I wish this comment wasnt so heavily downvoted. Its a common perspective that US dems are a left party and I think HN is a great platform to tackle that illusion.

I live in europe and US dems are pretty much in line with our right leaning parties. Except for a handful of extremes.

The US republicans are very unique to US in that their opinions are very close knitted to US specific laws. So I cant really think of a similar party anywhere else.

But yea. A swedish left and US dems are very very far from achother politically.

Democrats are a right party with authoritarian tendencies. Not left at all.

I explicitly wrote from an European POV. Stuff like not having mandatory and functional health insurance... even our far right doesn't want to question that.

It's just different. The American "left" has mostly abandoned economic issues, but it's gone much further on identity than the European left has. Like, I'd vote for a Euro-style leftist because they'd maybe give Americans healthcare, but they'd probably get called racist if they opened their mouth on Twitter. It's just a different world.

Center right, by global standards.

Maybe your views have been distorted by right wing news calling Biden “far left” which is an objective falsehood.

I’ve seen over half the nations on earth and I stand behind the OP assessment of the US Dem party as center right. Do investigate a bit before knee jerk responding from a position of falsehood

A more apt description for the Democratic party would be corporatist.

The primary constituency of both parties is corporate America, whom they rely on for donations.

This is probably the wrong time and place to ask, but I've been wondering: what is the definition of left vs right outside the US?

As far as I understand it, the fundamental and (seemingly) globally agreed upon divide is that Far Left = The State is in [presumably benevolent] control, and Far Right = The State is in [presumably malicious] control, while regular Left = The State knows what's best for The People (because it is derived from pure democracy) while regular Right = The People know what's best for themselves (and choose representatives for situations where multiple individuals are involved).

How far off am I, from a global perspective?

The problem is US has no health care for all. Minimum wage, especially as compared to average or the standard of poverty is very low in the US, the immigration stance of even the "far left" would definitely count as anti-immigration in Europe (yes, I know, despite the numbers favoring the US, and the US being ethnically far more diverse than Europe), US has the death sentence, and now the abortion stance ...

All of those are things that even the far right in Europe wouldn't dare suggest, yet the leftmost party in the US stands behind them, or is at least willing to accept them.

It's difficult to graph the ideologies, which are rooted in each countries culture and history, on to another's.

Voter ID is a non controversial issue in many countries. In the US I've seen arguments against it from both sides. Disparate impact concerns from the left, privacy and freedom from the feds on the right.

The problem with voter ID (and a whole lot of other issues like easyness of ID theft via SSNs) is that the US - as one of very few developed nations - has no requirement for a citizen to have a valid government issued ID card because of right-wing crazies.

The Left does not criticize voter ID per se, the Left criticizes that many people are effectively locked out from voting because obtaining ID cards can be an utter pain in the ass.

>How far off am I, from a global perspective?

I think this view of right/left as an axis of government optimizing for freedom/control is only very prevalent in particularly right-wing commonwealth discourse.

The law and construction of social systems in the common-law English tradition stem from a position that one can do anything unless barred by law, including in situations where it hurts others. The law of equity, largely derived from religious canon law, existed as a separate system layered upon the common law court system of 'hard rules' to fix situations wherein the application of common-law would lead to morally suspect outcomes. The situation in civilian countries, by contrast, generally define a sphere of acceptable behavior which explicitly excludes abusive and intentionally harmful behavior - the restrictions on behavior are baked in. Civilian-derived systems are far more common than those from the commonwealth, and accordingly the types of discussions had in each are very different on this point.

The result is it's very rare to conceive of left and right in terms of freedom, because most other nations derive from systems in which freedom is already viewed as one element to be balanced against other considerations rather than the unmitigated chief virtue upon which all analysis is founded.

Even in the commonwealth, progressive discourse is not driven in terms of de-jure freedoms, it's driven by de-facto freedoms, largely economic and social freedoms. The government only needs to be restrained when it restricts social rights or maintain economic systems that strip dignity from individuals. Generally, however, these aren't discussed in terms of the degree of freedoms afforded, but rather in terms of rights and equality before the law.

> I’ve seen over half the nations on earth

What?

Most likely he visited a bunch of countries, and now he thinks he “knows” them.

Lived and worked in over a dozen, and speak a corresponding number of languages. Ask instead of speculating.

As I said, you are deluded about 'knowing' half of the countries in the world.

I lived in America for over a decade before I could say that I begun to understand it. I have seen people like you who visit my home country and claim to understand it. All they do is project their faulty models onto our values and culture.

