General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The Democratic Party IS the Left in this country. [View all]BainsBane
(53,112 posts)imprisoned and deported. To say the Democratic Party is the left is to say there is no real left. The Democratic Party has always been an establishment party. The Communist Party, anarchists, and socialists (not Bernie type, but revolutionary socialists) were the left. What remains of the left is liberalism, which is not left. It is an ideology that upholds the legitimacy of capitalism and free markets. No where else in the world would the Democratic party--even your idea of what it should be--constitute the left.
It's unfortunate Americans learn so little about their nation's history, and what they do learn is the conservative, top down history of great men. Sanders is indeed left of the middle on a number of issues, certainly not all. On some, like Israel and guns, he is quite squarely on the right.
In much of the world, leftism means working class solidarity. It means standing up to capital, it means the poor and workers coming together in solidarity to oppose capital. What people here imagine to be he left is a fundamentally middle- and upper- middle class ethos that excludes the subaltern, defines their interests as less, as Third Way. The subaltern have issues that relate to their very survival, yet the white middle- and upper-middle class that seeks to exclude from consideration any who don't focus on their specific issues, concerns that come about due to their anger that they no longer reap the benefits of the American system as they did for decades, while the majority was denied basic rights and lived in crippling poverty. Hence the hearkening back to an era when the white middle-class continued to sit atop a system of inequality. People of course deny that because they refuse to imagine a reality outside their own. Their views, their experience, they assume to be universal. That assumption of universality is a function of class and race entitlement. That it is not universal is evident in the kinds of issues they focus on, all good issues, but by no means inclusive of the experiences of the poor, working class, and people of color--the subaltern who have been at the bottom of America's socioeconomic and political system since the inception of the nation, especially during the halcyon days of the Democratic Party that many here hearken back to.
So yes, The Democratic party represents the left in a country that for generations has had no significant left because of political repression. The "left" that didn't threaten capital remained, and it continues to uphold the capitalist system even as it rails against "corporations" because ultimately it refuses to address the systemic and pervasive nature of a system and a society built at its very core around inequality and oppression. It instead imagines "corporatism" to be embodied in one member of the political elite vs. another, and in doing so upholds the legitimacy of capitalist exploitation.
Only in America would people call an establishment political party the left, but that is the effect of national mythology and the long history of purges that has left the baby boomer generation, above all (since they were educated in the wake of McCarthyism), without a foundation in leftist political theory.