When the Democrat Party claims to be 'the left' it means the fake left. It has confused the public into thinking the term 'Left Wing' means anything the Republicans oppose. 'Left Wing' in 1789 meant opposing the privileges which gave the king and aristocracy far greater wealth than the common people could hope to gain. In 2023 that would mean not polluting the money supply used by the common people, and not sending production work out of the country.
'Left Wing' today could mean policies giving a lower Gini Coefficient - that is distributing wealth somewhat more evenly. Here in the US I don't think of wealth as being necessarily as important as respect, or the perceived worth of a person - but respect could be more difficult to observe. Certainly shipping the well-paid jobs of Detroit to Mexico was a bad deed for both respect and wealth inequality, and Bill Clinton did that by signing NAFTA into effect. Today large sections of Detroit look something like Chernobyl in Ukraine, ... or other parts of Ukraine now that the Democrats are shipping over weapons to their friends over there. That's the sort of 'help' Democrats and quite often also Republicans supply to those in need.
People can also fall off the opposite side of the horse. After the damage done by Bill Clinton somehow GW Bush got in and started devastating wars, generally backed by the US public at the time. The idea is to not get tricked into starting wars to 'help' the unfortunate people of some country. I'd vote either for RFKjr or Donald Trump as both are as far over on the anti war side as you can go in the US without being considered anathema.
The biggest division between the parties would be if one party started the wars and the other one didn't, but both parties are pro war so there is no clear division. DT was slow to send 'help' to Ukraine, but eventually forced to send weapons, which Kyiv used to shell Donetsk, and then when Biden got in and the Democrats controlled both houses a whole bunch of grief was sent to Ukraine and the war shifted into top gear, and Russia made good on their promise to protect Donetsk. RFKjr 's anti war stance is enough to make the Democratic Party disfavor him. So that's two out of favor, a lot of Republicans don't want Trump because of his anti war stance and a lot of Democrats don't want RFKjr because of his antiwar stance. So don't get tricked into voting for a pro war candidate of either party. But the main risk right now is thinking that sending 'help' to a country will in any way help the country, or that the 'left' is actually on the left.
I was doing pretty well for the middle of the night, and awake with congestion due to COVID... so although true, it lacks focus.
So the focus is this: Don't believe those Dems when they say they are sending aid to Ukraine, it was 300 million dollars of artillery shells and some more howitzers, and about 300 million dollars in payroll, for the huge, huge army they had with the help of NATO raised. The 'help' they sent Ukraine in mid 2021 most of which arrived in early 2022, was to Start A War.
I would like to see a Basic Minimum Income introduced in the USA that is financed in a similar manner to how Lincoln financed the Civil War..... Now that would truly be "Left Wing!" Alain Pilote, The History of Banking Control in the United States. 777 dollars per citizen and legal resident per month is a nice number...... .. everybody would still have to work but.... at least Americans would be able to pay off their debts..... But.... the BigBanking people seem to want to pretty much repeat what they did from 1864 to 1887!!!!
I have found the only way to make sense of anything anymore is to ignore all labels of "left wing", "right wing", and all other such similar nonsense, and take all people and situations on a case by case basis. I have found that my views do not line up at all with a strictly left or right wing point of view. Which makes sense, considering all of that nonsense is artificial, made up by political propagandists.
That's exactly the problem, without the categories of Left and Right, the policies aren't clearly categorized as left or right and what is possibly the most significant way of distinguishing policies is also lost, and debating turns into a food fight.
Usually the most meaningful is to ask who started a war and who didn't? The only good wars were WW2 (most of it), 1812, and I'd say the War of Independence, and that's it. All the others with hindsight have turned out to be for someone's private benefit. The war in Ukraine is another of those to benefit the weapons makers. Watch 'Ukraine on Fire' (Oliver Stone; 2016) to get a few ideas about how it developed.
I think what you're talking about here could be more accurately described as classical liberalism. I would see this more as centrist. If you look at the political compass you have authoritarian on the top and really anarchy on the bottom but they always write libertarian down there. Most people fit on a parabola that goes from the upper left hand corner the trough being probably about six points below the x axis and then it flows back up. I would say the base of this trough toward the left a little bit is where liberalism lies and then to the right a little bit is where conservativeism lies The extreme ends tend toward authoritarianism so they're anti-liberal.
Its originally an occult term- 'the left hand path', which referred to a way focussed on the good of the self as opposed to the good of the all ('the right hand path'). This eventually translated into politics with classical liberalism focussing on individual rights with the intent of allowing individuals to benefit themselves instead of forcing them to benefit the group (as was typically the excuse used to justify an authoritarian ruling class). And ya, over time it has effectively reversed. The only real difference is the authoritarians now seem to think a democratically elected ruling bureaucracy can justifiably tell you what to do, whereas before the renaissance it was just 'God chose your ruler.' So, an improvement in theory, but just as awful in practice. Although... one could also make the argument that 'the left hand path' has just been co-opted by the elite. Whereas it used to mean 'to each for the good of the self' it now means 'from each to the good of MYSELF', given that no authoritative collective ever seems to exist without someone at the top benefitting from all the rest.
