How frustrated are you with how Republicans have moved the center line in America?
It’s nothing to be proud of, especially considering the threat they now pose, but it’s something they’ve done incredibly well. I’ve referred to the work by Political Compass for many years and want to share their assessment of 2024 (attached). But I also want us to talk about the great harm Republicans have caused to America.
Are you as frustrated as I am with this one thing they’ve done well? They’ve convinced people that centrist-right politicians are the radical left, all while moving us towards a theocratic or authoritarian dictatorship designed to benefit billionaires and weaken us as a nation.
The image above might be jarring to some and I should note that I believe Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are excellent candidates on their own. Separately, it is imperative that any American who cares about democracy, the people in America, or their own lives absolutely must ensure that Trump/Vance are never given power again.
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Republicans lie every time they call Harris/Walz the radical left (they usually lie about most things).
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Republican voters looking for safety in denying Trump the power to turn America into an authoritarian hellscape have a clear permission structure to vote for Kamala Harris, she’s not the “radical left.”
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Those who think Democrats are the radical left should give themselves space to understand how that inaccurate view formed and challenge other political beliefs.
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For those on the actual political left: our day may come but it’s unlikely to come if the radical authoritarians gain control.
With platforms like Fox News, OANN, Newsmax, Breitbart, and countless online propaganda echo chambers, Republicans have manipulated the narrative. These propaganda machines have worked tirelessly to label reasonable, fact-based policies—like universal healthcare, climate action, and social justice—as “radical left.” Meanwhile, they paint their own agenda of billionaire tax cuts, attacks on voting rights, and undermining democracy as normal or centrist.
This shift, fueled by lies and disinformation, benefits the wealthy few while alienating the majority of Americans from policies that would serve their best interests. By moving the center today’s Republican Party has become the most radical force we’ve ever seen in America all while successfully convincing their followers that the opposite is true.
Having trouble with this? The FAQs at Political Compass are helpful:
- You’ve got liberals on the right. Don’t you know they’re left?
This response is exclusively American. Elsewhere neo-liberalism is understood in standard political science terminology — deriving from mid 19th Century Manchester Liberalism, which campaigned for free trade on behalf of the capitalist classes of manufacturers and industrialists. In other words, laissez-faire or economic libertarianism.
In the United States, “liberals” are understood to believe in leftish economic programmes such as welfare and publicly funded medical care, while also holding liberal social views on matters such as law and order, peace, sexuality, women’s rights etc. The two don’t necessarily go together.
Our Compass rightly separates them. Otherwise, how would you label someone like the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, on the one hand, pleased the left by supporting strong economic safety nets for the underprivileged, but angered social liberals with his support for the Vietnam War, the Cold War and other key conservative causes?
- Politics have moved, but you’re still using the old economic parameters.
Some critics have argued that, because the universal political centre has moved to the right, our axes should correspondingly move to the right. This, however, would not indicate how far one way or the other society has shifted. It could not convey paradoxes such as the fact that, in the UK, Tony Blair’s New Labour occupied an economic position to the right of pre-Thatcher Conservatives. Where was the centre, for example, in Apartheid South Africa? In Third Reich society, such a skewed analysis might show a Nazi opposed to the death chambers as representing liberal opinion.
Narrowing the standard political goalposts to accommodate merely the range of mainstream opinion within any given society at a given time is not only historically uninstructive; it is unscientific.