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From the Vox:
Many American pundits seem to firmly believe that the country stands at a precipice in which young, left-wing college students and recent graduates are the leading edge of a rising tide of illiberalism that comes in the form of “political correctness” and poses a clear and present danger to free speech and rational discourse.
[...] The alarm about student protesters, in other words, though not always mistaken about particular cases, is generally grounded in a completely mistaken view of the big-picture state of American society and public opinion, both on and off campus.
[...] Since the 1970s, the General Social Survey has posed a question about whether five hypothetical speakers should be allowed to give a speech in your community — a communist, a homosexual, an opponent of all religion, a racist, and a person who favors replacing the elected government with a military coup.
Justin Murphy of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom aggregated trend data about all five kinds of speakers and found that public support for free expression has been generally rising
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 26 2018, @02:30AM (6 children)
Pretending that there is any left wing in US Federal politics is your mistake. Your Mr. Obama was no more left wing than any president in living memory.
Depends on your definition. If you try to compare on a global scale, you're correct, but left/right is also relative, and within modern American politics, Obama is indeed left-wing, even though he looks pretty center-right from a European perspective.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @04:10AM
That's insane, I mean like, totally absurd. There is nothing 'left wing' about our government. Nixon was more 'left wing' than Obama. I know, I was there. Obama should be known for appeasement, because that's all he did, appease the other faction of the party. Like Carter, he was a chair warmer, to get this whole 'black president' thing out of our system, and now we're back to the good old days. Aren't you happy?? Now, if you want a woman president, find one with some class... We're trying to drain the swamp, remember?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 26 2018, @04:05PM (3 children)
Like Asia or Africa, for example? Europe is not the world and there are plenty of places that are less liberal than the US.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 26 2018, @07:32PM (2 children)
Are those the places you want to compare the US to? Really?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 26 2018, @10:07PM (1 child)
"If you're trying to compare on a global scale".
There's a fair bit of good stuff happening elsewhere in the world. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan all are doing pretty well, but they aren't particularly liberal. They account for 200 million people. China and India both are making democratic progress (with India being much further along). Again, not very liberal. Toss in the US and we're up to half the world's population, much larger than the European portion.
Meanwhile there are large components of Europe that we don't want to compare the US to. The financial disaster of the PIGS, the nanny states which, among other things, forbid "hate speech" precisely because laws against hate speech failed so badly (the Nazis and their regalia wouldn't be banned today, if they hadn't been so effective back in the 1930s at exploiting hate speech law of the day) when it mattered, and of course, the growing cancer of the EU bureaucracy.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 26 2018, @10:21PM
Oh.
OK then.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 26 2018, @07:23PM
No, he looks extreme right wing from any European perspective except Hungary maybe. It's the constant propaganda fooling you.