Okay, let’s get this over with once and for all: Barack Obama is not a socialist. The Democratic Party is not the Soviet Politburo. Even the most left-leaning member of Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders, is only a little bit socialist, even though he used to call himself socialist back in his days as mayor of Burlington, VT. Mainstream American politics is firmly entrenched in the center-right, and only because the noise from the extreme right has gotten so loud that the whole kit and kaboodle has shifted rightwards does anyone even remotely centrist look like Lenin.
You know it’s gotten out of hand when the Socialist Party USA itself has to send out press releases pointing out this basic fact and reminding everyone that the health care reform legislation jut passed is nowhere close to what real socialists have proposed.
This piece from OpenLeft.com blogger David Sirota tries to further parse out the differences between the more common left-leaning political labels “liberal” and “progressive” in the context of American politics. Because the conservatives were so thoroughly successful in their effort to make the word “liberal” a pejorative (which is what brought them to having to call Obama a “socialist” in the first place), many liberals rebranded themselves as “progressives”, but Sirota argues that there is indeed a fundamental difference between the two, although he finally concludes that you cannot have one without the other.
A similar distinction is at the core of this article at Dissent Magazine by the noted scholar Michael Bérubé, wherein he describes a correspondence with someone over his latest book (via 3QuarksDaily. The person made the distinction between the “liberal” mainstream leftism of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the clearer traditional “leftism” of Noam Chomsky. Bérubé refutes his correspondent’s observation, putting Chomsky more in the camp of contrarianists, citing the social theorist Stuart Hall as perhaps a better example of the left as alternative to the right rather than just a critical mirror (Hall was influential in British Labour Party politics in the Thatcher era), but I think his refutation helps further refine the spectrum.
