2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: If Sanders was such a great choice, his fans wouldn't have to resort to lies and conspiracy theories [View all]Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Last edited Thu Nov 12, 2015, 12:52 PM - Edit history (1)
There are many for "far left," referring to them by political ideology rather than any deep understanding of what they are. Also, note that because so little attention was paid to a mostly dormant far left from about 1980 to now, good numbers for today are not readily available. (Researchers have instead been especially busy studying conservatives and the right to far right during that national swing to the right.)
Plus, there's the the problem of intermixing the terms "far left" and "liberal." The people referred to as "far left" and as "liberals" by experts are not the same, or even fairly similar, at all, yet often discussed without differentiation. (Like here on DU. I'm linking an article that also doesn't explain it from The Atlantic, "Liberals and the Illiberal Left," because it illustrates THAT very well.) Regarding the "far left's" impact, it does point out that "...the same marginality that has always befallen the hard left in America..." Every dog has its day, but the far left's have tended to be short ones in America compared to Europe and Asia.
In any case, the article is loaded with references to consider vis a vis the issue of terminology and definitions and has links to other interesting articles by other authors.
Btw, my observations here at DU lead me to support a "horseshoe" or "circle" notion of the political spectrum, which is very incomplete puts the far left and far right closer to each other than to moderates on either side, very different in goals but similar in behavior. That would explain why the thoughts of so many here at DU seem to be on nonintersecting lines even though we're mostly assumed to average "left."
Here's useful little point from an old New Republic article, "But that very peace and stability, and the ideological narrowness that makes it possible, can also lead us to forget the persistent character of the anti-liberal left and anti-liberal right, with which we (unlike citizens in less fortunate regions of the world) have very little acquaintance. The anti-liberal left has historically been defined by the radical universalism of its principles, the anti-liberal right by its exclusionary (racial, ethnic, national) particularism. That is the primary difference between them."
Of the very inadequate stuff I pulled up on quick search, this may be the most useful by comparing the far left and the far right:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=3274984
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/liberals-and-the-illiberal-left/384988/