> The problem is that in 1989 when socialism died.
Socialism didn't die in 1989. What is that even supposed to mean?
> They started their rebranding effort. They became Politically Correct
“Politically Correct” was never part of a rebranding effort on the left, it was originally a pejorative used between different groups in the left, and adopted heavily as a pejorative by the right against the left in about the early 1980s, serving the same purpose as “cancel culture” does today (like, literally, anything the right says about “cancel culture” today can pretty much have that term swapped out for “political correctness” and be a quote from the right in the 1980s-1990s.)
> "democratic socialists",
“Democratic Socialist” isn't part of a post-1989 rebranding. The DSA itself was founded in 1982, and the “democratic socialist” label is older (one of the DSAs predecessor organizations was the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.)
> culutural marxists,
“Cultural Marxism” isn't a post-1989 left-wing rebranding, it's a right-wing conspiracy theory. No one on the left identifies or brands themselves or any movement they are part of as “cultural marxism”.
Again, not a left-wing rebranding; pretty much no one identifies/brands with globalism, and globalism is a term used both on the left- and far-right to refer to and critique an aspect of neoliberal capitalism (a center-right ideology).
> internationalists
Again, not a post-1989 left rebranding. Leftist “internationalism” historically has referred to association with one of the Communist Internationals (though it pretty much fell out of useful use with the overlapping, competing, Stalinist Third and Trotskyite Fourth Internationals before WWII, and the subsequent schism within the Fourth International. More recently, the left has been more prone to use “internationalism” as part of a term of critique with regard to liberal (centrist to center-right) internationalism, though even that negative use has largely been replaced with criticism of neoliberal “globalism”.
>And I agree, the word socialism is losing meaning because right wing media has been trying to equate democratic socialism with Stalin
The fact that you agree with what you read does not mean that it isn't propaganda. The man had his homeymoon in the USSR and is on video talking fondly of bread lines. I'm not saying he's Stalin 2.0 but right wing media isn't entirely stretching when they point out how far removed his policies are from American politics.
Note, that's not a value judgement. I'm just saying you're wrong to blame the shift in meaning on the particular media that you don't agree with.
> So something that has really confused me lately — I thought socialism had a relatively strict definition.
Very few terms that refer to current (as opposed to purely historical) movements or identity groups have single, universally accepted, strict definitions. That's true or “socialism”, it's true of “capitalism”, it's true of “Christianity”.
> AOC for example claims the label socialist, but as far as I can tell she’s not actually taken any socialist policy positions.
AOC is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which recently left the Socialist International because it viewed the latter as having slipped too far to the right and abandoned socialism by endorsing what the DSA saw as neoliberal economic policies. So, the DSA is to the left, ideologically, of the main global organization of socialist parties and groups.
Now, the DSA is also very much an incrementalist organization that sees socialism as a long-range goal, favoring what could easily be seen as evolutionary socialism. And AOC is one of I think three socialists between both houses of Congress, so it's not like even if she was an “as fast as possible” socialist ideologically she’d achieve much by, say, tabling a resolution to amend the Constitution to abolish private property in the means of production.
> Are you not aware that there are thousands and thousands of active Marxists in the US who proudly call themselves Marxists
Yeah, I've been involved in coalitions where some of the members were Marxist. That doesn't make labelling generic leftist action as “Marxist” any less of a false label and attempt to to use the emotional loading of “Marxist” in the wider society as a technique of poisoning the well against leftism generally.
> It's not poisoning the well to call someone a term that they voluntarily adopt for themselves.
It is, on the other hand, poisoning the well to use a label adopted by a small subset of a broader group to refer to actions of the broader group generally, when that is done specifically because of the negative emotional loading in the target audience of the label I question. Which is, at best, what is at play with the use of the term “Cultural Marxism”.
No, it's actually Marxism losing relevance in favor of something radically different, but in any case it's fairly irrelevant to the Democratic Party which never generally adopted a ”New Left” position, following classical moderate, non-Marxist pro-labor focus into the 80s, then abandoning that and anything like the Left generally for the center-right neoliberalism of Clinton's “Third Way”.
> I always thought the Marxists were the real power in the Democratic party
The most powerful faction in the Democratic Party are center-right neoliberals like the Clintons, the next most powerful are center-left Social Democrats (including what passes in the US, but not really by international standards, for “Democratic Socialists”.) There are essentially no Marxists in influential roles in the Party. There's probably a few Marxists (or Leninists/Stalinist/Maoists) in the electorate that hold their nose and vote for Democrats as, from their perspective, the very slightly lesser of two evils (and probably some who vote for Republicans as the greater evil in hopes of provoking revolution), but they aren't really driving the party, either by having their hands on levers of power or being an actively courted constituency.
