No, far left needs to be used in the exact same way far right is used. In the US media, some Republicans are routinely described as far right. The left of the democrat spectrum is therefore far left.

Crazy fringe parties are crazy fringe parties. meaningless in the grand scheme, and US politics is not defined by outliers. Get a certain distance from center, and you are "far" right or left. Doesn't matter which party you are in.

This seems to stem from the wrong-headed notion that there is a line with a continuum of parties on it. That the dems sit on a certain range of the line, then to the left there is some other party. Aside from the bad linear model, the parties are in fact "clouds" on the line that overlap. Dems and Reps overlap in the middle (not really even the middle, since the issues don't actually lie on a line, either—the linear model stinks). The Greens share almost everything with the democrats, for example, their principal selling point seems to be that they are judged to actually want to work on certain issues in the range more seriously. The CPUSA and the main US socialist parties will endorse democrat candidates. That's because they have some overlap on specific issues.

The overlaps are important, because they are all you can really do to even assign parties to "left/right."

It's more than just lining up issues, presumably for complex arrays of parties you'd need to weight them as well.

They get it...but like any addict, addmission of the problem is the first step. They just haven't hit bottom yet, but with only 26% of Americans believing Obama will be a two term prez, it may change.

Left/right needs to be rigorously defined to have a meaningful conversation that parses policies and party platforms and places them in the continuum. In the US spectrum, I'd say a sort of constitutional literalism marks conservative thought. What would the founders think? In other words. Libertarians are the extreme right, discarding with pragmatism in many cases in the name of constitutional purity. If it ain't explicitly granted as a federal power, then it shouldn't happen. The left, OTOH, clearly wants much larger government control. Take more of your money, and give it to other people (for various reasons, many well-meaning, even if I disagree with it). Educate you, feed you, kiss your boo boos, regulate everything for the "public good." The extreme left of that would be a communist/socialist aspect to the US (within constitutional limits—though not being literalists, they feel free to "interpret" the constitution to allow such changes). This literalism results in a "less government" right, and "more government" left, since the far right says "no" to federal powers not specifically enumerated in favor of State/local control.

So my axis is:

strong, central control by government ————> Weak central control by government

The 2 parties that matter overlap in the middle, primarily because elements want strong central control—but over different things.

This is the historical difference, too, and dates back to the Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson, Madison, et al) vs the Federalists.

This has been the split in many ways since, how big should government be?

Any attribution of "foreign" or even 3d parties to this continuum (which is not real anyway) needs to at least use this as the primary metric. More government is "left" less government is "right."

So your "logic" is based on acting just like what some muppet in the media does. :rotfl2:

US politics is defined by US politics, you tried dodging the fact that you were not making any sense earlier by going off on some irrelevant nonsense about people measuring against other countries political parties, this was always about measuring US political parties and now you are trying to dodge that too.
When you are talking about far left/right then of course the extreme fringe are meaningfull as it is they who are the far left/right.
Thats why its nonsense to talk of the far left/right as the mainstream parties as that only makes some sort of sense if you totally ignore reality.


If you have to totally ignore reality to be making some sort of sense then you ain't really making any sense


Once again in a topic you are showing that for your arguements to make sense you have to redifine everything just to fit your views.
If you have to redefine things to make your views seem correct then by definition your views are not correct.

But for the fun of it your new definition doesn't work either as less government=more government so your new right has instantly become your new left

No, the only objective measure of left/right in the US is voting record in congress.

Everything else is subjective, and the whole linear scale is silly anyway.

Kerry and Obama were both on the extreme left of democratic politics based on their voting record.

The CPUSA... has no voting record in congress. They're clearly "left" but how far left of Obama? 17.34% left? 58% left? 190% left? What is it? What metric do you use?

At least with voting record you can rank votes, then instantly place pols relative to each other.

And what of your ranking scheme? You call National Socialists "extreme right" when they share virtually nothing with the "right" not even the same ideas with different magnitude.

A majority of Americans would call nationalizing healthcare (even via trojan horse) as "far left." An entire party voted for that.

What was wrong with the republicans before was that they were too LEFT. Exactly.

Doesn't matter for the relative position, because as far as they may have moved left, the left was already well left of that point.

Again, this shows how poor the metric is. The right starts getting big government in the name of, say, defense, and that certainly moves them left. the left wants big government, but not on defense, they want a nanny state. Both spend too much, but on different crap.

You cannot be right of libertarianism in the pure form of it in US politics. The far left would probably be European socialism, which has adherents among democrats without question. The far right are libertarians, which have overlap with a number of republicans (almost all libertarians that actually win elections are republicans).

Not at all since bills get riders added which means that bills which someone would vote for on the issue for are not voted for because of additions that have nothing to do with the issue in question.

So you have been trying to show how the linear scale means your views made sense by shifting and narrowing the lines yet say its silly?:rotfl2:

US politics is not much different from any other politics, there are no pure forms so your libertarian measure is rubbish.

Would those be the same Americans that want the evil government to stay away from their medicare?
An ignorant measure is not a valid measure