I hear a lot that people say the US Democratic Party would be right wing in Europe. But I see a lot of Europeans online say that their (left) parties are corrupt and right wing. What am I missing?
Seems like you are from the US.
As much as “left” and “right” carry any meaning anywhere, in your country those words have been redefined to the point they are completely meaningless.
If you have any left-leaning organized political movement, it never makes the news. You only have extreme right.
Firmly agree, what the US considers left versus with the rest of the world considered the left is vastly different. Even it’s left-leaning parties are borderline to moderate right when compared to the rest of the civilized countries who share similar ideologies.
Any true left leaning candidates get their funding ripped out at the roots and get stonewalled off the ballets, even Sanders, while a breath of fresh air was still more centrist than leftist when he was running, it’s just the US scale is so off balance that he used the “socialist/leftist” tag to get into the news/boost his PR.
“Why do people call their government right wing despite not having slavery?”
Since when is the lack of healthcare the norm, and healthcare the “leftist anomaly”?
The US really made the world so much worse, it’s crazy.
Just on the free healthcare thing - in the UK, the NHS is hugely iconic national institution, and politically it’s almost a no-go area in terms of its founding principles.
Which is not to say that privatisation hasn’t been creeping into the NHS for some time - it has, starting in earnest with the Thatcher governments on the 80s.
However, no matter how right wing a party is, it would be almost political suicide to make an all out effort to remove the basic tenet of the NHS - universal care, free at the point of delivery.
Unfortunately, what’s tended to happen since the 80s is (IMO) a managed decline of the NHS, with layers of management brought in and services allowed to decline in quality and availability.
The result is that the public do start to question the model, see the NHS as second rate, and start to lose some of that loyalty towards it.
However, it will take some time to ever get to the point where a government or any stripe is safe to even talk openly about moving away from the NHS model.
And hopefully that point will never come, and instead the NHS will be given renewed commitment and support both from government and the wider public.
It really is one of the very best things about the UK, and were we ever to lose it, it would be a criminal dereliction of duty by those into whose care it has been passed.
I’m just gonna post the Cory Doctorow quote
"Take politics: One common refrain is that ‘‘I don’t even know what right or left even mean anymore, they’re just tribal identities.’’ Many years ago, I said something very like this to Steven Brust, who skewered me with his response:
‘‘‘Left’ and ‘right’ mean the same thing today that they’ve meant since the French Revolution. Ask someone, ‘What’s more important: property rights, or human rights?’ If they answer: ‘Property rights are human rights,’ they are on the right.’’"
Left vs Right depends entirely on where the centre lies. Even our (norway) most right-leaning loon party is for public health care.
Public health care is not a leftist idea - it is just good business. Canada has better life expectancy than the US and our healthcare system costs less than the american one. No canadian has ever gone broke or lost their house because they get sick. when a working-age american dies of a preventable disease, their education, skills, and experience die with them. keep your people healthy and they will be more productive and will pay more taxes because they will earn more over their lifespan. american media tell americans that healthcare is communist for one reason only: to protect the wealth of healthcare investors. you have been ridiculously bamboozled.
It is a leftist idea and it is good business.
Right wingers believe everything should be up to the individual, you should get no help from anyone else. Typically with the ironic championing of corporations over people.
Left wingers believe we’re stronger if we work together in the public interest.
Healthcare is just one small slice of the political pie, which is such an obvious human right that only the fascist fuckos you have over there think it’s up for debate
“Left” and “right” mean very different things for different people. People can’t even agree on the definition. Just to give you a clear example: today’s “leftists” are pro-immigration, while practically all leftists before 1990 were not so much pro immigration.
I take “right” to mean authoritarian, and “left” to mean self-organizing.
We have one odd leftist party in Germany that is basically Putins press office. Maybe they meant those.
BSW ftw (not).
Well it is relative to the country situation
Take Francois Hollande. In American politics he would indeed have been at the left.
But in French politics, on was considered at the rich of the current situation. And at the very right of what you would expect from a left wing man.
Remember that you’re Singapore’s leftist is your Cuban’s libertarian.
It’s hyperbole mainly
Because the left sees the left/right divide as fundamentally being about opposition to/support for capitalism, with the former being the defining feature of leftism and the latter of liberalism (which, from the international perspective, includes conservatives.) Anyone who isn’t opposed to capitalism - like ‘left-wing’ parties that advocate for reforming or regulating capitalism instead of replacing it - are not leftist. In fact, they often act as a pressure valve for anti-capitalist sentiment within society that channels people who might otherwise oppose it into less-radical reformist parties instead of moving on to find true anti-capitalist parties as they might otherwise have. Not to mention there’s a pretty well-established historical trend of ‘left-wing’ parties appeasing or even outright enabling fascism when things get bad in capitalist economies, so it’s hard to argue that they’re even nominally left-leaning.
The US democratic party is, by the international standard (the US defines things a bit differently), a centrist party at best, and honestly probably more like center-right.
Basically extreme right in Europe is about at the same level as extreme left in the USA. That about explains how bad your country is right now
Because ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are concepts used to split the voting population into two roughly equal groups which can be placed against each other to balance the other out, attempting to achieve economic stability. Where the divide needs to be made in order to achieve two roughly equally sized groups is different for each population.
