Not wanting people to die is a leftist thing now?
It’s more the idea that everyone counts as people. The further right you go the smaller the group you assign full person status becomes. Liberals are OK with a bit of genocide and/or slavery as long as the victims are sufficiently poor, distant, and profitable.
Not wanting people to die is a normal and sane idea.
People are still who they are but the world we live in has for the last half century significantly shifted to state authotorian and fascist idealogy has flourished in our ego centric rewarding capitalist economy
Political Left in the US aligns with center in Europe. Only adding to the evidence that political labels are arbitrary and subjective.
Fascist attack normalcy and misinformation adds to confusion. You have to believe its us and them, you have to pick a side.
Decent people stay true to what they are, causing the people who are fooled to listen to fascists to now label you a vilified left. You then have the option to confirm to your centrists peers or to stay true to your original ideals.
Currently i am aligned with far left anarchism But i can perceive plenty of context and societal structures where my identical ideas could be perceived as conservative.
America’s political compass is weird. On one side you have a party that mostly just wants to keep the status quo, only really doing changes where it is already desperately behind the times. And on the other side you have the conservatives.
I had a weird experience with this “have to pick a side” issue just a couple days ago on a different lemmy. According to the moderators there, not being willing to use violence against protestors was the same as defending them
Pacifism being perceived as hostile by both sides of modern politics is a great summary for the state of things.
Also a huge red flag for what may still come, we may not all realize it but very important parts of our collective history are being decided on today.
Let’s hope for a good outcome
Basically.
For example, tens of thousands of people die every year in the US because of inadequate access to health care. Universal payer would be cheaper and result in fewer preventable deaths. Centrists do not support the policy and thus are willing to let people die in order to support the parasitic insurance industry.
The genocide in Gaza, homelessness, prison industrial complex, climate change, etc. all get people killed in preventable ways. But we have to protect the owner class so we’re not going to do any of the clear solutions. Letting people die needlessly is an acceptable result.
This sounds like the plot of a post modern movie about society collapsing
Well it’s certainly not a right-wing thing
I’m pretty sure centrists think we’re bad because we want to abolish private ownership of the means of production, unless “leftism” means something else where OP is from.
The political center wants to maintain the status quo with regard to private property.
Edited for clarity.
A big problem of this entire argument, particularly when Americans are making it, is that nobody seems to agree on who the “centrists” and “leftists” are supposed to be.
Turns out social democrats are pretty sure they’re leftists, but everybody else self-identifying as a leftist is convinced they are indistinguishable from free market liberals, while free market liberals think they’re center left while social democrats are pretty sure they are indistinguishable from neocons.
Unless you’re in the US, where apparently social democrats are both far left and communists, the word socialism has about as much meaning as a Rorschard test card and hard left people seem to be a figment of an AI’s imagination in that they appear to exist exclusively online.
So yeah, I really don’t know what the OP is talking about, honestly.
This shit right here is why I hate to argue about labels or whether someone is/isn’t liberal/leftist/centrist/conservative/whatever. At best, they’re an extremely vague, ill-defined, hyper-individualized label that means different things to different people. One person says “I’m a leftist,” and they mean it as “I’m a progressive Democrat who supports heavily regulated capitalism, labor unions, LGBT rights, and am pro-choice.” Another person says “I’m a leftist,” and they mean it as “I’m an anarcho-communist who believes billionaires should forcibly redistribute their wealth, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about LGBT or minority rights because they’re a bourgeoisie distraction from class consciousness.”
I don’t care about your label, I care about your policies. Those actually tell me something about you.
Reminder that objective political centrism is either social democracy or democratic socialism.
Not Reagan.
I have no idea what you think “objective” means here, which I think makes your claim not particularly useful. It’s not wrong, it’s just based on a different set of definitions than most people appear to be using on this post.
“I don’t want to think, but I want to pat myself on the back for being Above It All™”
Cool cool cool. Be proud of your ignorance I guess?
Some are proud of their ignorance, some seem to think that hating everything means they are intelligent with discerning tastes.
Left, right, and center.
I don’t think centrists are against socialised health care.
Yeah what?
I thought secure socialized programs were left and “fuck you i got mine” system was about as far right as you could get.
My brother called me the other day, and after explaining how nature isn’t “take or be taken from” when there’s enough to go around. We got more into the myths about humans we’re taught, and eventually he asked how I identify politically, and about the difference between a leftist and a liberal
I told him liberals want the system to work, to be fair. Leftists look around and say “there’s so much food we leave a third of it to rot, why the fuck are people starving? What the fuck are we doing? No one is happy with the world we’ve created, why are we doing it? Why don’t we start with the assumption that everyone gets to live, and figure out the details from there?”