The result of my experience, which you question, is: not a single other nation would characterize the US Democratic party as “left wing”

I literally spent most of my rhetorical time abroad trying to convince folks that there was any difference at all between our two main parties.

You can scoff at me, but you will encounter this conclusion over and over again. The world sees our two parties as beholden to corporate interests, as are centrist parties all over the globe. Money apparently makes the world go around

> The result of my experience, which you question, is: not a single other nation would characterize the US Democratic party as “left wing”

You sound like you didn't even go outside Europe.

There are two scales, nationalism-globalism, and capitalism-intervention.

Most countries have very little difference between their capitalism-intervention side, because there's only one country where someone who supports free markets and capitalism could move to, this results in the right wing of all the countries becoming purely nationalist supporting govt intervention facing globalist left wing supporting their kind of govt intervention.

For example my dad in my home country has very little opinion on capitalism/intervention scale. But on the nationalism/globalism scale he has a strong opinion. If I were to describe the economic policies of the Democratic party, he wouldn't truly form an opinion, but the moment I will start describing the social policies he would immediately understand it and call it 'the leftist party'.

Aah come on. Nobody said the Democrats are "adjacent" to stoning women. Sheesh.

From the perspective of a country that is to the left of the Democrats, yes, they appear centre-right.

I'm not sure you've can offer a truly global perspective from which to accurately determine whether the US Gov is left or right leaning, but if I had to predict such an answer I'd say it would tip right.

Edit: okay, did some hunting and found this: https://archive.ph/PjNEF

Check the bubble chart. The Dems are in fact globally left-leaning, according to the Manifesto Project described in the article. But check the relative positions from e.g. a British perspective (since that happens to be shown in the chart). The Dems are to the right of the UK's left-wing Labour Party, while the Republicans are right of the right-wing Conservatives. The overall British perspective of the US would be of a right-leaning country.

I've not looked at other perspectives since I'm in mobile and I've not going to deep-dive the Manifesto Project just now. But I wonder which are the nations which have an "overall" perspective of the US as left-leaning?

I'd say that the spectrum of a typical EU country covers the vast majority of the actual spectrum. You have actual communists on one end and stop just short of actual fascists/nazis/theocrats on the other.

Meanwhile, the US reaches as far right as the EU does, but in the other direction, it barely reaches the middle of the EU (i.e. total) spectrum.

So it's not that Democrats are adjacent to the far right. It's just that they're more right wing than left wing. They're obviously still much closer to the centre-left than they are to the far-right, but they are also further from the left extreme than they are from the right extreme

Wouldn’t the political spectrum be an utter lack of government on one end and tyranny on the other? That being the case, communism, fascism, Naziism, etc. would all be closely related on the totalitarianism side of the spectrum, rather than opposing ends of the spectrum.

The ancient attempt of a 1d embedding of political ideologies is doomed to fail, however anyone tries. It started out in revolutionary France in 1789 to distinguish between the supporters of the king (conservatives, on the right) and supporters of the revolution (revolutionaries, on the left). It was good enough for that, but it's not for very much else.

The most sensible minimal extension (to 2d) that I know of is to distinguish between how much you value personal freedom on one axis and economic freedom on the other. That still leaves out a lot, but is the best indicator of which side you'll likely to end up on regarding most political contentions, given the simplicity of the model.

There are actually two popular models of that kind, the Nolan Chart (example quiz [1], your spectrum is the vertical axis) and the Political Compass (example quiz [2], your spectrum is the secondary diagonal).

[1] https://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/

[2] https://www.politicalcompass.org/

Such a spectrum would not be particularly useful for describing the behavior of politicians or voters. Consider that someone who usually votes for a democratic socialist party might sometimes swing further left and vote for a communist party, or further right and vote for a liberal party. But they're unlikely to vote for a fascist party. This fact is captured by a left-right spectrum, but not by the spectrum you're proposing, which would suggest equal likelihood of such a voter supporting a communist or fascist party.

Well, every model will have some weaknesses and I suppose it depends on what you want to know which one would be better. I know if I had to choose on the basis of one spectrum with whom I'd like to live in the same country, I'd strongly prefer gp's over the conventional one.

Also, btw, the fascist movement recruited much of it's ideological and political concepts and initial core activist base from syndicalist/corporatist socialist circles and was strongly anti-capitalist/pro-socialist and anti-conservative. Benito Mussolini was for a time chief editor of the Italian Socialist Party's newspaper "Avanti!" and member of the party's National Directorate.

In the US you have two choices, so you see them relative to each other. You consider democrats left wing and conservatives right wing.

In Europe there is a plethora of parties all throughout the political spectrum.