This is a popular thing to say but it really isn't true. Right wing parties in Europe are far more right-wing than the American right. The Democratic Party is comparable to any other social democratic party in Europe: the UK Labour Party, the German SDP, the Swedish SAP, etc. What America lacks that most European countries have is a true centrist Liberal party. This tends to be obfuscated in American politics due its unfortunate misuse of the word Liberal.
The US is a very right wing country. If you're not from there then there's a good chance that the Democratic Party is more right wing than your countries major right wing party.
Compared to the US, almost everywhere in Europe is a hotbed of rampant leftism. The US Democratic Party is pretty right wing by European standards, and arguably more right wing than the UK Conservative Party. But compared to the rest of Europe, Poland and the UK are right wing.
To most Europeans the US Democrats are center / right wing. There are no major left wing political parties in the US and no major left wing media outlets.
Interestingly, right-wing . left-wing is usually defined specifically for the European political spectrum. The United States has a liberal - conservative divide, but it is vastly different from what we see in Europe.
If anything, left/right does not mean anything in the US due to the radically different Overton window. As a European, I would consider the Democrat party to be right-wing. If you want left-wing, you have to go as far as Sanders or AOC.
You can't compare the right-wing in Europe and United States.
For example in Sweden our right win party SD is much less about the free market and small government policies. Instead I would say the main goal of SD is to preserve Swedens generous welfare society.
This is common rhetoric from America's own left but it isn't entirely accurate, and is largely offset by the fact that American use of the term Liberalism differs vastly with the rest of the world and history. Actual socialist parties have waned to a barely marginal existence in most European countries, and often have at most a "tea party" like relationship to more center-left social-democratic parties. America's Democratic Party is closer to a European Social Democrat party than a centrist European Liberal Democrat party, as America's use of the word Liberal is far to the left of European use of the term. Many European countries have sizable centrist 'classical liberal' parties that would actually be considered 'to the right' of American liberals, oddly enough.
So no, America is not really a right and far right country, it's more a polity of extreme Conservative and progressive ideologies lorded over by two centrist parties with a heavily authoritarian commonality between them. What the U.S. entirely lacks is an anti-authoritarian centrist Liberalism akin to that in Europe.
To illustrate, if we were to align US parties to those parties in the UK, you'd likely get the following: the conservative Republicans (US) align to the conservative Tories (US), the far right Tea Party aligns to the far right UKIP (UK), the progressive Democrats (US) align to the social democratic Labor party (UK), and then the UK's centrist Liberal Democrats do not align to any recognizable political organization in the US. The UK Lib Dems at best might loosely align to a combination of US civil libertarians and classical liberals, both of which belong more or less to the politically homeless. Some might say those fall under the Democrat tent, and yet the most vocal proponent of civil liberties in the US government right now is conservative Rand Paul, so go figure.
To come full circle, a US equivalent of the UK LibDems, were it to exist, would likely be the most vocal opposition to the NSA.
That’s not surprising. Your average Democrat is a “liberal”. The Democratic Party is center or (arguably) center right, and that is born out in the political views of the average member of the party. They have been trained to think that left labor reforms would be a disaster for the country by the media.
There is no truly left wing party in the US with any significant political power. Since the Democrats are not “the right” they must therefore be “the left”, which is how they’re referred to by essentially all media. This is a useful rhetorical maneuver because it paints left wing policies that most any rational person in Europe would view as reasonable as completely nuts because they’re so far out of the mainstream spectrum of discourse. See the Sanders campaign’s coverage on NPR for an example of liberal media going to town on a left wing candidate. Whenever I talk to someone from Europe about this they find this whole situation totally baffling (“why didn’t the democrats support Sanders? He’s a reasonable left wing candidate”).
Thanks for clarifying this, I have often been suspicious of the claim that Democrats in America would be considered center right in Europe, and you list concrete examples of left-leaning political stances in Europe that would be far right in America.
Oh but they are compared to republicans. I dont think the right in europe aligns with the right in the us. I think most centre right parties in europe would be seen as left in the us. But you are right the CDU is not left in strictly european terms. Thanks for pointing this out.
Most European countries -- and most democracies in general, though there are some exceptions -- have, largely due to differences in electoral systems, more real axis of variations among visible electoral parties and farther extremes on the axes that roughly align with those in the US which are represented.
On top of that, the center in the US is pretty far to the right in European terms; the mainstream of the Republican and Democratic parties (in government, if not in the electorate) have been, I think fairly, described as, respectively, right-wing and center-right in European terms.
The Liberal party is definitely right wing. It's the party of religious conservatives and big business. The centrist faction of the US Dems are right wing.
Contrary to popular belief among Americans, the Democratic party is very clearly right-wing by global standards. There is a "progressive" fringe (with little institutional power) that basically wants what would elsewhere be centrist liberal policies, and an even fringier "leftist" wing (with zero institutional power) that wants the party to essentially be a euro-style Labor party.
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