Quote:
Originally Posted by Istvan diVega
Left, Right and Centre alike (although they'd all translate to Left and Lefter from a US perspective).
|
Thanks for noticing the distinction! For those who remember the moment when the sea-change happened (hint: it was the early zeds), hearing people speak of right-of-centrist democrats as "leftists" is like waking in the Twilight Zone. There's a constant overhaul of language in the States that makes one think of Orwellian newspeak and Goebbelsian reversals. The rezoning of accurate terminology for right, left and center is designed to shift positions once considered extreme to more normative placements -- it's a kind of gerrymandering of categories. One notices the problem when one tries to place actual leftists on that spectrum and finds Marx's spot crowded by technically right-of-center politicians like Hillary Clinton. That shift has infected the press in the UK as well, and the problem is that we lose the overview of categories that educated people have had since 1867.
The irony is that many of us Americans (and Brits) are conditioned to treat our political views as mere common sense and everyone else's as agenda-driven and therefore overly political (nor do I claim to be cured of the inductive reasoning bug myself -- one has to examine one's thinking regularly, as if for thought lice). The result is that we bully people with our politics while accusing everyone else of having political agendas.
Overreactions to French policy are but one example of this.