The Democratic Party Is Not Remotely 'Far Left'
One of the most common refrains in American politics is that Democrats have moved "too far left." Spoiler: They haven't.
On April 29, Elon Musk tweeted:
Musk’s tweet sparked yet another wave of claims that Democrats — and American politics overall — have moved too far left.
Thankfully, more and more people see through this ridiculous propaganda:
Tim Urban @waitbutwhy
It's true that on aggregate, the right has moved more to the extreme than the left in Washington. But the small group on the far left has become very *culturally* powerful & out of fear, the rest of the left has often allowed them to speak (and make policies) for the whole left.
When I launched Direct Left in January, I knew it would be tough to debunk deeply entrenched myths about leftism in America. Among the biggest of those myths is that the Democratic Party is leftist.
If anything, Democratic leaders regularly join Republicans in bashing leftists and pushing the “too far left” talking point. As I detailed in a recent piece, Barack Obama waded into the 2020 Democratic primary to warn candidates against echoing “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds.”
Obama cautioned that the universe of voters that could support a Democratic candidate — Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans — are not driven by the same views reflected on “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds” or “the activist wing of our party.”
Being one of those activists, I created the hashtag #TooFarLeft to criticize Obama’s remarks. It caught on, trended worldwide, and was covered by the New York Times:
“Mr. Obama’s remarks prompted fierce backlash online and the creation of the hashtag #TooFarLeft by Peter Daou, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton.”
Faced with the “too far left” question at a January 2022 press conference, Joe Biden brushed it off, contrasting himself with Bernie Sanders and insisting he was “mainstream, not socialist.”
The idea that there’s anything leftist about status-quo-Joe Biden is absurd on its face, but that doesn’t deter the corporate media from demonizing and discouraging the slightest shift away from oligarchic control. The idea that it’s a bad thing to be leftist has been ingrained and normalized across the political spectrum.
The crux of the issue is how to define “left,” which is merely a direction. If you set the starting point at white supremacy, anyone can be described as being to the left. Which makes “too far left” meaninglessly vague.
So let me restate the definition of leftism I’m using at Direct Left:
A leftist strives to eradicate existing systems of oppression, discrimination, and exploitation by fundamentally restructuring how humans coexist and cooperate.
By any reasonable standard, the current Democratic administration is too far right than left. Continuing Trump’s border atrocities, caging migrant children, militarizing the police, expanding an already bloated military budget to become larger than Trump’s, pushing tax cuts for millionaires, approving more oil drilling than Trump, and blocking every avenue to popular leftist policies, is hardly “moving left.”
Propaganda notwithstanding, there is nothing remotely leftist about the Democratic Party, which is half of the capitalist, corporate-owned duopoly. If anything, fascism is in full view in politics, policies, and policing across the country. But you’ll never hear “too far right” in the corporate media and political establishment. That’s because the oligarchs and their minions in government like it that way.
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