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What are the strengths of the left in US politics?
I am genuinely curious to hear people’s opinions on this, especially in the wake of current events.
I am genuinely curious to hear people’s opinions on this, especially in the wake of current events.
There are like, 16,000 different definitions for what counts as "left" in US politics and most of them are bunk. There are no less than 26,436 different definitions for what counts as "strength" in US politics, and they're all poor attempts to define "power".
My point is: take any responses (including this one) you get to this question for what they are: opinionated bullshit on the hyperobject that is the US democracy. No one can see the whole thing. Anyone who says they can is a liar (and probably wants you to subscribe to their substack).
Having said that, I'll try to give a positive answer.
"The left" in the US pretty universally reviles and opposes oligarchs, also known as the "megarich" and "1%". "Every billionaire is a policy failure", etc. They generally support raising taxes on the wealthy (ultra or otherwise) as a baseline policy, to exterminating them (financially, or quite literally murdering all of them) as a class of society.
Obviously, one end of that scale of "tolerating billionaires" is more popular with the general public than the other, but it's at least my personal experience with a great variety of Americans that taxing billionaires more is a popular, or at least not popularly opposed, idea.
I don't think I can say what my personal stance is towards the oligarchy, without getting banned and my comment deleted, so I'll just say I can't say what my personal stance is towards the oligarchy without getting banned and my comment deleted.
"The left" in the US pretty universally supports unions and organized labor. "They" want workers to have more bargaining power and leverage with their employers. Like all other "leftist" beliefs, this too exists on a vast spectrum of ideas whose dimensions we really don't have time to get into (it's definitely not a 2D spectrum though).
Basically, you have some people who just think unions at Starbucks are cool, but they'll probably never join one themselves because that's too much work.
Then you have people who think every profession should have a nationally organized union capable of organizing, negotiating, and striking as a whole.
Then you have Syndicalists, a dying breed, who think everything should be unions, and unions should be like, the entire government basically. It's all unions, baby.
And then you have communists. I... don't want to talk about communists, because there are just so many goddamn types. Some of them support unions entirely, some of them support unions only so far as they are used to enact communism, at which point they see no use for them and think they should go away.
I like unions.
"The left" in the US is generally supportive of human rights. Things like not building concentration camps. Y'know, the simple stuff. There definitely are some, I guess I'll finally use the word "extreme", wings of leftists who go full authoritarian though, and actually think camps and gulags are cool and the Soviet Union did nothing wrong and what's that? Did somebody say "tankie"?
I think most "leftists" in the US just want people to be left alone to do with their own body as they please. Stuff like, you know, getting an abortion, or being able to identify as whatever gender they choose, without becoming fugitives of the state.
Some people (including some people here on Tildes unfortunately) like to talk about supporting human rights like it's some sort of political liability that costs Democrats elections. I think on one hand that's fascist bullshit and I'll actually fight you for it irl 1v1 me loser, but on the other hand if it costs political capital to support basic things like body autonomy then:
I remain unconvinced that trans people are a political liability though, and (bonus point!) I think "the left's" general unwillingness to compromise on autonomy and human rights is a core part of what makes its ideological basis so enduring.
(Except for, uh, all those authoritarian communist and socialist states that totally did compromise on autonomy and human rights to absolutely fucking ravage their populations. I liked the way @spctrvl put it six years ago, when they wrote a comment to the effect of "communism is an effective ideology, it just often runs orthogonal to the interests of its people". I'm pretty sure the context of that response was me pointing out that the Soviet Union, in 1917, went from being the last pseudo-feudalist state in Europe, to a world super power in less than thirty years. That's not the most historically sound analysis though, and you came here for unhinged ranting not Soviet history, so let's move on.)
Generally, I think the government should not concern itself with the private medical affairs of its citizens.
"The left" in the US is generally critical, if not outright hostile to, landlords as a class of people. The private ownership of another person's housing is generally viewed as a bad thing, and leftist ideas on this issue include "simple" market solutions (change zoning, build more housing, encourage supply), direct government intervention (rent price regulation/control, government funded housing, public housing), to the outright abolishment of landlordism as a practice.
What I think is a strength of "the left" in the US though, isn't necessarily their opposition to landlords, but their support for tenant rights and unions. Just like they want workers to be able to organize and negotiate better pay and conditions with their employers, they want tenants to be able to organize and negotiate better rent and conditions with their landlords. "The left" also generally supports laws that limit the power of landlords to evict tenants, and hold landlords to higher standards for maintenance, safety, and cleanliness.
