It must really baffle you that Chomsky signed this letter.
On social issues, our left is as far left as anywhere else in the developed world.
A centre-right candidate doesn't become "left" just because there's a far-right candidate. Maybe in the US that rhetoric works, but not in the EU.
What poll are you referring to where Macron's far-right opponent received 45%? Le Pen has 26% - less than Macron - from what I can see [0].
He's the more left candidate for purposes of this comparison, which is to compare where the U.S. is relative to France. So if Macron is to the right of Trump on muslim immigrants (and I think it's fair to say he is), and 45% of French support a candidate that is even further right, I think it's fair to say the U.S. is well to the left of France on the issue.
I was citing a head-to-head matchup in the second round: https://www.ft.com/content/6d8b9c7a-412c-11ea-a047-eae9bd51c...
> A recent Ifop opinion poll put Ms Le Pen narrowly ahead of Mr Macron for an assumed first round of the 2022 election, and within a few percentage points of victory in the second round (45 per cent to his 55 per cent)
But even on the actual practical side of those rights, this is not true. Discriminatory policing practices, reparations for slavery, abortion rights for women, and others have very commonly held right-wing positions even among democratic voters and politicians.
And calling Macron left-wing is funny, especially since the election had a very clear divide: Le Pen for the (extreme) right, Macron for the center (even center-right), and Melanchon for the left (he won slightly less votes than Le Pen, while being universally derided and ignored in the press).
Note that I explicitly said that left-wing discourse is missing from the mainstream in the US AND Europe, and in fact this is true for most of the world in general, with only small pockets in South America and east Asia.
And I have seen a lot of people on the left raising this problem and discussing how this will ultimately be used against them when, even when today it is done for mlre left-leaning goals. I think Professor Chomsky is extremely well aware of how easily tools of censorship are wielded against the voices of the minority.
And note that a lot of the grand-standing and calls to boycotts on these issues is coming from liberals, not leftists.
I agree with you in spirit, that we're further left than the American left realizes. But on this particular, I think you're wrong.
Biden faces that. He's not a classic leftist, like Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, Gene McCarthy, or Hubert Humphrey, all of whom were presidential candidates. To today's GOP, Eisenhower and Reagan would be considered too far left.
Feel free to read it as “as broad as it is”, different polling from around the same time toward the end of when it was an active issue varied widely (I can find different polls from about the same time putting it at 30% and 11% support), and the exact breath of support isn't really relevant to my point.
IMHO, the Democratic Party to En Marche is a fair comparison, but Our Revolution to En Marche is just silly. At that point, at least compare Our Revolution to the Parti Socialiste (a conventional European social-democratic party) and DSA to La France Insoumise (ie: the democratic socialist party founded by a former leader of the French Communists).
Not to derail, but extending public health care to undocumented immigrants in a pandemic just makes sense. Undocumented doesn't mean vaccinated, so there's a clear public interest in minimizing the absolute number of COVID-19 carriers, no matter their legal status.