In Haiti, Father Bertrand Aristide was a Leftist Catholic priest, a follower of Liberation Theology, who ruled the country for years. He won completely free and fair elections with 94% of the vote. He was removed by the Bush Administration which funded an insurgency out of reactionary Dominican Republic to overthrow the state.
Aristide had been reappointed by Bill Clinton after being ousted in a previous coup, but Clinton demanded that Aristide the disband the army and the national police as part of a deal to put him back in power. In this way, Clinton the liberal Democrat assured that Aristide was helpless against the insurgency that invaded from the Dominican Republic. Now you understand why I hate American liberal Democrats so much. They’re all reactionaries! Yes, they are more Left that the ultra-right Republican Party, but not by much. At best, US Cold War liberals are centrists or the center-right. At worst, they are just another species of conservative.
My own father, a dyed in the wool liberal Democrat and former member of Americans for Democratic Action, one of the most Left parts of the Democratic Party back in the 1950’s, supported both the removal of the Sandinistas and Aristide. My father was a Cold War Liberal. This is as Left as Democrats get in the US, and by world standards, my father was a reactionary!
Bernie Sanders is also a Cold War Liberal. His domestic policies are pretty good, but on foreign affairs, Sanders is a nightmare, just another damned reactionary. In the US, everyone is reactionary on foreign affairs – all of the Republicans and almost all of the Democrats. It’s the bipartisan reactionary consensus – they’re throwing it all down for US imperialism, come Hell or high water. And this sorry fact makes a good case for the argument that there is no Left in the US – or none to speak of for that matter.