American politics are primarily shaped by corporations who have an economic incentive to keep the Overton window exclusively center right to far right.

To add to what everyone else is saying, the right wing really controls all the narratives. As Zeppo said, communism/socialism have been demonized for years (starting maybe in the 1950s or so?) And if the right wing doesn’t like anything, they call it “socialism.”

Single-payer healthcare? Nope, that’s socialism. UBI? You damned pinko commie. Rainbow flags? You’re one of those neo-Marxist postmodernist scumbags!

And, left wing politicians who don’t want to appear too socialist shrink away from such things so as to not appear socialist.

In one recent election, the Democrat/Liberal candidate’s slogan was “they go low, we go high.” The slogan acknowledged that the right wing in the U.S. cheats constantly to keep what power it has. The majority of right-wing presidents lose the popular vote – that is most right-wing presidents get less than 50% of the total number of votes in the country – but still get to be president by virtue of gaming the “electoral college” system we have in the U.S… Trump broke tons of rules during his (first? 😬) term. The Republicans cheated to get a dispurportionate number of right-wingers on the Supreme Court (the highest court in the U.S. government). Just as a few examples.

That’s what the “they go low” part means. The “we go high” means that the Democrats intend to be the adult in the room. The Democrats will stick to the rules. They’ll follow the proper procedures for doing things. They won’t “stoop to the Republicans’ level.” And that approach didn’t start with that slogan. That’s been the Democrats’ approach for a very long time.

But in practice what “we go high” means is “we’ll roll over and ask them to kick us in the ribs again.” More apt would be “they go low and we… do nothing at all.”

The Republicans “shut down the government” (long story… they basically prevent funding broadly for most of the federal government to grind the government to a halt – hold the federal government hostage) over random bullshit like building a wall at the southern border between the U.S. and Mexico. And the Democrats let them. Republicans filabuster and the Democrats let them. Republicans overturn long-established legal precedent and the Democrats let them.

And the Democrats have no plan to change this dynamic. And, who knows. Maybe they like it that way. It’s not like the Democrats aren’t owned by the special interests just like the Republicans are. Really, the big businesses allow the Democrats to exist and continue to make popular noises and very slightly slow our rapid decline toward total dystopian hellscape while not actually letting them do anything that might appreciably threaten the industries’ unrealistic profit margins.

Because the left has been beaten, suppressed, and assassinated out of existence. Sanders represents a small handful of congresspeople that are reform socialists, and for us that’s radical.

Communism and socialism were heavily demonized for years by the capitalist political machine and their complicit/owned media. Also communist groups in the 20th century were persecuted by the FBI and so forth. As a result, most politicians don’t want to be openly perceived as “socialist” because there’s so much bullshit about it that the average person has no idea what the fuck it means but has a negative association. So, people like AOC and Sanders are the best we can get.

The US is the model for settler-colonialism in the modern era, itself being explicitly based on the Roman empire, with a slave-holding aristocracy holding political power, and granting free land and status to those willing to participate in its imperial project.

There have been challenges throughout US history against this rule by aristocracy, but all of them lost at various points, and are now on life support. It genocided its indigenous inhabitants and stole their land. The Civil war was a challenge between two right-wing systems: capitalism and slavery, although slavery was reinstated during the reconstruction era. Its communist-left was purged and eliminated by the 1960s, its union movement predictably died soon after in the 1970s, the anti-war left died in the 1980s.

There has never been the equivalent of a “red-scare” but for the right-wing, because the US is a right wing country and does not permit a public platform of left-wing views. Its a one-party state where both parties are “fluid”, one acting as the “foil” / controlled opposition against the one which currently reflects the more overt interests of its aristocracy.

I highly suggest reading Settlers, an Indigenous people’s history of the US, and Zak Cope - Divided world divided class, for some of the underpinnings of the US’s “master-race democracy”.

Settler-Colonialism, the highest reaches of Imperialism in the modern era, the latest stages of Capitalism in decay, and a century of Red Scare Anticommunism.

