This just might be me, but I consider the Republicans to be the extreme right and the Democrats to be the right-center.
The only leftist parties in the US are third parties, and people constantly perpetuate the circular logic of "Third parties don't win because people don't vote for them, therefore you shouldn't vote for them."
Both parties are big tent coalitions that compose multiple factions. The Republicans definitely carry the right-populists, theocrats, the Tea Party, and other such individuals, but they also have libertarian an centrist groups. Similarly, the Democrats range from conservative allies of convenience, to Blue Dogs, to traditional liberals, all the way to New England liberals and social democrats.
And you shouldn't vote for third parties outside of the local level. Not right now, anyway. Whom you should vote for is people amongst the major parties whom desire electoral reform that would allow the third parties to put up a fight (IRV and such).
That whole "left and right are relative terms" thing is a bit irritating, I find. It's quite a fashionable way of thinking, closely related to stuff like "democracy is a relative thing", you know, that little soundbyte that lets the Chinese get off with internet censorship and totalitarian government.
The leaders of the free world, if my memory doesn't fail me, stood up on several occasions and said that it's just a part of Chinese culture and that what is democratic and isn't is relative to the country, but that's utter nonsense. Left and right aren't relative terms when we aren't going by the standards of a particular nation, but politics all over the world. When ideas like socialism and communism still exist then no, the democrats are not left wing. They may not be popular ideologies in the USA but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
It's not closely related at all.
Right and Left are relative terms when we are speaking of individual nations, because what defines the right and the left is the difference between what is and what could be. As this varies between nations, so must the right and left. While one could possibly be speaking of the
global right and left, this is so hard to measure that it might as well be opinion. If you take every place on Earth into consideration, you could easily say that the USA is far-left and Europe has gone off the left end entirely into crazyland.
The China thing is something that is mostly said by China, not the free world. The
lack of democratic fervor amongst the Chinese is admittedly pretty famous though. Mind you, China does have a
little bit of democracy, mostly local, that I personally expect to blossom into a full democratic system as the Chinese get more wealthy and less tolerant of government oppression.
First came the righteous defense of the nations, who were as always, doing what was best for the people, like throwing them into political prison camps, and mass-executing over 100 million of their own people altogether, or alternatively, inadvertently and brainlessly starving them to death with 5-year Plans for Failure and Great Leaps Backwards.
Well, after that he claimed that all of those countries weren't Communist, they were actually socialist.
:/ Okayyy....
That is true, I guess, as Communists are basically advanced socialists... (not sure if everyone agrees with that wording, but they do follow the same policies, believe the same things etc. etc. etc.)
Sorry, I'm confused. Is it generally accepted among Communists that those countries weren't "really" communist, or is it more common to simply try to defend the actions of them?
It's just that from talking to them and listening to what they say, I'm not sure I can tell... Some do both... >_>
P.S.
Pleeeeeeasse don't rage at me or write a 5-page long essay, I just want a discussion. I guess I might be marching on forbidden territory or something, but... ah well, we'll see what happens (to my dead, bloated corpse[?]). 
Edit: I made it sound like the guy was actually defending the mass executions. Didn't mean to. He and the other people I was talking to were saying that they didn't happen.
It is important to remember that communism is very much a utopian ideology while capitalism is a pragmatic one. This is not to say that one is better than the other, but that the mindset of the two diverges at a very basic level. Indeed, one could just as accurately say that democracy is a utopian ideology while autocracy is a pragmatic one.
Communism is considered, in relevant philosophy, to be the state of total revolution that is supposed to follow the demise of non-communist regimes in the world revolution. With no external foes remaining and internal foes (supposed to have been) subsumed into the proletariat, humanity will be able to do away with the concept of a state entirely and exist as a brotherhood of men, all equal, all working for the common good and not for a few powerful men...forever, basically. Or at least that is how Marx described it. Like I said, utopian ideology, almost an early sci-fi.
"In response to PatriotSaint, the countries that have followed Communist state-ideologies have never actually reached that golden state of Communism that all Communist parties sought. Instead they were always stuck in the Socialist stage of development."
-Owlbread
Hmm... well, nobody ever has.
They do keep trying though, and it keeps ending up in lots of executions and prison camps.
It's like the very definition of insanity.
Yes, but consider that every nation that went communist was preceded by a similarly oppressive nation. Tsarist Russia to the USSR, the Qing Empire to the PRC, etc. This is actually a significant diversion from what Marx expected to happen. He himself put money on the first communist revolutions happening in fully industrialized, wealthy, even democratic nations. Those being Germany, France, and the USA. After all, (Republican) France and the USA were the utopian radicals of Marx's time. Significant rights, anti-aristocracy, (and this should sound familiar) set up by a few visionaries for
the equality of all people?
If communist revolutions had happened in these places, would they suddenly lose all respect for human rights and start killing people? I don't know. Nobody knows. It's never happened. But the places that did have horrific oppression under communism had said oppression happen in their predecessor as well, suggesting that it might not have been.
Now, now, quite a few attempts at the other end of the spectrum have ended the same way.
The thing is, they've all been big-time authoritarian as well on both sides.
It's a bit like a big ring where the two extremes go so far round the circle they touch.
A horseshoe, actually.China is in a transition stage from Communism to Capitalism, right?
China is more capitalist than the United States at this point. Big money, no really enforced regulations to speak of.
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Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread (Read 1244325 times)