It’s real, but viewed from the wrong perspective. The overton window is the set of ideas that The general public will find acceptable.
The right have been dragging it right in America (along with the rest of the world). They’ve done this by joking about various topics, then backing off. Individually, it doesn’t make much difference. With the media machine the right have, and a few decades, and we ended up here.
The left chooses to be constrained by it, rather than trying to push it back to counter the fascists.
The traditional conservatives (like Mitch McConnell) realized that if they pretended to be Nazis, it’d shift the Overton window right enough that the compromise in the middle would be what they wanted in the first place.
The problem with doing that is that you attract True Believers. And they lost control of the rope they were pulling.
Maybe that’s the meme. One side always points out what’s so bad about the other side while whitewashing their own sides issues meanwhile casting anyone who has a different view on any issue as a “Centrist” that needs to be taught a lesson.
While I get what you mean, what is the radical left then? Do they break into large companies and take the food and spread to everyone through the night… I mean I guess they could actually be trying to disrupt capitalism somehow, but how? Killing a person doesn’t end capitalism.
There is almost nothing going on in the world that could classify as real leftwing extremism. Every few decades some cars get light on fire at a political event and that’s about it. In Germany the RAF is still the example for the radical left after like 3 or 4 decades of nothing happening because they don’t have new examples. They shot some politicians in the 70s and 80s. There hasn’t been anything like that since. Everything you hear about the extrem left is basically propaganda by the right and capitalists. If you want to see right wing extremism it is probably sufficient to watch the damn news. The overton window has now made fascism normal. People are just going with it because people always are going with what the “current thing” is.
Proscription of what? Also they would have to be in power to seize the companies and nationalize them. It sounds like individuals wouldn’t be much of a threat if it requires having control of the government as step 1.
Radical left is various things depending on the group. Like, there is no common agreement among them. Flavours include Communism/Marxism, Anarchy, unlimited unchecked migration, pacifists, hating police, forcing everyone to altruism.
It’s what republicans call the “radical left,” but honestly it’s just center-left.
Fortunately there aren’t many (if any at all) actual “radical leftists” in US politics currently (though I’d call them “left-wing extremists” to differentiate from the republican hyperbolic scare-tactic).
They exist on the internet, the people I’m referring to are basically the types you find on hexbear, lemmygrad, and .ml
They certainly exist but fortunately most are little more than keyboard warriors. They do give leftist politics as a whole a bad name though, and to an extent enable and justify the caricatures that right-wingers depict the entire left as.
I assume the “centrist” in the OOP is probably deceived into thinking the DSA are all tankies (but as we know, tankies hate the DSA). So she thinks she has to choose between “radical right and radical left”, when really the choices are “radical right or center left”.
The guy responding is making the assumption that what she means by “radical left” is actually “center left,” which is a justifiable assumption seeing as an actual “radical left” option isn’t even on the table…
The lemmygrad and Hexbear types are left, but they are authoritarian left, which makes them in my eyes closer to the fascists than to any legitimate left wing movement that wants people to thrive.
The reduction of USA politics down to a single dimension (l/r) is absurd and the cause why the left in the US is so fractured. Authoritarians, regardless of left or right wing, are primarily engaged with securing power, just as long as they stay in power, while the libertarians (l/r) are fractured for a good reason - Right wing Libs (aka “the establishment”) do not have much in common with left wing, anti-authoritarian positions.
I agree that they’re closer to fascists. I’ve tried explaining that to them but they get all up in arms about how their ideologies differ. I tell them it doesn’t matter, because their methodologies are the same, but they just dig in with the strawman, red herring, sea lion combo and claim over and over again that I’m an uneducated idiot who doesn’t know the difference between fascism and communism.
(I tend to refer to their beliefs as bolshevism though, because after all that’s what ML is. Nothing like Marxism or really any other kind of communism. And their only response to that is to try to glaze the bolsheviks because they can’t even deny that that’s what they are).
And yes, US politics are overly reductive, but I find that inevitable in a two-party, FPTP system. I’ve been pointing that out for years, since even before I fully understood it. I’ve learned a lot in the time since and changed my opinions on various things, but the underlying intuition that something was deeply wrong with a two-party political system at least was correct.
And libertarian is such a loaded term because of its association with right-wing libertarian capitalists. But libertarian and liberal are too distinct concepts, although it could be argued that they’re related. Liberal is another loaded term though, and often gets conflated with neoliberal (which is an illiberal and conservative economic policy).
In short though, the libertarian-authoritarian axis on the political matrix is not what most people think of when they hear “libertarian,” even though according to that schema, anarcho-syndicalists would fall all the way on the libertarian side of the spectrum.
Oh and for what it’s worth, I think we could divide the horizontal spectrum into at least seven segments: (from proximal to lateral) “Centrist,” “Center-(L/R)”, “Moderate (L/R)”, and “Radical (or far-) (L/R)”.
Anything beyond radical would be extremist, and falls outside of the political domain so isn’t on this spectrum.
