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Comment by t-3 | Hacker News Reader

They're leaning left from the perspective of the extreme right. To everyone else, they're just the leftmost portion of the rightist blob.

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By "everyone else" you mean literal socialists and communists trying to pretend that they are still on the map and haven't been far outside of the Overton window for at least half a century. Seriously that rhetorical whine is as obvious as unironic use of "Bourgeois" and "Proletarian" framing.

This is clearly incorrect. MSNBC is pretty strongly left / progressive.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. MSNBC tends to advocate for liberal positions which, while on the left side of right wing, is still a right wing position. You don't see them advocating much for social democracy let alone more extreme forms of socialism.

If you set your 'center' at your personal position, instead of the center of the population as a whole, you get weird results.

I.e. to someone else, Fox News isn't advocating to deport all non-whites, therefore they're just the right side of the left-wing blob.

In real life, left-wing means left-wing relative the population, not relative to you personally.

If we define left wing in terms of the population as a whole, then there is a huge portion of the population that is opposed to neo-liberal & far right positions and there are no major media organizations that represent them. That's the point that I am attempting to make.

Most people in the US have not encountered the 'left'. Democrats, do have progressive wing but in general they are center-right/right while Republicans are far-right at this point. (Even ignoring the Nazi salutes at Republican rallies).

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