Americans are deeply awash in right wing propaganda and silly little founding mythologies. It also killed or blacklisted its left several times.

American political education is that being left means being a conservative liberal that is okay with the gays and being right is being, more or less, a “respectable” civil Nazi, and everything else is vague extremism.

Decades of anticommunist propaganda, destruction of the careers of communists via McCarthyist red baiting, and in the worst instances outright murder of prominent leftists. Like if I went to a communist rally with my face uncovered and it got sent to my employer I would probably lose my job.

We’re talking about the democrats though, the “left” party with actual power, but the most radical among them are social democrats at best with most being centrist technocrats. There are genuine leftists and even left parties in the US but none with any power.

There is no Leftist party active in Congress.

So, when you read/hear some USA politician being called “on the left” it should be taken as literally as possible. They are literally standing just to the left of whatever they are being compared to.

So a person who says, “Hey, shouldn’t we all have healthcare that you don’t have to pay out of pocket for?” is to the left of “If you can’t pay, just die.” and will be considered “left”. Even if the person wanting everybody to get healthcare is fully on board with “The Global War On Terrorism.”

Its probably best to view somebody’s opinion/action on an individual issue as being labeled “left” and not the person themself. Even when a person in the USA is describing somebody else in the USA as “of the left.”

Two things I’ve noticed about American politics: first, the most left-wing American politician would be seen as borderline far right in Europe. Second, in the US there’s no left, because left would imply socialism that eventually lead to communism and that goes against the ideia of America, the American dream, the constitution etc. The entire country was built and maintained on the ideia of being against any form of communism.

The Settler-Colonialism

As someone who was raised evangelical in the very evangelical southern states, I think the American Christian religion has quite the part in pushing things for the country both further right and further capitalist. The evangelical work ethic combined with late stage capitalist propaganda create an environment that is toxic to notions like ownership of the means of production going to the people or the state being responsible for many things at all.

There’s a lot of contempt bred in working class people toward the government generally due to capitalists destroying its capabilities to actually make things better. This function is creating a feedback loop that is actively pushing us even further toward a blatant fascist oligarchy (as opposed to the secret fascist oligarchy that has been functioning for at least half a century)

With all that said, as everything for our country is pushed further right the left has been dragged in that direction due to the goalposts being further and further dragged in the opposite direction.

The simplest explanation is that the American “left” is rightwing, because they’ve been told that actual leftism is bad.

We’re only told about leftist ideology or politics in the context of “these bad people in the past did bad things”, and many Americans refuse to actually tackle those lies. because of this, no one in the American “left” is willing to be anti-capitalist in any way that actually matters. Nor are they willing to use materialism in their dialectics, because their political education comes from Liberalism, so they’re more willing to listen to right-wing talking points and integrate them into their views.

This is why you’ll see Americans who’ll call themselves “leftists” pair a statement for working rights with a statement against immigration. Or you’ll see them decry the horrors of fascism, then support whatever new war NATO has wrought.

False consciousness, as we say, is very widespread in the United States compared to other countries. I think that one part of this is that the United States is built on the stolen resources of exploited countries, including its very own territory, which is occupied illegally in violation of treaties with indigenous nations. These stolen resources allow the United States to essentially “buy” the loyalty of its citizens. I also think that another part of this is that the United States isolates its people from the rest of the world in various ways, for instance that monolingualism is very widespread in the United States, or Americans consume less foreign media, et cetera, and this means that Americans exist in more of a bubble compared to other countries.

In the ruling class of the United States, the furthest left that you get is Bernie Sanders, because people like Bernie Sanders or historically FDR or Huey Long etc exist to facilitate that buying of loyalty that underpins the whole of American society. That is, they exist to make exploitation less apparent and hardships more bearable, without addressing the conditions that lead to exploitation and hardship in the first place — so they’re the political equivalent of a smoke break or office pizza party, basically.

Nice bait post with some excellent answers here