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Comment by ytoi | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. As a European "leftist", which I guess counts as the "far left" people like to blame things on, I think almost all these issues being discussed are right wing issues. To the point were you have to explain to people in Europe, that have been reading US articles, that the things they are opposing doesn't exist here. Overall European leftist doesn't want company policies, affirmative action or even large immigration. They want powerful unions, fair admissions to university, daycare, protection of employment and other concrete things that the US consider socialism. This entire "social justice" situation is because liberals in the US doesn't want to give up their privileges of private social insurance, good schools districts, rising housing markets, lobbying etc. So the result is the predictably a shallow shouting match, which people are uncomfortable with after the fact.

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Political labels are fuzzy, and highly subject to drift. I use the term "liberal" and "leftist" because in current US politics, there are two clusters of political thought and, in current US politics, "liberal" and "leftist" are the names that we seem to be assigning them.

A European leftist is not the same thing as an American leftist. In fact, if we were to look at a different issue, the division between liberal and leftist would be different, even withing American politics.

For some issues, there is so little corralation with the general notion of liberal and leftist, that we would not even think to frame the problem in terms of those lines.

My point being, political identities are not a fundamental unit. They are an abstraction that is only meaningful in a particular contexts. There are real clusters of thought in politics; and we are currently discussing the relationship between two particular clusters of American politics. For the sake of communication, we are forced to give these clusters names, and we choose liberal and leftist because they are the best names we have available.

There are many people who identify as liberal while basking in their rising home value and exclusive school districts, but they typically do so quietly, not under the banner of liberalism. The closest example of people doing this openly and proudly under a left-wing banner is San Francisco's Progressivism, which is more closely aligned with what we're calling leftism here than what we're calling liberalism. Overall, the various shades of the left are still pretty aligned on concrete policy at the national level. Liberals are pretty reliably in favor of single payer, education funding, minimum wage, family leave, etc.

Where you start to see the fissure is around how universities should handle controversial material in the classroom and accusations of sexual misconduct in their student populations. The Christakis incident at Yale [0] is one of the best test cases. In particular,

>...if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.

is one of those flash-point statements that separates liberals from leftists. This incident has been picked up as a rallying cry by the far-right so there's a lot of FUD flying around, but just to prove I'm not the only Democrat who would agree wholeheartedly, here's Obama [1]:

> I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, "You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say." That’s not the way we learn either.

I would call Obama and has allies "liberals" here, and the protesters and their allies "leftists." Happy to be convinced otherwise on terminology, but it shows that there are at least two very distinct value systems going on here, which may be aligned on policy only by accident.

[0]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-per...

[1]https://www.vox.com/2015/9/14/9326965/obama-political-correc...

I just think it is inaccurate to call that leftism. There are certainly leftist in the US and there are also similarities between socialism and social liberalism, but the game being played in the US isn't a leftist one. It isn't about state intervention, union power or even legislation. That private individuals, institutions or companies should be able to do and say whatever they want is even a right wing positions in the first place. Just that it originally was about teaching about god, excluding gay people and firing union organizers. So if anything, people that want precedence for their opinions are right of liberal and not left. The left position is that important institution shouldn't be private (or at least not privately funded) in the first place and/or primarily be accountable to the state rather than individuals.

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