I hear a lot that people say the US Democratic Party would be right wing in Europe. But I see a lot of Europeans online say that their (left) parties are corrupt and right wing. What am I missing?
“Left” and “right” mean very different things for different people. People can’t even agree on the definition. Just to give you a clear example: today’s “leftists” are pro-immigration, while practically all leftists before 1990 were not so much pro immigration.
I take “right” to mean authoritarian, and “left” to mean self-organizing.
“Why do people call their government right wing despite not having slavery?”
Since when is the lack of healthcare the norm, and healthcare the “leftist anomaly”?
The US really made the world so much worse, it’s crazy.
Seems like you are from the US.
As much as “left” and “right” carry any meaning anywhere, in your country those words have been redefined to the point they are completely meaningless.
If you have any left-leaning organized political movement, it never makes the news. You only have extreme right.
Firmly agree, what the US considers left versus with the rest of the world considered the left is vastly different. Even it’s left-leaning parties are borderline to moderate right when compared to the rest of the civilized countries who share similar ideologies.
Any true left leaning candidates get their funding ripped out at the roots and get stonewalled off the ballets, even Sanders, while a breath of fresh air was still more centrist than leftist when he was running, it’s just the US scale is so off balance that he used the “socialist/leftist” tag to get into the news/boost his PR.
With its support for capital punishment, the Democrats would fit somewhere in the far right in most of Europe.
No healthcare is free. It is paid. Whether through taxes or mandatory insurance schemes. The money doesn’t grow on trees.
It is a US BS narrative that ‘socialized healthcare’ is lefty silliness. And while there are conservatives in Europe who float the idea of abandoning government-organized healthcare every once in a while, every time they do they are met with a lot of frantic finger-pointing across the Atlantic. Everybody else sees a societal value in taking care of each other without any, or at least many, preconditions, like employment.
Europe is not one homogenous political body. Much like the US on the state level isn’t. The only difference is that the US shares a party structure on both state and federal levels. But there are just two relevant parties, twice as many as in North Korea! The party spectrum has always been broader in European democracies. As a result, the European Parliament often creates strange bedfellows.
There are marked differences between European countries and what they consider left and right. You’re looking at a lot of separate and shifting Overton windows. The suggested social cuts of the center-left Labour UK government would probably cause another revolution in France. The right-wingers of France are pro-Russia. The right-wingers of Poland absolutely aren’t. The list goes on.
There is far more to politics than just healthcare.
I’m just gonna post the Cory Doctorow quote
"Take politics: One common refrain is that ‘‘I don’t even know what right or left even mean anymore, they’re just tribal identities.’’ Many years ago, I said something very like this to Steven Brust, who skewered me with his response:
‘‘‘Left’ and ‘right’ mean the same thing today that they’ve meant since the French Revolution. Ask someone, ‘What’s more important: property rights, or human rights?’ If they answer: ‘Property rights are human rights,’ they are on the right.’’"
Just on the free healthcare thing - in the UK, the NHS is hugely iconic national institution, and politically it’s almost a no-go area in terms of its founding principles.
Which is not to say that privatisation hasn’t been creeping into the NHS for some time - it has, starting in earnest with the Thatcher governments on the 80s.
However, no matter how right wing a party is, it would be almost political suicide to make an all out effort to remove the basic tenet of the NHS - universal care, free at the point of delivery.
Unfortunately, what’s tended to happen since the 80s is (IMO) a managed decline of the NHS, with layers of management brought in and services allowed to decline in quality and availability.
The result is that the public do start to question the model, see the NHS as second rate, and start to lose some of that loyalty towards it.
However, it will take some time to ever get to the point where a government or any stripe is safe to even talk openly about moving away from the NHS model.
And hopefully that point will never come, and instead the NHS will be given renewed commitment and support both from government and the wider public.
It really is one of the very best things about the UK, and were we ever to lose it, it would be a criminal dereliction of duty by those into whose care it has been passed.
The NHS has already largely been privatised. GPs were always private contractors but now GP groups have been increasingly bought by US companies, with the largest GP group in England, The Practice (half a million patients), being completely US owned
NHS Logistics was privatised 2006-2019 (part of DHL, later Unipart) before becoming a government owned company.
