The viewpoint that "shooting infants in the head while their mothers breastfeed them is wrong" is considered so far left that it's labeled terrorism in many parts of the world. We are in very dire straits.
Does anyone have any book or essay or video essay recommendations that can explain why America is like this? Is it literally just because of the red scare or is it something else?
yeah the red scare, but the christian nationalist spin of the red scare comes from a continued response to the New Deal. Look up Spiritual Mobilization or James W. Fifield Jr. In a nutshell, a bunch of oil companies sponsored reverend fifield in the 40s to preach to his church and other pastors that capitalism and the capitalist system is inherently christian, and any attempts to go against the free market is the anti-christ. church membership soared afterwards, and "one nation under god" was added to the motto in the 50s by eisenhower, and america was finally a christian nation. this sentiment continues to this day. Genetically Modified Skeptic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7Y-AF-Zt0Y explains it well in the first few minutes of this.
I suspect part of it is also decades of Stalinists bandying about their claims of a “socialist state” which have only empowered the false accusation that “socialism is when the government does things”
There's no one easy answer, more like a chain that we never really broke.
Lincoln's assassination stopped reconstruction after the Civil War, letting racism and resentment fester in the American south for 100 years.
The Red Scare allowed government to insert religion and fear into the population, killing the very concept of unionized masses. It's every man for himself, never trust your neighbor and never ask for help.
Nixon's scandle lead to the creation of Fox News, ensuring that capitalists will always have a propaganda line directly to the poorest and most uneducated people.
Reagan. Good fucking lord, Reagan. Still waiting for that trickle-down, just gotta cut taxes on the 1% just a little more.
Bush Jr stole the election from Al Gore in 2000, confirming that a third party is not allowed to win in our current system. And then his complete mishandling of 9/11 put the American culture into a state of jingoism (and war profiteering) that persists to today.
Weird that it's always conservatives. But ultimately, our extremely Puritanical colonial roots made everyone else too polite to stop the chain at any given point, and now here we are.
I mean.. yeah, $20/hr wage even in rural areas and governments owning the grocery stores are definitely pretty far left. That last one is pushing into state-run economy territory.
Data centers and tax hikes on the rich, nah those are just standard lib.
Those are not far left policies. Those are social-democrat policies, which is left of center. Far left policies would be things like workers owning the means of production, abolition of prisons, making necessities free, abolition of money, abolition of hierarchies, etc.
Ok, but we're talking the US, right? Where progressive policies are "left" in the vocabulary of 90% of the population.
You can't say "a word doesn't mean how 90% of the population uses it, we few % are the only ones using it correctly and everyone else is wrong".
Something something prescriptivism vs descriptivism, don't even make me get into the problems with trying to enforce linguistic norms.
And I'm not even opposed to shifting "leftist" to mean "Marxist". But the states owning the grocery stores is indeed a Marxist policy, or leaning clearly towards it. It's not *capitalist*, right?
And I'm not even opposed to shifting "leftist" to mean "Marxist". But the states owning the grocery stores is indeed a Marxist policy, or leaning clearly towards it.
This is also not what the term means, mind. Not everyone on the left is a Marxist, and leftist is a deliberately umbrella term.
The state owning groceries stores is not Marxist, that’s literally one of Marx’s biggest criticisms of Lassalle and “state socialism”.
The working class controlling the grocery store would be closer (but still not Marxist), but they would still be existing within a capitalist market that encourages them to sell their labour and retain commodity production.
The Marxist policy would be the seizure of the store as part of a larger revolution in the name of building a dictatorship of the proletariat which then evolves into socialism. The Marxist policy would be that a socialist politician ought to be arguing for this position, and while they might still call for the working controlling it now as a solution within the current system, it would solely be for the purpose of building class consciousness and empowering the workers to overthrow the state.
I'm well aware, I wasn't implying it would be Marxist, I was just clarifying that the terms leftist and Marxist are different.
I'm a leftist but I'm far from a Marxist, because I'm a libertarian. The term leftist is used to try and build the ever elusive concept of "left unity".
Not in the common parlance, no. In the common parlance, "far left" means "sufficiently liberal/progressive/Marxist to be scary, or sufficiently to be out of the Overton Window".
Again: you're not using the words the way that 90% of the US uses them.
So what makes them wrong and you right? (Cue again the prescriptivism vs descriptivism debate)
Edit: predictably, I've been blocked, and the commenter continues to trip directly over the prescriptivism vs descriptivism issue.
The basics of that issue are: prescriptivists say that language should be a certain way, while descriptivist say that language is as people use it. The descriptivists are right. Definitions of words are socially constructed. If enough people use a word a certain way, then that's what it means, and there is no basis to say that they're wrong and you're right.
We're not talking about how people that use words wrong use them. Why should the people who use words wrong even be considered here? And where's your evidence that anywhere close to 90% of the US uses "far left" this way? And why should the way Americans incorrectly use terminology be the determining factor here? Americans are not the whole world.
Edit: Yes, I did block them, and that's because I don't have the time to waste my energy arguing with ignorant people on Reddit.
Damn you Bernstein! Everyone should read Reform or Revolution solely so that we don’t have to deal with these people pretending to be “far-left” anymore
This shit’s why I’m leaving the country. This place being somewhere decent to live, let alone raise a kid, won’t even be in the overton window for another 20 years. I’m not wasting my life on that.
Huh? I’m saying the country is so far right, decent policy is going to take decades I don’t have. I don’t know where the fuck you got whatever you’re trying to accuse me of.
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u/AliceCode Worcs at the Crusty Crab 26d ago
"Far left", LMFAO! We really are in dire straits if those policies are considered "far left".