The difference between moderate and center- would be that the Moderates in this interpretation would be the meat and potatoes of representing the values and priorities of that side of the spectrum, neither too rash nor overly compromising, whereas the Center-(L/R)s would be the next thing to centrists, only barely distinguishing themselves as falling to one side or the other, and more prone to compromising and appeasement.
The problem with this interpretation though is that many of these terms are already so loaded in the current political environment, it would be difficult to give them technical definitions that don’t provoke emotional responses and knee-jerk reactions…
I agree on the “loadedness” of terms in the US. Liberalism on its own isn’t a bad thing, it simply means that the state does not want to interfere in basic things like trade or relationships. The US have redefined it into something more like Staliniism - this is nowhere near the truth, but they made it THEIR truth. This makes informed discourse in the US very hard - because just like newspeak in 1984 it removes the ability to communicate different ideas than what the establishment wants to be available as options.
For some reason your comment made me crave loaded baked potatoes.
But yeah, it’s next to impossible to have an intelligent discussion in the US. Not just because the education system is sorely lacking and anti-intellectualism is deeply embedded in the collective consciousness, but also because so many terms are so loaded that you can’t even use them according to their precise technical definitions without everyone assuming you’re exaggerating and hyperbolizing because vitriol and mudslinging are so much the norm here.
The inherently polarizing nature of a two-party FPTP electoral system is partly to blame, but so is the concerted effort the right-wing has made in recent years to discredit all political discussion by using all these buzzwords so disingenuously that they lose their meaning.
I think they did it on purpose. The whole projection/every-accusation-is-a-confession thing was a deliberate tactic to preemptively make anyone sound crazy who accuses them of doing the shit they really do, because they’ve already been so busy accusing everyone else of those things!
I have the same opinion regarding “on purpose”. The GOP has been doing this for a long, long time now while cooperating with evangelists, and if you look in from the outside it is pretty obvious that they want to keep their populace poor in education and money and use religion to keep them radicalized and anti-intellectual.
The dems either did not realize the game plan, or didn’t think it would succeed (the displayed hybris in the last decade lets me suspect the second option)
Yep, those are classic socialist demands. Extreme left would be nationalizing the whole shit that goes down in silicon valley to make sure they behave.
That’s not even radical left. That’s like slightly left of center.
But that’s what they were told radical leftist is! The propaganda has been wildly successful.
The overton window in the US has shifted pretty far to the right.
the overton window isn’t real. it only ever constrains the left. the right doesn’t acknowledge it, and clearly doesn’t need to
It’s real, but viewed from the wrong perspective. The overton window is the set of ideas that The general public will find acceptable.
The right have been dragging it right in America (along with the rest of the world). They’ve done this by joking about various topics, then backing off. Individually, it doesn’t make much difference. With the media machine the right have, and a few decades, and we ended up here.
The left chooses to be constrained by it, rather than trying to push it back to counter the fascists.
The traditional conservatives (like Mitch McConnell) realized that if they pretended to be Nazis, it’d shift the Overton window right enough that the compromise in the middle would be what they wanted in the first place.
The problem with doing that is that you attract True Believers. And they lost control of the rope they were pulling.
Maybe that’s the meme. One side always points out what’s so bad about the other side while whitewashing their own sides issues meanwhile casting anyone who has a different view on any issue as a “Centrist” that needs to be taught a lesson.
While I get what you mean, what is the radical left then? Do they break into large companies and take the food and spread to everyone through the night… I mean I guess they could actually be trying to disrupt capitalism somehow, but how? Killing a person doesn’t end capitalism.
There is almost nothing going on in the world that could classify as real leftwing extremism. Every few decades some cars get light on fire at a political event and that’s about it. In Germany the RAF is still the example for the radical left after like 3 or 4 decades of nothing happening because they don’t have new examples. They shot some politicians in the 70s and 80s. There hasn’t been anything like that since. Everything you hear about the extrem left is basically propaganda by the right and capitalists. If you want to see right wing extremism it is probably sufficient to watch the damn news. The overton window has now made fascism normal. People are just going with it because people always are going with what the “current thing” is.
Mass proscriptions, seizing of major companies, either nationalizing or returning them to worker control, etc…
Proscription of what? Also they would have to be in power to seize the companies and nationalize them. It sounds like individuals wouldn’t be much of a threat if it requires having control of the government as step 1.
Radical left is various things depending on the group. Like, there is no common agreement among them. Flavours include Communism/Marxism, Anarchy, unlimited unchecked migration, pacifists, hating police, forcing everyone to altruism.
Radical leftwing politics is stuff like this.
Extreme left wing would be nationalizing Silicon Valley and then putting them under UN command.
It would still benefit the world at large, even the americans.
Bro… Don’t be a meme.
It’s what republicans call the “radical left,” but honestly it’s just center-left.
Fortunately there aren’t many (if any at all) actual “radical leftists” in US politics currently (though I’d call them “left-wing extremists” to differentiate from the republican hyperbolic scare-tactic).