This is actually the thing I have the most experience with. In college, I joined a student housing union, and one of our many activities was "agitation". We would pass out leaflets around student housing apartments, inform tenants of their rights, and maintain a network of contacts so students and other locals could get legal help (including from the university itself) to deal with housing issues.
I've seen some shit, and as a result I'm completely opposed to the private ownership of another person's housing.
It is, however, a difficult thing to come up with a solution to. I'm generally supportive of anything that increases the housing supply and forces landlords to drive down prices and compete harder. I'm universally supportive of tenant unions, housing cooperatives, and anything that gives the people actually living in a building, power to protect themselves against the people who own a building.
I would go as far as to say that I think private ownership of another person's housing should be outlawed. That, if someone lives in a building, it can only be owned by that person, or exist in a state of ownership limbo until the tenant acquires ownership.
Of course, that leaves a lot of open questions such as: "what if the tenant decides to completely trash the building and stop paying for it?"
And yeah, I'm not going to pretend like I've sat down and written out the hundreds of thousands of words it would take to replace the current societal system of private ownership of other peoples housing.
Nor should anyone expect me to. Because frankly, it's fucking stupid to expect anyone who opposes a "thing" or "practice" in society to have a complete, fully-formed idea on what an alternative should be. Society is way too big for that, and people who don't get that reek of we-should-improve-society-somehwat syndrome.
Oh, right, the hyperobject thing.
Uh, yeah, years ago, like fuck, 2018? 2019? someone, I actually think it was @Deimos, shared some link about the concept of a "hyperobject".
I don't have that specific link on hand, but it was probably this person who originally authored that link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Morton
Anyways, the way I'm using the term "hyperobject" here is as a "thing", in the most literal sense of the word, that is simply too great to be thoroughly understood by a single person.
And look, I get that we have voting data and polling data and professional pundit opinion data, but I fundamentally don't think the political zeitgeist of 75-to-80 million voters can be accurately opined, argued, examined, or shitfucked into a coherent and solid narrative without a few decades of information entropy to reduce the examinable sources down, and to lay the historical consensus.
Like, to be clear, what I'm saying is the country is so fucking big, and our brains so incredibly small, you just can't. You just fucking can't even capture it. You can't conceptualize an answer that's correct and accurate. It's just beyond our biology.
That's why we have to reduce everything down to spreadsheets and numbers and code. That's why there are so many different definitions, and so many of them are bullshit. Because it's all bullshit. IT'S ALL BULLSHIT. You were not made to capture, in your tiny little head, the "gargantuity" of tens of million's of people's opinions and expressions and moods.
You like media right? You know, television shows, movies, music, books, video games? All that bullshit?
Pick some piece of media you really like, but that's also popular.
Now write a single review of it, that captures the entirety of what that work is, what it means, for everyone. Not just yourself. Everyone. Every single person who has ever consumed that media. You have to write a review that is simultaneously complete and correct in every conceivable way for every single person who has consumed that media.
Not the easiest thing to do.
That's basically what you (yes, you OP, @Bet, bet you didn't expect this kind of bullshit response) are asking us to do here. That's fine, it's not like, against the rules or anything, and some people really like these kinds of political "discussions", but just know what kind of review you're really asking for, and don't be surprised when the responses are all over the place and flawed and simultaneously wrong-but-not-really.
If there's any lesson I want you and anyone else reading this to take with them, it's this:
Everything that is happening right now, at this very moment? It is so fucking beyond you, beyond any of us, to be able to understand in its entirety.
Everything that has happened in the past? You know, that thing we call "history"? It's bullshit. Itself a tiny sliver, a window into the past, a narrative weaved, albeit skillfully and worthily, from the piecemeal collections of what was. We will never be able to capture the entire picture. We will never be able to write the entire story.
You will never, never, be able to understand the world beyond your tiniest of tiny slivers that you call your life.
I really enjoyed your comment and broadly agree that politics as a gestalt whole is impossible to succinctly summarize.
From a philosophical perspective, many of your points are aligned with Postmodernism which has its fair share of critics. A political Modernist like a Communist would generally reject this analysis and argue history can be understood with grand narratives like workers versus owners.
Not that I totally disagree, but some criticisms of these points
The left has been pretty happy with their home grown oligarchs as long as they were on their side. Musk used to be the golden child and silicon valley elite and their cult around FAANG has always been a thing in left circles.
Unless it's a union they don't like (cops, which granted I think shows one of the major problems with unions) or it's inconvenient (rail strike, and yes he did get them what he wanted but it sure as hell didn't feel supported). I feel the left pays lip-service to unions while not actually doing anything about the massive amounts of anti union practices that flagrantly occur.