> Does neoliberalism really hold sway in the Democratic party and what I considered incremental marxism was really just left-of-center Clintonian politics?
The first, yes, the second...well, insofar as it is not Marxist, sure.
> How does the constant ratcheting up of identity politics stuff fit in to your theory, though?
While there are Left forms of identity politics, other-than-proletarian-identity politics are not Marxist even when they are somewhere on the Left, though the practitioners (even among right-wing identity politics) may draw something from Marxist (or Leninist) tactics or analytical modes (Marx's adaptation of Hegelian dialectic is widely influential in this way), but this doesn't make the movements involved politically Marxist.
And while the Democratic Party does include some who pursue Left forms of identity politics, it predominantly pursued bourgeois feminism and the similar bourgeois versions of other group-rights movements, rather than any of the Left (for instance, radical, socialist, or Marxist) versions.
While to anti-feminists (etc.) the distinction may seem irrelevant, it's actually quite critical to leftists of all stripes.
Bourgeois identity politics (and the fairly overt rejection of Left identity politics) is a fairly key part of Clintonian Third Wayism.
> you can hear arguing between tankies and anarchists
Those people are the legitimate users of the term 'Leftist'. As I was saying, very few normal people would be willing to use a term that lumps them with strident communists who yearn for the good days of the USSR.
It's one thing that some other members of the tribe are commies, but "The Left" was literally coined and adopted by them. (Well, socialists, but no difference.)
The Left fully adopted the post modernist rhetoric of the French philosophers in the 60s and 70s, including actual literal pedophiles trying to remove age of consent laws in order to "queer children before they are stifled by the patriarchy". Again, not something normal people would support if they knew.
The only way this functions is by being so tribal that nobody looks at who else is in the group because they're so busy screaming at everyone outside the group. As proof that it's an identity and not a useful descriptor - your leftist status can be stripped from you and you will be identified as "far right" if you disagree with certain tribal truths.
"The left" is a label people adopt, "the right" is how they label everyone they disagree with. It's a very religious thing, to view all opposition as part of a united collective that wants to destroy you.
> Leftist or Conservative
Conservative what though? That's almost as empty as leftist. As in careful planning, or as in pushing your religion? You have to add 'Fiscal' to conservative before it begins to represent an actual viewpoint instead of a tribal marker.
> it's not meaningless because there are obvious real-world associations between the values in each group.
But vastly less meaning than any actual descriptive. Terms like fiscal conservative, socially liberal, democratic fundamentalist, etc, at least mention the issues a person could believe.
You're free to call yourself whatever you will, but it's undeniable that left/right, conservative, progressive, etc, are so broad that they're identities instead of platforms.
>> The left wants to own online political discussion in the US, and they are very bothered that the right finds a ready audience when they are allowed to compete.
> That's a very odd definition of "left" floating around down there in the US. What is being called "left" in that context is nothing but neo-liberal centrist politics, and it has wanted to own political discussion in the US in some form or another for over a century.
I don't think that's the "left" the GP was referring to. I think were most likely talking about the "culture war" left.
> I remain flabbergasted by the increasing number of people who can somehow in the same breath complain about "radical socialists" and "cultural marxists" while at the same time somehow equating those people with "corporate elites" and "silicon valley" -- the two are the enemy of the other.
It's because we don't always get to control definitions, even ones we care a lot about (ask me about "crypto" sometime). IMHO, those are both fashionable (in some circles) new terms for the "culture war" left, somewhat inflected by plutocratic interests that harness opposition to it to further their own agenda.
Edit: IMHO, I think a flag-waving socially-conservative socialism could be surprisingly successful in America, if someone could get it off the ground.
> Kids today love socialism not because of their radical professors, but because of their radical politicians - namely, those devoting their political careers to destroying what little safety net remains.
That's true, both in part for the reason you describe and also in part because those same politicians have driven a linguistic drift where what would previously be described as “preserving the modern mixed economy against a regress to 19th Century capitalism” is now often , in American political vernacular, “socialism”.
While, sure, that scares some people into conformance with the right-wing program, it also reduces the cognitive distance between preserving the status quo, social democracy, democratic socialism, and even harder-left forms of socialism. When everything they isn't right-wing extremism is “socialism”, the term becomes less scary.
> I don't think "like the left wing of the French legislature in the late 1700s" is a very good description of what leftism means to people in the modern day.
