I think the current best demonstration on this is how hard people are pushing Mark Kelly as VP.

They push a center-right president onto the stage and then dangle another "centrist" to try and, what? Appeal to Never Trumper Republicans? Racists?

How about you offer actual progressives some goddamn enticement for once and offer it to Jamaal Bowman, who the Dems primaried in favor of a genocidal AIPAC stooge?

Very well put

They didn't like John McCain, so they lumped him in with the rest of us.

The upside of that is it works against their overton window dragging, if you are going to be called a commie leftist no matter what might as well lean into it

Yeah, but that ‘center’ is a relative term and people move ‘center’ to fit their opinion. Every American I know thinks they are close to center, but I know people that are far left and far right, as well as people that lean left and right from a mostly central position.

No one wants to consider themselves radicalized, but there are a lot of people out there that are.

Most of American politics is right wing. Democrats lean right and Republicans run right. You could change the slant of your statement with a left-bias, instead of the right, by saying everyone left of center is progressive and everyone right of center is regressive.

What most Americans think of as 'center' is way fucking right compared to most of the world.

Here Bernie Sanders is a radically dangerous communist.

In other parts of the world he is just considered a bit progressive.

The center is now also conservative, unfortunately.

Libs and leftists are different

I mentioned this anecdote in another thread a couple weeks ago, but I think it fits here too:

It's not even just chuds ime, it's the majority of the US population that thinks the "further left" something or someone is, the more "liberal" it is. Even many liberals think this.

A while back I told someone (an acquaintance I met irl) that I considered myself a communist and their response to me was:

"I'm pretty liberal myself, but communism is too liberal even for me."

There were several other people present and none of them thought this was a strange thing to say.

They referred to specific ideologies and economic and social policies before the modern corporate propaganda machine really started in the 80s. Pretty sure they’re meaningless to most Americans these days.

The latter is much more amusing

same here; but likely for different reasons.

i like learning about viewpoints that differ from mine; i think they help me question my own beliefs and, usually, it re-enforces them.