As a Brazilian, I think Americans use “the left” far too broadly. Do liberals here see the same problem?
I’m Brazilian, and one thing that keeps confusing me about American political discourse is how enormous ideological differences get compressed into “the left” and “the right.”
From my perspective, a mainstream Democrat and someone like Hasan Piker do not occupy remotely the same political space.
As a very rough Brazilian analogy, I would compare much of the traditional Democratic establishment — particularly the Clinton/Obama type of Democrat — more to the space occupied by the PSDB between roughly 1994 and 2018: institutional, broadly market-friendly, supportive of social programs and generally more socially progressive than the conservative right.
It is obviously not a perfect comparison. American Democrats today are more progressive than the old PSDB on several social issues, and the Democratic Party contains a much wider ideological coalition.
But I would put someone like Hasan much closer to the political environment of PSOL or the DSA than to a traditional establishment Democrat.
That is why I find statements such as “the left celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death” strange.
If some anonymous left-wing accounts celebrated his death, then those people deserve criticism.
But how does that become a statement about millions of Democrats, liberals, social democrats, democratic socialists, progressives, etc.?
If I found some neo-Nazi account identifying with the American right, I would not consider that sufficient evidence that every Republican voter secretly believes the same thing.
I also notice what looks like an asymmetric standard.
A random left-wing account with 20 followers says something horrible and it can become:
“This is what the left believes.”
“Democrats are insane.”
“Look at how hateful liberals are.”
But when a major political figure on the right says something inflammatory, suddenly the conversation becomes much more nuanced:
“He was joking.”
“He was trolling.”
“That’s just how he talks.”
“It was taken out of context.”
“The media distorted it.”
To me, that seems backwards. I would expect the President of the United States, a senator or another major political figure to be held to a higher standard than some anonymous person on Twitter.
Brazil developed something very similar with Bolsonaro. I sometimes jokingly describe Bolsonaroism as a Brazilian “bootleg version of Trumpism” — not because the two countries are identical, but because some of the rhetorical patterns became remarkably similar.
An anonymous leftist says something stupid and it becomes “this is what the left/PT believes.”
But criticism or legal action against Bolsonaro can be reframed by some supporters as “they are persecuting conservatives” or “they are criminalizing the right.”
Again, the individual disappears and becomes an avatar for an entire political identity.
Bolsonaro does not represent every Brazilian conservative any more than a random socialist Twitter account represents every American Democrat.
I also think some American political vocabulary still carries a surprisingly strong Cold War logic. “Liberal,” “progressive,” “socialist,” “Marxist” and “communist” can sometimes be used almost interchangeably, even though they describe very different traditions.
So my questions for American liberals are:
Do you think “the left” has become such a broad label in American discourse that it has lost much of its usefulness?
And do you think there is an asymmetric tendency to treat random left-wing people online as representative of the entire Democratic coalition while giving much more individual nuance to statements made by powerful politicians on the right?
I’m especially interested in how liberals, social democrats and progressives here distinguish themselves from one another, because from outside the US those differences often look much larger than American political language suggests.