That's why 'left' and 'right' have little objective meaning. They're more tribal than explanatory.
> what leftism means to people changes over time with culture
Correct, I don't think there's a good idea what it means in the USA right now, let alone worldwide and across time.
> influences from many leftist writers and philosophers
That's a circular definition though. How do you know they were leftists? By the current or the old meaning? Do old works suddenly become leftist works as the term changes and their author would now qualify as a leftist?
> people's views could boil down to [mistaking a god for a theism] and yet all would easily be considered atheists by themselves and others
There's a difference between a god and a theism so they'd simply be mistaken.
>"Please distinguish between Democratic Party and actual leftism."
I am so tired of this trope. Nothing is ever 'true leftism' and yet everything that opposes 'the left' is automatically binned as authoritarian, fascist, hard-right, *-ist, etc.
Left is progressive, right is conservative. These terms can and are applied to historical events retroactively.
> Pick up a book on the Weimar Republic some day, you might learn something!
How is this a refute?
> Strangely omitted are the Russian, Chinese, & Cuban revolutions. I wonder why?
Neither Russia nor China are considered the West. But why don't you tell us. I can only guess your argument is that left wing revolutions are totally worse than Nazis.
>It's kind of crazy to me the degree to which the left is becoming a movement built around kneejerk status quo bias, based on nothing but a distaste for the idea that someone might be making money off of making consumers' lives better.
What exactly are you referring to when you say "the left"? The movements I'm familiar with as such are openly pro-technology and blatantly utopian and anticapitalist on those grounds.
> Anarchism can be considered either left or right
Nope. It is always socialist/anti-capitalist. The name as been wrongfully appropriated by anarcho-capitalist, a contradictory term. They are merely for no-gov't-capitalism; which it against pretty much every anarchist principle (anti-oppression).
> Libertarianism is just a form of minimal government
Yes.
> Left and right are not really well defined ideologies[0].
Indeed. But pro-private-property-ad-inifinitum and against it are well defined (and largely overlap with true-left and true-right). Problem, nowadays many that subscribe to capitalism may call themselves "social dems", and thus get a little "lefty" vibe going, thereby diluting the term.
Well, what isn't? LOL. That and 'cultural marxism' are just scary/meaningful-sounding terms people make up to label and then defame something they don't like.
They're terms that are broad and just accurate enough to describe something, but too vague and imprecise to actually describe anything.
Let me help. You dislike academics who study and analyze society and culture to discover it's biases, unspoken assumptions, and so on, and you don't like that they critique society for the oppressive elements which they believe they've found.
I.e. social justice. Critiques of capitalism. Critiques of systemic racism.
Criticize something specific so we can talk about it. But, the reason you aren't accurate or specific is because if you were, whatever argument you are trying to make would rapidly fall apart.
And I'd love to be proved wrong! Share a specific critique. We can talk about Marxists, neo-Marxists, communists, libertarian anarchism, Progressive Democrats, Social Democrats, The New Left, Poststructuralism, Structuralism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism (though that one's a bit vague), Feminism, Intersectionalism, Third-wave Feminism, Liberation Theology (the current Pope has roots in Liberation Theology, which was a point of contention), and so on.
Or maybe you don't like Democrats? Social Progressives? The entire field of Gender Studies?
Pick something you don't like and let's talk about it.
But, I'd bet your own lack of education (which I don't mean as an insult, more so a factual description - I'm uneducated about, say, genetics) on the things you criticize makes it difficult to do so.
And I'd bet your true dislike is something you'd be shunned for expressing, which is why you hide behind nonsense-phrases that function as dog whistles.
Because we all kinda know what you mean, even though you didn't actually say it.
Well, nothing to do with the left may be a bit of an overstatement, imho.
If the "Left" is such a problematic term, then let's just agree to avoid using the term, since you seem to be of the position that the "more centrist faction of the Democratic Party" is not Left.
I would assume the term "Left" includes both the "more centrist faction of the Democratic Party" and the more left-leaning social-democratic ideologies.
> That’s all correct, but you’re choice of starting point is a bit misleading.
The commenter who made the accusation of present leftism chose the time period of interest (the last couple decades.) Discussing within that frame rather than changing the subject to the distant past isn't "misleading".
> FDR was not a center right neo-liberal.
FDR died more than 70 years ago.
I mean, I might just as relevantly point out that Thomas Jefferson was a follower of the kind of old-school liberalism that modern center-right neoliberalism seeks to return to in reaction--at least within the Democratic Party--against center-left progressivism.
> There was a brief interregnum during which Clinton and Obama governed as center-right economically and center-left socially.
