I hear a lot that people say the US Democratic Party would be right wing in Europe. But I see a lot of Europeans online say that their (left) parties are corrupt and right wing. What am I missing?
I hear a lot that people say the US Democratic Party would be right wing in Europe. But I see a lot of Europeans online say that their (left) parties are corrupt and right wing. What am I missing?
Because the left sees the left/right divide as fundamentally being about opposition to/support for capitalism, with the former being the defining feature of leftism and the latter of liberalism (which, from the international perspective, includes conservatives.) Anyone who isn’t opposed to capitalism - like ‘left-wing’ parties that advocate for reforming or regulating capitalism instead of replacing it - are not leftist. In fact, they often act as a pressure valve for anti-capitalist sentiment within society that channels people who might otherwise oppose it into less-radical reformist parties instead of moving on to find true anti-capitalist parties as they might otherwise have. Not to mention there’s a pretty well-established historical trend of ‘left-wing’ parties appeasing or even outright enabling fascism when things get bad in capitalist economies, so it’s hard to argue that they’re even nominally left-leaning.
The US democratic party is, by the international standard (the US defines things a bit differently), a centrist party at best, and honestly probably more like center-right.