NHS internal operation capacity has essentially frozen since 2014, with the increase coming from the private sector. Over a third of “NHS” hip and knee operations, 60% of cataract operations, and a fifth of operations overall are contracted out to private companies.
In terms of “internal” structure the service has been broken up into more than 500 legally distinct “Public Benefit Corporations” who can set up commercial subsidiaries and bid for provision contracts between themselves, as well as entering into commercial partnership with foreign companies such as the Mayo Clinic’s involvement in Oxford’s NHS provider.
Social care has been almost totally privatised at this point.
The current health secretary, Wes Streeting, is in favour of increased private involvement in the NHS so expect the trend to continue.
Out of hours doctors are all private doctors (they have been for years) and hospitals now have a department you get sent to when you shouldn’t be sent to A&E but its still kinda urgent, and those are private too. Also, last time I needed a surgical procedure they sent me to a private hospital. So yeah, you’re absolutely right.
All fair points - but the fundamental point about people getting access to free healthcare has remained so far.
Free at the point of care.
And even that isn’t true. A dental crown costs 300 quid.
You’re unfortunately very mistaken there. That fundamental was shattered in 1993 when social care was separated from the NHS (free at point of use) and instead given to local government (means tested pricing at point of use). Ever in search of savings for their limited budgets, local governments promptly privatised and outsourced their services. We went from 65% of care home spaces being publicly funded at the end of the 1970s to 6% a decade ago. At-home care went from being 95% publicly funded in 1993 to 11% in 2012.
This sector of healthcare is beyond breaking point, with over 100,000 unfilled staff vacancies in care homes alone. This creates a backlog as NHS hospitals can’t discharge patients who need residential care that doesn’t exist.
If you’re expecting a free-at-point-of-use care home later in life, think again. That is gone. Unless you have a large accumulation of savings to burn through things don’t look rosy.
I don’t disagree, but I wasn’t really talking about care homes, I was talking about treatment, operations, maternity care, etc.
Left and right started as arbitrary concept based on where political parties sit in a parliament and they totally depend on the circumstances of the political system. In European history at the time democracies came into existence you could have separated idiological streams into e.g. republicans (as in people who aim for a republic) and monarchists. Also the more political parties with different topics there are the more difficult it gets to assign them to either left or right. As another commenter stated… dividing a political system into left and right helps to define a common „enemy“ which moves away the political discourse from other topics that matter.
I like to think of it as the Conservatives chose to sit on the right because they can’t accept that they’re not.
And I believe this pun works to some extent in French too, which is where that arbitrary labelling started.
Left vs Right depends entirely on where the centre lies. Even our (norway) most right-leaning loon party is for public health care.
We have one odd leftist party in Germany that is basically Putins press office. Maybe they meant those.
BSW ftw (not).
Right wingers believe everything should be up to the individual, you should get no help from anyone else. Typically with the ironic championing of corporations over people.
Left wingers believe we’re stronger if we work together in the public interest.
Healthcare is just one small slice of the political pie, which is such an obvious human right that only the fascist fuckos you have over there think it’s up for debate
Public health care is not a leftist idea - it is just good business. Canada has better life expectancy than the US and our healthcare system costs less than the american one. No canadian has ever gone broke or lost their house because they get sick. when a working-age american dies of a preventable disease, their education, skills, and experience die with them. keep your people healthy and they will be more productive and will pay more taxes because they will earn more over their lifespan. american media tell americans that healthcare is communist for one reason only: to protect the wealth of healthcare investors. you have been ridiculously bamboozled.
It is a leftist idea and it is good business.
To add on to what others said. Also having universal healthcare could be a result of a former more left wing government that implemented it and could have proven very popular, thus not worth removing by future more right wing governments.
Because many government left partics have converted to liberalism, and economic rigor with cut in government spending, and private corporations.
Which isn’t exactly a left wing platform.
The 2-party-system in the USA compares to most European parties as follows:
- GOP: far-right and radical-right parties like AfD
- Democrats: all the rest, but mostly center-right and center-left parties
Caveat: more and more of our center-right parties vie for the far-right sector