Well, except the Democratic Presidents governing from the economic center-right include Carter, as well; 1977-2008 isn't all that much shorter than 1932-1968 (the FDR-Johnson period). It was no "brief interregnum".
> To someone who grew up during that period, the allegations of socialism from the right never made any sense to me. It was only recently when Democrats started fighting to distance themselves from Obama that I understood the criticism from the right.
But the criticism you didn't understand didn't concern the times that you describe it as making sense. So...how did the later change validate it?
> I would also argue that you’re understating the profound shift that has happened in the last two years. The Green New Deal is an openly socialist document, and every Democratic candidate has committed to supporting it.
(1) The shift didn't happen in the last two years, more like the last 5.
(2) You are overweighting establishment candidates seeking deny candidates challenging the establishment ground to fight from, while burying substantial differences in policy below the level of headline positions; its a fairly standard strategy. Also, the GND is not, in any case, an "openly socialist" document; it does endorse both environmental and social-democratic goals, but does within a capitalist framework.
> It’s again the party of FDR
I think you are jumping to conclusions on the flimsy basis of early primary campaign strategy.
No, the right is defined by the left, but woke is defined by the people who oppose it, etc. It's one of many. Conservative and liberal are a circle jerk where each is an identity and a slur to threaten dissidents with. (Despite Liberal, at least, having deeper roots than are currently meant by those who use it, it's now meaningless in most places.)
The left is perhaps a bit worse than some identities for being communist, and being used to explaining millions of deaths in terms of progress...
Left/right bothers me even more than liberal/conservative though because it's a reductive lens that people try to push onto everyone around despite it having little to no historical impact on most of them.
> You've gone off the rails my dude, and I have no reason to believe you are communicating with a modicum of good faith anymore.
It's a mere search away but that's just it. I could guarantee that you weren't going to go look because you don't want it to be true. It's a giant umbrella of things nobody is really happy with so nobody looks carefully.
I'm not really talking about actual leftists who embrace their ideology but shrill ideologues with identities and how the term is incorrectly used by many, even for themselves. And it isn't that this specific philosophy is bad, though it seems so, but that it's more officially a leftist platform than a lot of what people would think is.
That most supposed leftists wouldn't support this, if asked away from their peers, is the point.
> I think we _almost_ agree here, except that they are both identities and platforms.
Sure, then I'm just saying that leftist, conservative, etc, are all the way at the 'almost entirely an identity with almost no connection to policy' and 'fiscal conservative' is perhaps roughly in the middle, and some sort of hypothetical amazing group may exist which is vastly more focused on policy than identity.
> Keep investigating, just remember, they're watching you, just waiting for you to make a small misstep. They want to take away your freedom. They want to turn your children gay. They track your phone location. Stay vigilant. They are always watching.
That's pretty funny considering you're the one talking about good faith.
And yes, hello. They do track our phones. Congratulations on conflating a huge issue of national security with your identity politics.
Socialism didn't die in 1989. What is that even supposed to mean?
> They started their rebranding effort. They became Politically Correct
“Politically Correct” was never part of a rebranding effort on the left, it was originally a pejorative used between different groups in the left, and adopted heavily as a pejorative by the right against the left in about the early 1980s, serving the same purpose as “cancel culture” does today (like, literally, anything the right says about “cancel culture” today can pretty much have that term swapped out for “political correctness” and be a quote from the right in the 1980s-1990s.)
> "democratic socialists",
“Democratic Socialist” isn't part of a post-1989 rebranding. The DSA itself was founded in 1982, and the “democratic socialist” label is older (one of the DSAs predecessor organizations was the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.)
> culutural marxists,
“Cultural Marxism” isn't a post-1989 left-wing rebranding, it's a right-wing conspiracy theory. No one on the left identifies or brands themselves or any movement they are part of as “cultural marxism”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_...
> globalists
Again, not a left-wing rebranding; pretty much no one identifies/brands with globalism, and globalism is a term used both on the left- and far-right to refer to and critique an aspect of neoliberal capitalism (a center-right ideology).
> internationalists
Again, not a post-1989 left rebranding. Leftist “internationalism” historically has referred to association with one of the Communist Internationals (though it pretty much fell out of useful use with the overlapping, competing, Stalinist Third and Trotskyite Fourth Internationals before WWII, and the subsequent schism within the Fourth International. More recently, the left has been more prone to use “internationalism” as part of a term of critique with regard to liberal (centrist to center-right) internationalism, though even that negative use has largely been replaced with criticism of neoliberal “globalism”.
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