They exist on the internet, the people I’m referring to are basically the types you find on hexbear, lemmygrad, and .ml
They certainly exist but fortunately most are little more than keyboard warriors. They do give leftist politics as a whole a bad name though, and to an extent enable and justify the caricatures that right-wingers depict the entire left as.
I assume the “centrist” in the OOP is probably deceived into thinking the DSA are all tankies (but as we know, tankies hate the DSA). So she thinks she has to choose between “radical right and radical left”, when really the choices are “radical right or center left”.
The guy responding is making the assumption that what she means by “radical left” is actually “center left,” which is a justifiable assumption seeing as an actual “radical left” option isn’t even on the table…
The lemmygrad and Hexbear types are left, but they are authoritarian left, which makes them in my eyes closer to the fascists than to any legitimate left wing movement that wants people to thrive.
The reduction of USA politics down to a single dimension (l/r) is absurd and the cause why the left in the US is so fractured. Authoritarians, regardless of left or right wing, are primarily engaged with securing power, just as long as they stay in power, while the libertarians (l/r) are fractured for a good reason - Right wing Libs (aka “the establishment”) do not have much in common with left wing, anti-authoritarian positions.
I agree that they’re closer to fascists. I’ve tried explaining that to them but they get all up in arms about how their ideologies differ. I tell them it doesn’t matter, because their methodologies are the same, but they just dig in with the strawman, red herring, sea lion combo and claim over and over again that I’m an uneducated idiot who doesn’t know the difference between fascism and communism.
(I tend to refer to their beliefs as bolshevism though, because after all that’s what ML is. Nothing like Marxism or really any other kind of communism. And their only response to that is to try to glaze the bolsheviks because they can’t even deny that that’s what they are).
And yes, US politics are overly reductive, but I find that inevitable in a two-party, FPTP system. I’ve been pointing that out for years, since even before I fully understood it. I’ve learned a lot in the time since and changed my opinions on various things, but the underlying intuition that something was deeply wrong with a two-party political system at least was correct.
And libertarian is such a loaded term because of its association with right-wing libertarian capitalists. But libertarian and liberal are too distinct concepts, although it could be argued that they’re related. Liberal is another loaded term though, and often gets conflated with neoliberal (which is an illiberal and conservative economic policy).
In short though, the libertarian-authoritarian axis on the political matrix is not what most people think of when they hear “libertarian,” even though according to that schema, anarcho-syndicalists would fall all the way on the libertarian side of the spectrum.
Oh and for what it’s worth, I think we could divide the horizontal spectrum into at least seven segments: (from proximal to lateral) “Centrist,” “Center-(L/R)”, “Moderate (L/R)”, and “Radical (or far-) (L/R)”.
Anything beyond radical would be extremist, and falls outside of the political domain so isn’t on this spectrum.
The difference between moderate and center- would be that the Moderates in this interpretation would be the meat and potatoes of representing the values and priorities of that side of the spectrum, neither too rash nor overly compromising, whereas the Center-(L/R)s would be the next thing to centrists, only barely distinguishing themselves as falling to one side or the other, and more prone to compromising and appeasement.
The problem with this interpretation though is that many of these terms are already so loaded in the current political environment, it would be difficult to give them technical definitions that don’t provoke emotional responses and knee-jerk reactions…
I agree on the “loadedness” of terms in the US. Liberalism on its own isn’t a bad thing, it simply means that the state does not want to interfere in basic things like trade or relationships. The US have redefined it into something more like Staliniism - this is nowhere near the truth, but they made it THEIR truth. This makes informed discourse in the US very hard - because just like newspeak in 1984 it removes the ability to communicate different ideas than what the establishment wants to be available as options.
For some reason your comment made me crave loaded baked potatoes.
But yeah, it’s next to impossible to have an intelligent discussion in the US. Not just because the education system is sorely lacking and anti-intellectualism is deeply embedded in the collective consciousness, but also because so many terms are so loaded that you can’t even use them according to their precise technical definitions without everyone assuming you’re exaggerating and hyperbolizing because vitriol and mudslinging are so much the norm here.
The inherently polarizing nature of a two-party FPTP electoral system is partly to blame, but so is the concerted effort the right-wing has made in recent years to discredit all political discussion by using all these buzzwords so disingenuously that they lose their meaning.
I think they did it on purpose. The whole projection/every-accusation-is-a-confession thing was a deliberate tactic to preemptively make anyone sound crazy who accuses them of doing the shit they really do, because they’ve already been so busy accusing everyone else of those things!
I have the same opinion regarding “on purpose”. The GOP has been doing this for a long, long time now while cooperating with evangelists, and if you look in from the outside it is pretty obvious that they want to keep their populace poor in education and money and use religion to keep them radicalized and anti-intellectual.
The dems either did not realize the game plan, or didn’t think it would succeed (the displayed hybris in the last decade lets me suspect the second option)
Yep, those are classic socialist demands. Extreme left would be nationalizing the whole shit that goes down in silicon valley to make sure they behave.