- cross-posted to:
- mop@quokk.au
- cross-posted to:
- mop@quokk.au
Found this graph online for anyone who might still be confused. I think this makes it much more clear.
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The Overton Window is known to many but still most can’t see how it shapes acceptable politics. What’s left and right in the US is shifted so far right from most other democratic countries.
I think it’s important to recognize the Overton Window is shaped by what is acceptable to voters. This means that the present state of affairs can only be the result of one or both of these scenarios:
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Enough of the US voting population leans far enough right to move the window, or
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Political policy is being dictated by forces other than what voters find acceptable.
the Overton Window is shaped by what is acceptable to voters
No. It’s shaped by what’s acceptable to the media, politicians, and their owner donors.
Much more often than not, the vast majority of voters don’t get to choose beyond harm reduction by choosing the lesser evil. Which is still an evil.
Political policy is being dictated by forces other than what voters find acceptable.
Yup. 🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
#2 it has always been #2 except sometimes those “forces” want the same things or the “forces” that agree with something the public also happens to agree with have a win for a minute
What you’ll notice online is that a lot of these people who want to move the overton window understand this, so their goal is to remove the left from the voting population. There are a lot of ways to do this. You can require ID to vote, and then invalidate trans people’s IDs. You can gerrymander so the votes don’t count. You can just plain old kill people. You can make it very unpleasant to vote. You can suppress candidates who represent the left wing from winning primaries. And if you’re really clever, you can make up a propaganda line that convinces leftists it’s in their own interest not to vote.
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Bernie isn’t far left by international standards, but I wouldn’t put him in the centre. Nobody in the centre is trying to make radical changes to things. What Bernie is proposing is pretty radical compared to where the US currently is. And, I think if those reforms actually passed, he’d still be trying to move things even more to the left.
And Biden as “far right”? It has lost all meaning if you’re applying that label to him.
Idk. Simping for a fascist ethnostate sure doesn’t seem left to me.
… and it’s just a meme, homie.
It usually takes more than one thing to label somebody left or right.
And “it’s just a meme” is how we ended up with a meme in office twice.
Do you realize how insane our politics are for people to think of supporting a genocide as just one thing on a list of policies?
Yo, the only reason Hitler is considered right-wing, because he wanted to lead the German nation to prosperity. Stop purity-testing!
/s (in case it’s not obvious)
Genocide Joe still was a right-wing politician. With his hwole political legacy.
… wait a second… you think Trump became president, because of leftists not con&idering the Dems anything but right wing? Lol.
Twice, so far
Do you mean that supporting a genocide is a centrist policy?
Genocides come in all colours :/
He stopped a rail worker strike for safer working conditions, then six moths latter there was a massive derailment and an environmental catastrophe in Ohio. You would call that left?
Biden was a pro-business Blue. I’d put him a couple steps left of center for his green energy initiatives though.
I think politics is a bit of a spectrum in reality, so not everything politicians do fit nicely on a left/red bar chart when we’re trying to talk about where they stand.
All his green initiatives were catering to private business though. Tax breaks and subsidies with little conditional restraints. If you want left wing green energy initiatives, look at how China does it.
Yeah they sacrificed nuance for effect - but the scale tipping to the right is still effective. A more informative version with brief explanations of what ‘center’ and ‘left’ and etc. are would be great too.
The right-left divide is a fabrication meant to obscure the fact that the actual division is capitalist-socialist. Do you support the owning class, or do you support the working class?
Yeah capitalism isn’t interrupt about free markets and competition or investing in yourself. It’s about the ownership class, and the labour class (those that work for the owner class, make all the money and get proportionally none of it). Companies are mini monarchies where you get no say in the policy, the ownership of the company is usually passed on to descendents, you live half your life abiding by the mini monarchy. You vote outside of work, but not at work, work is not democratic. Even so, governments are not mediators between workers and elite, the people that end up in government are of the elite class and have their own interests in mind. We only have our labour rights and aren’t complete slaves today because of very strong socialist movements during and after the great depression and ww2. They compromised with some socialism to avoid complete socialism, but these movements are of course not too frequently mentioned in history lessons
This 100% - it’s part propaganda.
The funny thing is - to support the working class is to support the owning class. Because when people have more money, they spend more which makes company profits increase and stock go up.
It’s more like “stupid retards who only want to hurt people vs. people who want to help people”.
Personally, I want to help the working class by getting rid of the ruling class and make owning capital a community thing instead of an individual thing.
I don’t think I would say Hillary Clinton was to the left of Joe Biden. At least he had Lena Khan and a strong FCC. Something I don’t think Clinton would have ever done. I would reverse those two.
For that matter I don’t know if Obama is to the left of him either.
There is no left or right anymore. There are only fascists and antifascists.
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Which are basically just synonyms for left and right.
Why did George Washington lead the continental army again?
To avoid taxes on “owning” people:
none of those whose misfortune it is to have slaves as attendants will visit the City if they can possibly avoid it; because by so doing they hazard their property
when slaves who are happy & content to remain with their present masters, are tampered with & seduced to leave them; when masters are taken at unawar[e]s by these practices; when a conduct of this sort begets discontent on one side and resentment on the other, & when it happens to fall on a man whose purse will not measure with that of the Society, & he looses his property for want of means to defend it—it is oppression in the latter case, & not humanity in any; because it introduces more evils than it can cure.
it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptable degrees
Whoever apprehends the said Negroes, so that the Subscriber may readily get them, shall have, if taken up in this County, Forty Shillings Reward, beside what the Law allows; and if at any greater Distance, or out of the Colony, a proportionable Recompence paid them, by George Washington
it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptable degrees
Honestly, I could see this as being better than the alternative – better than having a Civil War. Especially if it was started during Washington’s time.
