this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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And they sometimes get called "tankies" too by people to the right of them. That's why I both think it's a useless term (if everybody is a tankie, then nobody is) and why I think I fall in the definition (as most leftists do, I've seen pretty mild social democrats being called "tankies" by liberals)
Plus ultimately these blanket descriptions are pretty useless IMO, you'll find extremely heated debates between "tankies" themselves on many topics, there's no consensus, and there are many different ideologies "tankies" subscribe to. It would be like saying that Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Greens are all the same thing. We could call them "dronies" maybe.
Oh, I agree - calling people Tankies/Liberals/Dronies, especially ad hominem, is reductive and generally unhelpful.
ML people often tend not to apply 'liberal' correctly either, so it goes both ways.
Actually we do tend to apply “liberal” correctly.
It is liberals themselves who tend to not have even a Wikipedia-level understanding of liberalism—their own ideology!—or of socialism. And that’s how a centrist liberal like Bernie Sanders can get away with calling himself a socialist despite never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, because Burgerlanders don’t know their asses from their elbows politically thanks to over a century of red scares and cold wars, which are still ongoing[1][2].
Hang on, so you're telling me you guys lump social liberals in with classical liberals and neoliberals? That's definitely not common, but then I suppose if you're a communist then it kinda makes sense.
Also, while I wouldn't call Sanders a socialist either, he is not a centrist by any standard measure. I presume you don't consider anyone a leftist if they don't advocate for collective ownership and a centrally planned economy?
If you’re going to double down on not reading the Wikipedia entries for liberalism or socialism, I’m not sure what to tell you.
Yes, Sanders, both Bushes, and Reagan are/were all liberals. Off the top of my head I don’t recall the US ever having had a president who wasn’t a liberal. We had a bourgeois revolution to overthrow a still semi-feudal monarchy, and we’ve been a bourgeois-run state ever since, just as the bourgeois Founding Fathers intended. Our government was never meant to represent the working class, and it never has.
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Sanders is a centrist by the standard measure: the left is socialism; the right is liberalism. He’s center-left at best. He wants to preserve the bourgeois order while providing a better safety net to the proletariat. He is in no way on the left, and he has a history of supporting US imperialism.
The Overton window in the US is so far to the right that most Americans wouldn’t know the left if it bit them.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
he has a history of supporting US imperialism
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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I understand very well what liberalism and socialism are, thanks. Where we disagree is the definition of the "left" versus the "right". Even in Europe, the old socialist left is becoming a thing of a bygone age, so of course the Overton window shifts to reflect the current political landscape.