Leftists/progressives say “the reason for all of that is the oligarchy hoarding all the resources, so we need to start with stopping them from doing that”
Liberals kinda want the same things as progressives, but they don’t want to "hurt " the rich to get it. But of course if 5 people are hoarding literally everything the only way to get more for everyone is to take it from those 5 people. Liberals just can’t get themselves to take that next step.
(This is US liberal btw, might be different in Europe)
The rest of the world uses the name “liberal” for different things. I think left and (American) liberal are pretty much the same thing, but obviously since America has two words, America divides the left into two.
We used to think the conservative side of politics was fairly united, while the left was a mess, ranging from leninists through environmentalists through workers’ rights through people into the public good (and a thousand other divisions)
Now that conservative politics has been replaced by a radical mix of authoritarianism, individualism, anti-government, so I’m not all that sure they’re as united as they used to look
I don’t think that’s true. At the heart of it …
Liberals want to fix the system. They want to tweak things to make it fair, to make it work better
Leftists want to change the system. They want to rewrite the rules in a way that works better, the way things are currently be damned
Maybe I’d say liberals think the system CAN be tweaked enough to make it work for the people, progressives don’t think it can and want to create a system that does… But I do think the major difference between liberals and progressives is liberals serve the oligarchy while progressives want to eradicate it
I think it’s more like the system is built for the oligarchy, and liberals want to preserve the system. They’ll often support things like taxes on the rich or worker protections - but they don’t like the idea of something more direct
Neo-liberals do directly serve oligarchs, because they’re liberals who operate under myths about how capitalism works - the efficiency of corporations, billionaires as innovators and job creators, voting with your wallet. They think if you fix the economy, everything else will work out, and for every social service they make sure to send a pile of money into someone’s pocket. Thank God this seems to finally be declining
I think what makes this topic so complicated is we’re taught a lie - that the political spectrum is a line. It’s not two dimensional or a horseshoe - tankies are leftist authoritarians, but they’re not further left than anarcho-communists. On some aspects they’re pretty close to christo-fascists, but it’s not because they went so far around that they’re curving towards the far right. They just also want their end goal enforced from above, and also are willing to overlook a little genocide of the “enemy”
Meanwhile, anarcho-communists are on the other side of a different spectrum. They don’t believe in a large system of enforcement from the top down, they believe in building community from the ground up. They don’t believe in a system of rules, they believe in social bonds
The end goal is the same, but the methods couldn’t be more different
My point with all this is that the left want change, the right wants the status quo. Conservatives want a hierarchy under de facto aristocrats, liberals want a system of rules, and anarchists want community rule
This doesn’t all fit on a 2d spectrum, but it all makes sense when you break it down in more dimensions - you can nail down any coherent political stance to a point in this multifaceted graph space.
American liberals are different from liberals elsewhere, but what they have in common is they hold the legal framework as sacred. We already live in a world managed by English common law, they all want to perfect the laws, but resist anything that threatens the status quo
There is also a point for the left not wanting to alienate all their voters so they are wanting to start slow. Personally I see this as a progress point for how left a country is. If their left is saying a little genocide okay it’s probably a right leaning country.
The problem with leftists (and I say this as a leftist) is they resort to name calling of anyone who disagrees with them. Instead of listening to their point of view and trying to convince them otherwise. There’s a real “othering” going on.
When someone openly shouts heil Hitler, I think I’m justified in ignoring their POV and calling them what they are.
I’ve said things like “you are literally alienating people who, being reasonable in general, would be voting for you this election,” and been downvoted or argued against.
i like how this image is three different posts tied together precariously.
Does anyone consider that there might be a large number of the people that consider themselves to be centrists are near the actual center, and that everyone dunking on them is imagining center of our current Overton window? I think about that a lot. (Not the guy in the meme, just in general)
I mean, even if not, why do both sides shit on them instead of trying to bring them closer to their side?
Do we not want to make change? Because you need people for that. Are we just concerned about being correct? Because that does nothing to solve our problems.
- Emmie ( @Emmie@lemmings.world ) 3•1 month ago
Who are the centrists even. I am a pro capitalist and I am extremely pro universal healthcare and education in addition to free market economy. It seems what was meant by „centrist” is conservatives in the context of American politics.
Which primo is USA centric and secondo idk if even is a good definition of the word in that narrow context.
What the centrist so reviled here dislikes is being told we’re no better than fascists for taking a small or piecemeal win rather than stomping our feet and going home if we don’t get a full Marxist revolution today.
true (talking about beathecult reply)