I’m promoting this topic from a comment thread that will get too deep otherwise. Laska and I were going back and forth on what we think “left” and “liberal” mean. Defining terms is always impossible, but it may be actually interesting that in this election year, those two are up for definition after so many years of being run away from. We also have an opportunity this year to ponder what “populist” and “fascist” mean. Even “democracy” and “republic.”

Regarding “left,” I like to stick with old, hardassed definitions  like “struggle against capitalism,” partly because that rules out seeing liberalism as a philosophy of incremental progress toward left goals. Like Naomi Klein is a leftist, not a liberal: the climate crisis is to her the crisis that will bring about the revolutionary change she’s always wanted to bring about anyway. But I’d call any movement left that wants to use the power of the state to advance labor over capital.

So maybe Orwell would be left? And maybe all democratic socialists?  And maybe Laska too?

In that context, the 19th Century Populists were left, though by no mean Marxist. And yet when I see today’s new-new left, with its revived Marx-Leninism, claiming Lincoln and free-labor free-soilers for its own, I cry foul, though unfortunately, in space nobody can hear you scream.

Hilarious to me that Marx himself started that tradition by trying  to rope Lincoln into the communist international (scroll down for the natural brushoff).

As much as, in this election year, I know something’s happening but I don’t know what it is, I’m kind of glad these questions are being raised. I think we’ve never had any idea what we mean when we say “American democracy” or “democratic republic” or “of the people, by the people, for the people.” A more optimistic person than Mister Jones would see this election year as the beginning of a painful national quest to find out.