I agree that this is mostly true. I do believe their messaging on basically all 3 of these issues costs them elections. Hey we're pro immigrant, but also leave your dirty views about trans people and abortion behind isn't exactly compatible. Or are they just pro educated anglosphere immigrants? Sure seems that way sometimes.
And again here is an area where I think they pay more lip service than actually get much done. I don't think it's totally coincidence two of the worst states in regards to this happen to be liberal strongholds, with plenty of bureaucracy that mostly just gets in the way of actually solving the problems, and lets the corporate landlords get away with damn near murder.
I don't recall Musk ever being the golden child of the left. There was a lot of leftwing enthusiasm for Tesla for environmental reasons, but I don't recall much interest in Musk himself except from Libertarians and from Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley itself has been criticized by the non-Silicon-Valley left since at least the 00s (when I first heard of it). Big tech did not receive as much criticism as, say, the oil industry — but that doesn't mean it was beloved.
Not even left-friendly billionaires like Warren Buffet escape criticism from the left; I think most see him as relatively harmless, or even politically useful in some ways, but certainly not as their champion.
I am very curious to know where your perspective on this has come from. Are you perhaps basing this on observations from within Silicon Valley?
I'm in vegas and there were plenty of lefties here who swore musk could do no wrong and was the new google (since they were no longer the old google that could do no wrong...).
Facebook started out as the "cool college kid" thing and remained that way for some time even after zuck calling his users fucking morons came out. Google was "the good guys" because they had a "do no evil" clause in their charter.
Musk was ABSOLUTELY the darling leading the charge on all the good stuff and I vividly remember that one because I caught all the shit for saying he's not nearly as great as he seems from the people who now use his name as a swear word. He was saving the world with tesla and making rockets with space x and I'm just a republican bastard because I don't believe we'll be on mars or ever see anything remotely like a hyper loop and think calling the guy who actually saved children a pedophile is out of line.
So maybe it's a circles thing, but I absolutely got blown up and told what a moron I was for doubting musk in all my leftist circles. Real life and internet (reddit where he could do no wrong, discord, forums). At least one person who worked for a solar panel company (which was eventually acquired by musk in its own fiasco) , another who does/did work for WHO, several feminists and lbgtq members, and plenty of others who were more on the hippie/stoner leftist spectrum.
Edit-
Oh I forgot to add to my early musk red flags list "oh he also treats his workers like shit and seems to be extremely anti worker and just riding horrible burnout" but the fuck do I know right?
I'm sorry for my delay in responding. I have been busy.
I grew up in a low-income neighborhood of Atlanta, and the vibe was definitely very different amongst the leftwing in my community compared to what you are describing. There was a general distrust of business interests and people who pursue extreme wealth, and they instead encouraged small, decentralized businesses (e.g., using slogans like "shop local"). Now, the Libertarians I knew certainly held views similar to what you are describing, but progressives and Libertarians in my community were at odds and argued constantly. While they agreed on things like gay marriage, they still nonetheless came to these conclusions from subtly but fundamentally different first principles (namely fairness versus non-intervention). It sounds like if the progressives from my circle had met the progressives from your circle, they would have identified them as Libertarians and disagreed with them strongly.
From my perspective, using these terms as I understand them, it sounds to me like your social circle had a lot of Libertarians (or perhaps centrists without a cohesive underlying political philosophy) who enjoyed the aesthetic of progressivism (e.g., dressing like hippies), but did not actually adhere to progressive principles. I have no idea why our experiences here are so different; maybe different socioeconomics, maybe different regional influences, or maybe we just fell in with different crowds? I can certainly understand why you found them frustrating, however, because I don't think I would have been able to handle that, either.
There was one other point I wanted to address in your earlier comment:
My neighborhood had a very large immigrant community (I grew up in a section of the Buford Highway Corridor where recent immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia outnumbered locals), and while the progressives in my community certainly disagreed with those immigrants who had conservative views, they were still very welcoming of even the most conservative immigrants because their major guiding philosophical principle was that everyone deserves a fair shake in life, regardless of creed. This same community was also very concerned about poverty in Appalachia, for example, despite full acknowledgement of wildly divergent political views.
Unfortunately, I can't say what this community would be like today because it was essentially destroyed by gentrification. However, I do see a lot of people today who claim progressive ideals, yet do not actually seem to understand or care about the philosophical arguments underpinning those ideals; they just adopt the popular opinions around them, and they would just as readily express conservative ideals if they were in a more conservative space. In the 90s and 00s in Atlanta (at least in my corner of Atlanta), progressive philosophy was not the default like it is in many places now, so the quality of progressive thought was much higher there than I see in most left-leaning communities today.
