I’m a centrist. I live in Canada. We have public health care here. Even right wingers here like it. People who are against public health care aren’t ideological, they’re in the pockets of private insurance.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 33 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If it's not ideological, why is it always the conservatives in Canada and the UK trying to dismantle public healthcare? Come the fuck on.

[–] dojan@lemmy.world 23 points 3 months ago

Same pattern holds here in Sweden. It’s definitely ideological. The right wing ideology of “fuck you, I’m lining my pockets”

[–] saltesc@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, US lefties are odd.

Where I'm from, if far left is 10, centrist 5, and far right is 0. You apply the US version to our spectrum and their left is like 5, centrist 0, right -5. Hell, not even, because the moderate-far right support universal health.

I'm centrist-left and I see the average US self-labelled lefties as generally more centrist or even right-leaning than me. Their whole spectrum and perspective is decades behind and heavy right-leaning.

But credit where credit is due, progress has gotta start somewhere and they no doubt see themselves as very progressive and left in their environment.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's not that the entire spectrum is further right, it's more that the vast majority of society is dealing with actual praxis and thus living in some anarchocapitalist hellscape where fairly centre-liberal reforms are a big lurch left, while a small pocket of cosplayers are online pretending they're about to start the February Revolution.

It's not a one axis thing, either. Americans are also blissfully unaware of how hostile European leftism is against some of their cultural causes. We don't talk enough about how it's well accepted among Euro leftist circles that surrogate pregnancies are a form of human trafficking, or that all sex work should be banned. Culture is culture, left/right positions aren't universal.

[–] saltesc@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ah, I see you're a fellow "three-dimensional spectrum" person. Not the traditional two-dimensional one, or worse yet, the binary "If not this, than that. This and that are only options."

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 7 points 3 months ago

More of a "people agree and disagree on different things, often for cultural and historical reasons, and the bundling of those things into pre-established packages is way less consistent than political traditions would suggest". How much that's the same thing I leave up for interpretation.