen in France or Orban in Hungary.

and on that note https://www.cpachungary.com/en/speakers

Candace Owens?! That's hilarious.

I don't follow their platforms, but in Europe one can still expect conservative parties to believe that people should have public goods like healthcare and childcare and education and retirement as basic human rights, that dignity is something we deserve, that a job should mean something more than wage slavery and that the average citizen shouldn’t die in debt. Who they define as persons or citizens is up for discussion on the right, but measured on this other corporate-capitalist scale of being "right", the Democrats are off the scale in European terms.

Yes, that's all true, but that does not support the claim that the "American radical left is the European conservative right". In some ways, some of the demands of the American radical left mimic some of the expectations of European right-wing platforms, but the American radical left would still be identifiably left-wing in Europe, mostly due to their positions on immigration, regulation, sociology, and taxation.

The follow-up question to demonstrate this point would be "would an American who identifies as radically left-leaning join a European conservative right-wing party if they moved to Europe?"

I think the claim here that: “The "radical" US left equals the conservative right in many European countries” is a bit of an exaggeration. A more accurate statement (and probably what OP meant; albeit less inflammatory) would be something like: “Moderate and conservative (i.e. mainstream) Democrats in America closely resemble the conservative right wing parties in Europe”. And I think this is largely true. Biden is in many ways to the right of Macron even though Macron is in the center-right of the political spectrum. While Bernie Sanders (the most left wing the US could possibly hope for) really only approaches the center-left Olaf Scholz.

This isn’t that true today, the US far left is solidly left nowadays by European standards, and Europe had a far right that isn’t too distant from the US

What US far left lol? Genuinely curious European here.

Yeah, the US far left has 3 congress people and one youtube news channel no cable news presence at all.

The actually difference in beliefs between Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell is paper thin.

The far left in the US is materially different than the classical understanding of the far left. The far left in the US is now primarily concerned with pushing the goals of Critial Theory (a cultural neo-Marxist ideology, to oversimplify) as supposed to the goals of traditional big S Socialist or Marxist economics and workers party goals. This slow dialectical evolution of the left in the US has led to a lot of confusion regarding how it can be possible for people to be arguing the left in the US is not just extreme but increasingly radicalized when it rejected democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. It's because the revolutionary tilt of the left has moved away from overturning economic class and systems of capitalism through labor organization, at least as the primary lever to push on.

Oh my god the Patterson bullshit. Please mate, stop the cap. Bernie Sanders is the furthest 'left' in the US and man wants free education and healthcare which are the status quo in every other developed country.

Cultural Marxism is not a thing, please educate yourself beyond the videos of the lobster psychologist. You claim the left is 'radicalized' in a right-wing country where the right-wing party literally tried to undermine democracy through an insurrection less then a year ago...

I’ve literally never watched a Jordan Peterson video.

My bad, he's the most egregious offender of that BS in the media space. What I'm getting at here is that the US has no true left. Your workers are exploited and healthcare/education/life costs are making it so that jumping over the poverty line is getting so hard you might as well live in a third world country.

And somehow the narrative is about the non-existent 'radicalized left' doing stuff and cultural Marxists trying to change our pronouns. It just feels sad to hear.

Bernie Sanders wants a lot more than that and would be left by European views as well, and yeah the left has become radicalized just like the right has, this is all non-controversial

I mean Bernie Sanders was almost the nominee and he is pretty far left even by European standards

No he's not. You do realize free healthcare, education and social security is the DEFAULT in Europe. Even in conservative countries. That's far from 'far left'.

In what ways?

The left in the US is to the left of Europe now in many ways. By second tier I wasn’t referring to politics, but referring to our collapse into a weak economic and cultural power.

> The "radical" US left equals the conservative right in many European countries.

Who cares? The US is not a European country, so the point is irrelevant. And although I see it repeated a lot, I don't think it's factual either.

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