Thanks for the shoutout but I'm not sure this was me. I searched my comments for 'communist', 'communism', 'marxist', 'marxism' and 'socilaism' and didn't find it at least. I did however find this, which is sadly relevant today in a way much worse than we thought possible in early 2021:
https://tildes.net/~society/vdi/the_republican_party_is_now_in_its_end_stages#comment-683r
Ah, yeah, apologies for the false attribution. I found the comment I was referring to, and it turns out it was written by @spctrvl almost six years ago.
Apparently my brain can remember random online discussions I had from that long ago, but not who I had them with 🤷
Breaking this down is great, thank you a ton for that.
I want to discuss one point specifically excluded: government provided healthcare for citizens.
In your human rights section, you agreed with the government not being involved in private medical affairs.
What are your thoughts on universal/more universal healthcare as 1) a platform for the left and also as 2) an actual thing?
They're not the right.
I don't mean that as a snide joke so much as my accurate feelings on the issue. The democrats are mostly a headless nepotism factory with few actual goals or useful impacts in many ways. There's plenty of candidates and members who I think are functionally only different from the current batch of republicans because they're the old style useless corrupt politician rather than this crops fad of literal wannabe dictators and sycophants.
The "left" itself, and those who identify as it, seems to have just focused wildly on issues that I think are important but no 3rd rail issues, and the biggest loss/betrayal i've seen has been them backtracking completely on being the party of free speech and isolating the working class citizens (basically the entire rust belt).
In my life there's always been accusations that the dems/left are elitists, and some of that criticism is rightly earned, but growing up it was the Religious right that said I was damned and a bastard and horrible because I watched certain movies, read certain books, played certain games, and listened to certain comedians.
Well the dems jumped right in on violent video games (not that Tipper Gore didn't already have a morality streak going for them) and then in 2016 broke down the floodgates and decided to allow people to represent them who show the exact same hatred for me that the religious extremists did.
I have known at least several "left" people who have admitted quite happily that my family deserves to die, and plenty of other actually moderate leftist who felt "that was somewhat over the line but they had a point".
What bothers me SO MUCH MORE than when the religious right pulls this shit, is that at the very least they have the decency to not even claim to be inclusive. It's pretty much right on the sleeve. And yet these same people who would happily murder my family and some of my friends (god forbid anyone be a cop and try to do things right and be disillusioned with the system first hand) swear that they're the party of inclusivity, and they hypocrisy of it all makes me feel physically ill sometimes. It heavily reminds me of all the coders who got bullied in school, but when they finally got their degrees and had the upper hand, rather than remembering how miserable it was, just became massive bullies themselves showing that all they really wanted was the chance to hate someone without any consequences.
And with all that said, the right is worse, so I will happily vote for the left down ticket, which I had never done until trump hit the scene.
For the record, I believe that most people in America, if you actually listed out their beliefs, fall somewhere in between, but there's a really really ugly trend now of just letting people sit in echo chambers and using that to justify their desire to bully and hate others for their circumstances and up bringing. God the same fucking party that swears they want to help the poor uneducated American is also the one that has plenty of fucking awful stereotypes about them and doesn't seem to understand that these things drive people towards the nightmare we're approaching.
So in short, the democrats have helped fail this country while benefiting heavily, and large portions of "the left" have become entrenched hatred camps sitting in bubbles almost as badly as the right.
You're going to have to elaborate. Do you mean the Democratic Party? Or, people who identify as leftists? Or, people who the right prescribe to be leftist?
I feel like in general, typically, people to the left of the political spectrum tend to have more compassion for other people, better sense of empathy, etc. They have a better idea what's best for all of society instead of just the individual. They're somewhat more informed of politics and the implications of political decisions. They're generally more able to look at the whole instead of the now and the me.
I know you didn't ask about disadvantages but I'll say I think the left is too fragmented. The US sportsball culture, 24 hour media cycle, social media, (plus foreign influence,) has shifted everything to the us-vs-them narrative and only one side of the political aisle benefits from that. Until shit hits the fan (which it might likely soon do,) the left is too plagued by infighting, probably again influenced by foreign powers meddling in social media.
I left the question vague because the concept of ‘the left’ is vague, and I didn’t want to lead anyone anywhere. I’m not really looking for an answer, only opinions. I’m not looking to define anything, only to see how other people perceive this question and how they decide to respond.
So far, so good. :)