I know of American's who definitely thought this until they moved outside of the US and were able to see what other countries "left" looks like in comparison. I can imagine it's not easy living under such heavy propaganda all the time.

Literally 90% of americans think this, so im not sure thats true. It seems exceedingly obvious to me and you, but the constant lifelong propaganda and intentionally removing opportunities for people to realize and express this, im not sure its fair to say theyre willfully ignorant

let me shock you left and right are terms determined by a country's individual elections and the terms, as relating to politics, are only about 150 years old. they come from revolutionary france referring to the political parties The Mountain and i forget, i haven't had my coffee yet. it refers to who sits on what side of the aisle in parliament. in statesia, yes, democrats are Left. They sit on the Left Side of the aisle. SHOCKER.

now when you want to think about greater political movements, we start muddying terms. Leftism and who sits on the left side of the aisle? Really easy to get your terms confused. Pretty sure that's intentional. Kind of how you have the communism in the book and the Communist Party and how different those are in practice. It would be pretty easy to use different words to describe them, but mass media has an oversized influence on language so we tend to use the language they use. And who owns the mass media, and what do they want? Thus we use the language with connotations that benefit them.