Maybe on economic issues. On certain social issues it's definitely not "centrist" and arguably further left than other developed countries.
Normie centrist views tend not to garner much attention either in traditional media or in online forums. Instead, we tend to focus much more on the issues that clearly and quickly establish our membership and bonafides in a particular group.
The same extreme-voices-get-heard feature gets recapitulated through our political system. Especially the rise of getting primaried from the left or right. Break ranks with your side? Get primaried. The result is that, to get heard over the fray, political candidates need to articulate more extreme views and stick to them.
Lots of words have been spilled about how various electoral reforms could get us out of this mess. For me, I believe ranked choice voting and open primaries represent an optimal trade-off between "legal, and plausibly implementable" and "yield biggest improvements to electoral system." A major complaint against ranked choice voting is that it tends to bias for more moderate centrists, which I think would be a not-bad problem to have.
It's really only identity politics where the left is actually on the global left, and then it's far-left.
Those are arguably closer to "economic" than "social". Energy is plainly economic. Even healthcare and labor at the end of the day, boil down to dollars and cents (ie. how much people are paying for healthcare and how much they earn).
>speech
Having the strongest free speech protections in the world is "far right" now?
>religion
The Republicans might be "far right" on religion, but I don't see how the Democrats are. They can certainly be more secular (think the CCP), but at least they're not obviously religious. Compare this to the UK and Denmark which have state regions, and the christian democratic union in Germany.
>basic human rights
Clarify. "basic human rights" has been muddled by the left to include mean stuff like "healthcare", as well as the right to mean "right of babies not not get aborted" and "kids not being groomed".
That rings true, but how did the US get here? How did identity politics suddenly come to be the most important thing, bringing the world order to its knees?
Left to me means workers movements, and there's very little of that in the US.
At no point was "liberal" mentioned in this comment chain prior to your comment.
>Left to me means workers movements, and there's very little of that in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics#Social_prog...
It's time to stop thinking in materialist terms when analyzing US politics, that has completely flown the coop. It's all culture war.
Americans should continue to conflate socially liberal and economically left-wing at their own peril.
Everyone claims they're the true voice of the 99%. Trump, despite being a billionaire, claims he's defending Americans workers by imposing tariffs and deporting undocumented immigrants. More broadly the right claims that they're fighting against the "elites" in the media/academia/corporations/"deep state".
Maybe a year or two ago…the political landscape has shifted drastically in recent years and months.
California governor Gavin Newsom has a new podcast, and recently told Charlie Kirk (yes, he invited Kirk to pander to the young white male voters) something along the lines of “trans people shouldn’t play sports”.
