this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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I mean, its not really a purity test. It's just kind of definitions. The political terms "right" and "left" have meant the same thing since the French Revolution. Democrats are not left wing. We can have a whole bunch of ancillary discussions about whether that means people should or shouldn't vote for them, which I'm not interested in having, but i struggle to see how one could argue in good faith that the Democrats are left wing. Its really not even clear that Ocasio-Cortez or Sanders are "left wing" since neither seems to oppose private property rights, nor do they advocate for the weakening or abolishment of capitalism - the traditional dividing line of left and right.
Wasn't the French revolution just abolishing feudalism and the monarchy?
leftism is defined by opposition to the status quo. the french monarchy was capitalist as well as the status quo at the time; we still have monarchies and capitalism is unquestionably the status quo.
You've just introduced a whole other definition of leftism. Also it seems to mean that no leftist society could exist in practice.
From what I can figure out, it was still in principle feudal but moving towards capitalism due to the growth of the bourgeois class. Is that correct?
opposition to the status quo is the definition of leftism, but anyone can be forgiven for not understanding this since westerners define it in the same terms as classical liberalism due to monarchies still (barely) being the status quo back then (and still existing to this day); back then, liberalism was "left" of that.
now-a-days neo-liberalism is the dominant hegemony and it's pro-capitalist; anything to the left of that is modern day leftism.