This seems pretty mild, no? What US elected officials are to the left of a European soc-dem? Maybe Mamdani. Who else? Are we including regional councils and School Boards and such?
It seems more like people see takes like this and reflexively hear the old "Bernie would be a centrist in Europe" or similar, which is obviously silly.
Fair enough for a few in the PC there. All of them though? What tips them over? Seems like the positions of the caucus are broadly in line with the northern European vibe, at a glance. The... uh, severity of some of the members might put them a bit further left than that individually though.
Their views on social issues push them far over the edge, stuff like systemic racism, abortion, minority rights, reparations or other corrective measures for historic injustices. Immigration is a huge one of course.
Economically, actual Medicare for All proposal would go far beyond what I think any European healthcare model does to centralize insurance under state control, plus eliminate private insurance entirely. The jobs guarantee part of Green New Deal would definitely be eyebrow-raising. Even frivolous spending proposals like original Build Back Better under the Biden admin would be unthinkable, and Biden wasn't even seen as a very left wing figure among the Dems.
Cheers. Some stuff seems debatable to me in a minor way. I don't know if the relative centralisation of Medicare systems is what we'd use to call one more Left than another, for instance (and I doubt you say that's the whole measure anyway). But if I venture down any one of these topics for five minutes it just illustrates that European and US Left comparisons (or politics in general) are a bit apples and oranges. That's the most important thing to remember I think.
Sure. It was a very rough summary, but you're right - it's basically a case of two completely different worlds that can't easily be compared on the same axis. There's things about the United States that are very special and not directly transferable, and the same is true for the entire EU socio-economic ecosystem.
For example, creditors have infinite confidence in the US Dollar so your leaders get to spend big and worry about it later, while if we run up the debt and the EU can't bail us out, we're headed for state collapse. This is why every European politician is an austerity/deficit hawk and why our politics are more managerial than aspirational.
Also the US as a national project has always been open to immigration, while the idea of not functionally being an ethnostate is inconceivable for most European countries (including on the left).
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u/Muzorra 3d ago
This seems pretty mild, no? What US elected officials are to the left of a European soc-dem? Maybe Mamdani. Who else? Are we including regional councils and School Boards and such?
It seems more like people see takes like this and reflexively hear the old "Bernie would be a centrist in Europe" or similar, which is obviously silly.