Comment by Amezarak

> The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.

Not only are "left" and "right" vague relative terms used to classify the electorate in the US, they also encompass a whole array of issues an things that aren't binaries that fit on the axis. Someone can be pro-Israel and yet overall of the left; just as someone can be very pro-Palestine and yet overall of the right. In fact on this particular issue this seems more and more common - the real divide is probably generational versus political. I recently heard a segment on the radio from a convervative evangelical bemoaning that their future leaders were increasingly "anti-Israel" and this was a huge problem.

In America, we simply roughly assign Democratic positions - left, Republican position - right. These are both really big tents. "Left" positions include support of candidates like Sanders or Mamdami but also in practice even stronger support for candidates like Clinton and Biden.

Arguing that someone is "on the right" simply because they don't support your candidate of choice is silly; it's sort of like the rightists out there arguing Trump is a liberal RINO because he doesn't support the bedrock conservative principle of free trade.

> Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.

NYT does make a show of having a "balanced" opinion panel and David Brooks is one of the token (2 of 11 in the source link) conservatives, but it seems strange to describe such a bland, anodyne person (also anti-Trump, by the way) as a blowhard. IIRC one of the complaints from the opinion editor that got fired for printing pro-Trump letters to the editor was that not one single columnist was pro-Trump and therefore obviously didn't represent any mainstream conservative audience.

edit: this was the nyt article I was thinking of: https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-...