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The history of left-wing politics in the United States consists of a broad range of individuals and groups that have sought fundamental egalitarian changes. [1] Left-wing activists in the United States have been credited with advancing social change on issues such as labor and civil rights as well as providing critiques of capitalism .
Peter Berkowitz writes that in the U.S., the term liberal "commonly denotes the left wing of the Democratic Party" and has become synonymous with the word progressive, [74] a fact that is usefully contextualized for non-Americans by Ware's observation that at the turn of the 21st century, both mainstream political parties in the United States ...
Besides conservatism and liberalism, the United States has a notable libertarian movement, developing during the mid-20th century as a revival of classical liberalism. Historical political movements in the United States have been shaped by ideologies as varied as republicanism, populism, separatism, fascism, socialism, monarchism, and nationalism.
Filmmaker Michael Moore directed a series of popular movies examining the United States and its government policy from a left-wing perspective, including Bowling for Columbine, Sicko, Capitalism: A Love Story and Fahrenheit 9/11, which was the top grossing documentary film of all time. [86]
At the end of the 18th century, upon the founding of the first liberal democracies, the term Left was used to describe liberalism in the United States and republicanism in France, supporting a lesser degree of hierarchical decision-making than the right-wing politics of the traditional conservatives and monarchists.
The United States was the first nation to be founded on the liberal ideas of John Locke and other philosophers of the Enlightenment, based on inalienable rights and the consent of the governed with no monarchy and no hereditary aristocracy, and while individual states had established religions, the federal government was kept from establishing ...
As a group, liberals are referred to as left-wing or center-left and conservatives as right-wing or center-right. [10] Starting in the 21st century, there has also been a sharp division between liberals who tend to live in denser, more heterogeneous urban areas and conservatives who tend to live in less dense, more homogeneous rural communities ...
Major examples include Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal and New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. In the first half of the 20th century, both major American parties had a conservative and a liberal wing.