A large number of Americans genuinely believe politics is a one-dimensional axis which runs from infinity Conservative to infinity Liberal. Therefore, if you are shitting on Liberals you must be right-wing. This is pretty deeply baked in. Political polling institutions which are ostensibly staffed by political scientists often frame the left simply as "very liberal." Television political coverage does more or less the same thing. Orgs like DSA, if mentioned, are portrayed as very liberal. Communism is used only as an epithet, but is functionally interchangeable with Liberalism. Non-affiliated voters are universally described as "independents," which are universally assumed to be somewhere in-between Liberal and Conservative (never outside). This is also why the solution to every political issue is framed in terms of dialog and meeting in the middle. This is the only thing which is even possible under this paradigm. To resist compromise is to be divisive. Division is bad, against the rules, and means you want to destroy The System ("Democracy," which is good).

Then you have the smart-asses who learned about the Political Compass website sometime after 9-11 and think they're Machiavelli because they understand there are actually two axes (with Margaret Thatcher and Joseph Stalin in the same corner).

Our political education is really fucking bad.

[–] alexei_1917@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago

I usually joke about this "after the revolution", but in truth you'll need it to get there, a lot of resources will need to be spent to get you guys all proper political education, and build proper ideological foundations for you. When you guys do leftist politics, you're trying to build solid structures on foundations made of wet paper, and then they fall apart and you don't know why.