I'm going to reply with a comment I made an hour ago.

"The far-left managed to create an "amazing" (and terrifying) perspective.

If you're a leftist but not as leftist as them, you're a centrist, maybe even center-right which makes everybody on the right to be automatically far-right."

If you're further left then democrats you're a troll, if you're further right you're a nazi.

It's a magical place where only those who agree with the person speaking are allowed to have an opinion and shouldn't be censored by big tech co.

I mean, the Third Way Democrats whole shtick is embracing right wing policies and injecting them into the democratic party. They gained power as a faction in the democratic party around 1992 with the argument that after Reagan changed politics in the US and after losing the presidency for three elections, they argued that the democratic party needed to shift heavily to the right to chase what Americans were looking for. Clinton got for instance got elected on a platform to "end the welfare system a we know it", and gun control (which at the time was a right wing policy because scary minorities were open carrying. Reagan actually passed the law against open carrying, the Mulford Act, stating at the time that there was "no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons"). The explicit goal here was courting center right moderates.

Since then the Democratic Party has continued tracking to the right, with Newt Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation's 1994/94 HEART Act being slightly edited and passed as Obamacare.

This isn't a "terrifying perspective", but literally public statements and accepted political science.

> I mean, the Third Way Democrats whole shtick is embracing right wing policies and injecting them into the democratic party. They gained power as a faction in the democratic party around 1992

They gained power before that (their main original organization, the DLC, was a powerful force in Democratic politics well before its former head became the Democratic nominee in 1992), but they were definitely the unquestionably dominant faction from that point forward, though that has gotten weaker over the past decade or so.

Sure, by "gained power", I mean that they went from fairly important group to _the_ leadership of the party, actively purging other groups, and their decisions were the de facto decisions of the party as a whole.

So then you are obligated, in the context of this conversation, to define "far-left."

I suspect you haven't elaborated on it because you recognize that your application of the term is easily disputed.

Anti-capitalists, socialists, police defunders, censors (they can be also far right wingers), haters of every western thing, etc. You can easily identify them inside the democratic party, they have a lot of power now.

Those aren't far-left. Especially the "haters of every western thing" lol.

Far-left is the complete abolition of private property, abolition of police and prisons, in some cases the abolition of monies period.

There are literally zero far-left people in elected or appointed positions within the US government today.

Your worldview is much smaller than reality and the dog-whistles you lean on are obvious. Educate yourself before choosing to expound your limited views.

"Educate yourself before choosing to expound your limited views."

Oh, come on. You can't really be that condescending and expect people to take you seriously.

Anyway, according to your broad worldview, communists are not far-left. Ok.

Communists advocate the abolition of private property. It's right there in the name -- it's the "commune" part.

So you're wrong again.

Folks seem to be taking me seriously. I don't know if you can say the same.

Attacks on rhetoric and not substance only serve to expose your lack of a basis on which to make your claims.

No, communists want to abolish the private means of production.

To reciprocate your condescending comments I could say you should read a little bit before making a fool of yourself.

I'm not wasting my time anymore with you.

Private property _is_ the private ownership of the means of production.

Your house and toothbrush and such is personal property.

What if I airbnb a room in my personal property house? Do I get "eaten as a landlord" in case I need to evict a freeloading squatter

Plugging your ears because the facts don't agree with your pre-conceptions?

Some call that... being a snowflake :)

Socialists want to end the private ownership of means of production. Communists go further.

You're being toxic.

I'm calling out a bullshitter.

Your attempts to silence me are petty.

I'm not the person you were arguing with. I don't like seeing the discussions here devolve into name calling.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...

> haters of every western thing

such a low level of discourse. I thought these kind of comments weren't allowed on HN?

Except for the fact that a mainstream democrat is a center-right politician anywhere else in the world. The "far-left" you reference doesn't exist outside Twitter and a small group of congresspeople, giving that small group an outsized image of power isn't very congruent with reality.

That is literally how the world neoliberalism got created. It has some very limited academic use before then but basically exploded in usage.

When center leftists started to embrace free trade and things like that.

So basically anybody not on the left fringe was label a neoliberalist, all the way from Clinton to Milton Friedman.

You can make it really easy if you just throw everybody in the same bucket and label it evil. Its a classic move in politics.

Neoliberalism is based on economic policy position. Your lack of understanding of the term doesn't mean people are using it incorrectly.

It does have a meaning.

> Neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers" and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

So disheartening to see this low quality of discourse on HN.

The Democratic Party is a centrist party whose dominant faction is center-right but which has a substantial center-left and smaller further-left factions.

You can be right of the Democratic Party and be anywhere from merely slightly-less-center center-right to, well, anywhere to the right of that.

But the US polítical spectrum is basically bimodal, and the peak to the right of the dominant faction of the Democratic Party is far-right.

Or, the Democratic party is a center-right party only if you are far-left

No, only if your Overton window is as wide as the set of expressed political opinions through history.

No they're not. You don't define the overton window, society does. I'm right of the democrats but I'm not far right, that's the society we live in.

This isn't up for debate. In economic terms, socialism is what the left looks like.

Do you see anything that looks like "socialism" coming from the democratic party in the united states?

yes? you see people like yang advocating for things like UBI, and others like ocasio-cortez wanting similar programs along with other big spending programs like getting rid of student debt and free college.

OK? Yang is hardly a democrat and he is not in any position of power. Nothing you are saying is actually backing up what you are claiming. Quite the contrary, these are examples of democrats who have been pushed away from power because of their ideas. How many delegates did Yang get again?

Ocasio-Cortez is one congress woman who has been in office for less than two years. She is not in a position of power within the democratic party, in fact they actively oppose her.

So what is your point? AOC does not reflect where the democrats are as a party, and it's dishonest to pretend so.

And student loan relief is not socialism. Free college could arguably be, but what is being discussed is far from free college.

Yang is part of the democratic party and therefore a democrat politician, there's no debate on this. The same can be said for ocasio-cortez.

So a communist registers as a Republican and the Republican party is now a party of communism?

Your logic is astounding.

Well, yeah. Universal healthcare, subsidized childcare, forgiveness of student debt, etc.

That's all socialism.