https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 The political compass just released an analysis of the 2020 candidates based on their positions. I'll just leave this here.
It says I'm farther left than Bernie and Tulsi and more libertarian than all of them. Democrats now love the FBI and CIA, want war with Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, daily blow warmonger Israel for no reason, etc. etc. The Green New Deal is about as big as the Cultural Revolution was in China, and if you don't know what "everyone is guaranteed a job" means, that's called "the iron rice bowl" in China, a fundamental component of Communism (which they have blown off, by the way). The result of "everyone is guaranteed a job" is "I don't need to take my job seriously."
This shows the effect institutions have on steering a person’s political positions. You can’t be a truly radical leftist and hold a place in our government, because the existing institutions don’t fit with their vision of what the country should be. This pushes them to be more conservative than what they would like and to run on smaller, incremental changes. People filling out a survey are not similarly restricted by what the institutions can realistically accommodate, so they will often skew much further left.
I always thought left and right is a false dichotomy. Even horseshoe theory, which is a bit closer to reality, is flawed.
Same for me, they plot me southwest of Bernie. Which is weird because I think I'm more conservative than at least half the Democrat candidates they plotted.
I know you are more aware about the Culture Revolution than to actually think the New Green Deal is anything at all close to it. People were locked up, put into re-education camps, etc. The govt. instituting that was centralized with all power in the hands of leadership. It had authority to mandate those changes in the Cultural Revolution. The New Green Deal, isn't law, nobody is forced to accept it, and there is zero chance that it would be mandated in the same way or with the re-education camps such as existed with the Cultural Revolution. I have no idea where you are getting the concept that the NGD is even close to being 'about as big as the Cultural Revolution was in China'. Did you just mean that the projected amount of change is the same? I would disagree with that, but could understand that opinion far more than saying it is about as big in practice and impact.
Yet right wing media(memes basically) have pretended it's some binding resolution with enforcement mechanisms. It's a non-binding resolution setting goals.
That is because there are 3 or 4 dimensions, at minimum, in the political landscape. Most of these charts and tests only plot for 2 of them. To the OP; this is what I've been saying for years. America has no true left. We have a right wing, and a center-right wing. Gabbard and Sanders are mild left, but looking at them through the prism of American politics, they look like revolutionaries. In the rest of the world, they're basically centrists.
yeah the center line is always moving. Consider how far we've come since the Civil Rights movement (Trump's rhetoric aside). I wish party identification wasn't a thing. We all share common values and there wouldn't be such division if it weren't manufactured by party politics