Say, just pass a law that says no new slaves can be imported and anyone born after the law passes is not born a slave, no matter the status of their parents. Then, (hopefully) slave owners don’t get all violent over losing their ‘property’, and slavery is slowly abolished in the country over the course of a generation.
Is it as good as complete, total, and immediate abolishment of slavery? Hell no. But if it could have ended slavery without a war that killed millions, maybe it’s worth it. Especially if it was done in Washington’s time, such that slavery would already be essentially over by the time the Civil War would have otherwise started. So, on the balance, less people suffering under slavery overall. Pragmatism?
Oh well, who are we kidding? The slave owners would never have allowed such a law to stand, and they’d start a different Civil War about it if nothing else worked.
Just for reference. It was more than I thought.
Our national estimate is 698,000 Civil War deaths. This is substantially higher than the conventional historical estimate of 618,000 but lower than the most recent estimate of around 750,000 deaths based on a 1% census sample.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2414919121
New estimates of US Civil War mortality from full-census records
Joan Barceló, Jeffrey L. Jensen, Leonid Peisakhin, and Haoyu Zhai
Edited by Margaret Levi, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; received July 25, 2024; accepted September 25, 2024Oops, shit. I was off by about an order of magnitude on the death toll. Still, though.
Oh wow, defending a slaver for wanting to keep his slaves? I wasn’t expecting to actually encounter one in the wild today.
Oh come off it. I’m not defending the fucker. Just saying that a slow, gradual abolishment of slavery that started much earlier might have been an overall better outcome, with fewer people enslaved and fewer people killed over it.
Kill all slavers.
That is indeed a very nice goal. But is it practically achievable?
Forgive my propaganda learning, I thank you good person.
If only more than one of those were pictured.
The only ones that want us to believe that are the fascists. If they can keep us fighting each other, we won’t be able to fight them.
lmao, agreed.
E: whoops, those two sentences were so contradictory I could only remember the second by the time I was responding.
Those are just different words for the same things.
They’re not, but your antifascism meter is mis-calibrated.
Always has been, it’s only that now the violence turns inwards.
These memes remind me of my high school religion teacher (I went to Catholic school in Canada, “religion” was what you would call Civics) who introduced the political spectrum. He wrote the usual line across the chalkboard with left/center/right labels, and explained what they were. Then, he extended the chalk line to the right, off the board and onto the wall, and continued past the corner onto the next wall. He was about half way to the back of the room before he started writing down names of any of our political leaders at the time. I don’t remember most of the names from 30 years ago, but Conrad Black was on the back wall.
Every political discussion is civil until you say “maybe states shouldn’t exist”
Democrats today are Republicans of 1980s-90s, in my opinion; without a doubt in regards to corporations and billionaires specifically.
“The New Deal” is a dim memory of the beforetimes
Democrats of the 90s were Republicans of the 80s.
Oh hell nah. Biden was FDR 2.0!!!
👀
That ratchets been going for decades!
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In a sane world centre would be ‘status quo making decisions based on objective reality’ yet somehow even the idea that we should base our decisions on verifiable data is like super extreme gay communism left by current standards.
Why is Bernie Sanders shown as left-of-center? Solid right-centrist at best.
If he’s left, he can touch the center without his full arm extended
Not a reach to touch the right when you’re not even solidly against genocide.
I hope he’s playing an electoral game on this one because 😬 yiiiiiiish
What, like, the “I still have a chance at the 2028 presidency if I just triangulate this right” game?
This. The left starts at anti capitalism. Imperialism being the highest stage of capitalism means that if sanders isn’t fully against genocide, he’s not left of center.
No way fr? It’s like being a liberal doesn’t make you a leftist and that you can definitely be a right wing liberal
You can indeed be a right wing liberal, it is however more difficult to be a left wing conservative
is being a left wing conservative even possible?
If we consider one of the key value of the “left” being progress, I think it is difficult to concillate both.
Not really no, closest is a Moderate Conservative, which is just any conservative with a leaning towards the center
I am of the opinion that green are very often left wing conservatives.
I thought they were communists
I would say that most liberals are right leaning. They’re not willing to stand up for leftist values. When people “accuse” them of wanting open borders they backpeddle like crazy.
Yeah in the rest of the world Liberalism is a right wing political philosophy. Just because you believe in the words of Voltaire doesn’t make you a left wing. Liberals aren’t even center left progressives.
You know how some international cuisines have to cater to the taste of the country they’re operating in? Like Chinese or Mexican food, if they don’t add a lot of sugar in the ingredients, US people won’t eat it. Same with leftism. If they don’t add a little bit of right, they can’t cater to the political palate of the average Joe.
And this, of course, is by design. The American people are heavily propagandized and indoctrinated.
Abso-fucking-lutely. Also the rest of the world has been propagandized for decades through Hollywood. I was guilty of believing some things for years, the main one was that freedom of speech in the US was sacred and honoured. I was naive.
See, we have to support genocide because we can’t win without it!
Later:
Stupid fucking voters won’t accept the genocide we worked so hard for!
Who is this guy in right side from Trump?
Stephen Miller
Peewee German, the Nosferatu
Now watch Schummer fall in line with Trump, now that the Iran war has begun. This is how we know he was never a lefty!
fuckin’ Schomer Yssrael ass dork. the fact that all us ashkenazi are as related as we are means he’s probably my cousin makes me want to slap him so fuckin’ hard. acting like israel speaks for me, and he speaks for israel, therefor he speaks for me? unacceptable. what a huge fuckin’ dork
