What if the site name were changed to "radical left lunatics underground"?

[milestogo]

Do we fit the bill?

[Walleye]

1. I'm not really sure what the radical left is. It used to be guys like Castro, but that doesn't exist anymore.

If somebody would give me a few examples of the radical left, it might clear things up.

[thucythucy]

9. I would cite groups like the Socialist Workers Party,

the Spartacist League, and the Socialist Equality Party (formerly the Workers' League) as examples.

Also sub groups such as the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, which I think might still exist and was affliated with the SWP.

Then too there's the Communist Party USA, which I think also still exists.

There are others, but these come immediately to mind.

[Walleye]

10. Yes, I understand, but they are such a small percentage of the people who actually Democrats.

At least that is the impression I get, because you never hear of them really doing anything. However, the radical right wing has now consumed the entire Republican party it seems.

[thucythucy]

13. I don't think any of them consider themselves to be Democrats.

They are all locked into the "both sides are the same" frame of thought. Democrats to them, no matter how progressive, are all tools of the bourgeoisie and running dog lackeys of American imperialism.

If any of them claim to be Democrats it's only for the purpose of trying to infiltrate or co-opt us.

Back in the 1930s and '40s groups like these were very much larger, and more influential, and actually did some good work. The CPUSA for instance took the lead in defending "the Scottsboro Boys" from being murdered for a crime they obviously didn't commit, and the SWP in the 60s did some antiwar organizing that was helpful to the overall cause. But the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 and Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin in 1956 took a lot of wind out of their sails, so by the '70s they had shrunk to insignificance. Then too the FBI under Hoover and its COINTELPRO did a lot to undermine and eventually destroy many of the more radical groups. There's a report I read years back, for instance, that claimed that by the mid 1970s fully one third of the entire SWP membership were FBI informants. The fall of the Soviet Union pretty much was the final straw.

The radical right, as you say, is so much more powerful, and has in fact seized control of the GOP. But then the radical right has always had so much more power than the left, having as it always had backing from the extremely wealthy and much of mainstream religion. Hell, they even for a while had their own country within a country--the Confederate States of America. And now they have control of the Republican Party.

I'm not at all looking forward to the next four years.

[bearsfootball516]

2. Ha! I know you're joking, but there used to be a website called Jackpine Radicals that was basically that.

Pretty sure it was run by people who were run away from DU because their ideas were so far to the extreme left, they weren't really accepted here.

[Silent Type]

12. As I remember it, Jackpines were "DUers" who didn't like H Clinton and actively worked to defeat her because their

favorite candidate lost in the primaries.

But I could be wrong, it's been a few years.

[milestogo]

4. TSF is always throwing shit at radical left lunatics.

But I'm really not sure if he just means all democrats or some particular group.

[Walleye]

11. Anybody who dares to go against him. To him, Liz Cheney is a leftist looney.

[Charmin One]

5. To Trump

Anyone who disagrees with him is “extreme left”. The extremist-in-chief is projecting. Again.

[Ping Tung]

6. It would be false advertising.

In my opinion it would be better described as Left Leaning Forum for Democrats.

[Joinfortmill]

7. Lately it's more like..Radical Rude Lunatics.

[GreenWave]

8. Radix means the root. If we want to solve things we must get to the root.

Left has implications of being "sinister" but in baseball you do not have to be as good if you were yet another disposable rightie tightie.

Our Moon, Luna, is what allowed complex life forms to evolve on a rare surface breathable air planet and it stabilizes our rotation.

Underground is where we may encounter space aliens from elsewhere.

[Fiendish Thingy]

14. Hardly

Most of DU is pretty mainstream, not radical.

[RandiFan1290]

15. No, this site is more 'centrist' nt

[BannonsLiver]

16. The hell it is.

[hunter]

17. I'm a radical environmentalist and extreme leftist compared to most members of this site.

My politics are always practical, however.

I don't think "both parties are the same" and I don't think we should "let it all burn" just because Trump won.

I'm not sure what you are rolling on the floor and laughing about.

[BannonsLiver]

19. Because the idea that it's centrist is utterly ludicrous.

Your anecdotal experience aside.

[hunter]

20. Biden is a centrist. Harris is a centrist.

Most of the people on this site are closer to that center than they are to my "anecdotal experiences" as some kind of Social Justice Warrior.

"Anecdotal" has a solid meaning when we are discussing statistics but it can also be used as a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) slur.

People experience what they experience, and they describe those experiences in ways that make sense to them. You can't dismiss that by calling it anecdotal.

Of course I don't have to accept that some pharmaceutical (for example) is safe and effective just because a random person on the street or a television advertisement tells me so.

I will say you are one of the posters here on DU who frequently irritates me but not enough to put you on "ignore." That's anecdotal, but so what? I believe you and I share a distaste for anti-intellectualism in general, whether it's coming from the "left" or "right." We don't have to agree about the sorts of anti-intellectualism we find most distasteful.

[BannonsLiver]

21. I just don't see it as centrist

If it were, we could actually have discussions on issues that are generally unpopular with outside normies and problematic from a political standpoint, rather than having those conversations instantly shut down here if they deviate from the established groupthink.

[Iggo]

18. I was a child in the 60s and 70s.

There are no radicals here.

(I should probably say, “There are very few radicals here.”)

[Blue Full Moon]

22. Better than Republican Lite.

But the right wingers would think that no matter if it was the same exact position. I couldn't count how many times the magats where I worked called me a moon bat.