It’s the neoliberal center that controls the big tech companies, not the left. The left is scrappy neighborhood groups of activists that run soup kitchens and lie down in front of oil pipelines and collect signatures for ballot referendums. They gather in coffee shop bookstores to have book clubs on malatesta. They’re flat broke and half of them are homeless and based on what I’m hearing they’re pretty much convinced that they’re next on the censorship list. I mean you can’t really look at those kids and Jeff Bezos and say, hmm, looks the same to me.
Yep. There's a left wing inside the Democratic party, but the Democratic party is not left wing.
George Soros is not "left wing"
Bill Clinton was not "left", and Hilary wasn't either.
It's not even a question of what's relative. They don't even call themselves "left."
I spent much of my 20s and 30s in the organized and unorganized left, as an activist. Back then (90s, mostly), globalization was the enemy, not the goal. We were tear gassed at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City protesting the negotiation of trade agreements. It's a strange world to see now people lump BLM and Bernie Sanders and your local Trotskyite sect in the same camp as Biden, and "globalists" and "George Soros."
As in 1930s Germany, the far right has adopted certain clasically left positions on certain issues in order to mobilize the working class, but for opposite goals. Many of the slogans chanted in the Capitol building the other day ("whose house? our house?") are directly lifted from left wing activists.
Nothing speaks to the disintegration and loss of the actual socialist left in North America more than the fact people can't identify them anymore from the background neoliberalism of the American political mainstream.
Yes the left and the (often far) right will recognize the same problem but then put forth very, very different causes of and solutions to those problems. Both contrast with the center that doesn’t even agree there is a problem (e.g. healthcare).
In the case of Hitler and Mussolini it wasn't some organic process of arriving at different solutions to similar problems. They literally looked at how the early socialist movement was successful with working people and outright copied the language and symbolism and then modified it. They were very explicit about what they were doing, hence the "socialist" label in the Nazi name despite having no socialist program. They wanted to recruit those people and divert them to their cause.
Every time I hear one of these Trumpite nutbars go on about the "mainstream media" I have to give my head a shake, because the phraseology is the same as what you'd overhear at a Food Not Bombs event in the 90s or something. But the intent and the ends are entirely entirely different.
They've taken the vacuum left by the disintegration of the left, and filled it nice and full of some really awful stuff.
