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Now often when I have brought up the fact that the Democrats are a right wing party I often get a reply that is either:

A. The Democrats are are left wing and liberal by US standards and as you are debating something in the US, you should go by that assumption. If you try and bring the Democrats up to other left wing parties to disprove this, they will either repeat the above or say that its just different views from different countries.

B. To weather they are a truely left wing or righ wing party. You have to look at what they stood for in the past and how they have evolved and not by comparing them to other left wing parties.

C. They are left wing, just more right wng then most left wing counties.

Now how do I argue against those 3? It would be very useful if I knew how to prove those statements wrong.

Thank you for your help.

Obviously, the term "right wing" or "left wing" has to be stated relative to some external standard. Usually, if I say the Democrats are a right-wing party, I say "right-wing by the standards of most of the civilized world". Mr. Super-Left-Wing Obama came out during his election campaign and flatly stated that he was against gay marriage, remember? Americans think he's "left wing" because he still supports "civil unions", which is a good example of how skewed their viewpoint is. Hell, Bill Clinton signed the DOMA, and Glass-Steagal was killed under his reign.

In order to be "right-wing" in America, you have to be a Christian supremacist, you must deny evolution and global warming, you must hate universal health care in all its forms, you must cheer when poor people suffer because it's "moral hazard" in action, you must think that "tough on crime" is actually a well-formed social strategy, and you must have a powerful urge to take a shit on the environment if it will help anyone anywhere make money. Anything left of this makes you a dirty socialist.

The Democrats are are left wing and liberal by US standards and as you are debating something in the US, you should go by that assumption. If you try and bring the Democrats up to other left wing parties to disprove this, they will either repeat the above or say that its just different views from different countries.

Than you can point out they aren't liberals- that is defined relative to a fixed standard.

You have to look at what they stood for in the past and how they have evolved and not by comparing them to other left wing parties.

That makes no sense whatsoever. Do the Republicans still stand for the free soil platform?

C. They are left wing, just more right wng then most left wing counties.

That is the same as 1- defining them by relation to the Republicans.