Is there a viable political left in America?

[SteppingRazor]

I'm sure a lot of folks here have checked out Politicalcompass.org in the past to see where they sit on its x-y axis. If not, please do so! It's often enlightening. I personally sit way the hell out there in the bottom left-hand corner, the furthest reaches of the left-libertarian wasteland occupied by few politicians (but hey, according to political compass, Gandhi and the Dali Lama are in my quadrant, so what the hey).

But on a recent revisiting of the site -- something I'm inclined to do every now and again out of morbid curiosity and self-examination -- I noticed that they've plotted all of the 2007 presidential primary candidates. Check it out, please, before reading on:

http://politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2007


Kinda startling, no? There's a massive swath of political thought that is wholly unrepresented in American politics (thankfully, in the case of that scary upper-left quadrant, but the upper-right is little better). Let me say that, in other threads across DU, despite my predilections for bomb-throwing leftist politics, I'm often one of the DUers who is advocating prudence over purity == for example, while she's far from my first choice, you can bet I'm checking "Hillary" in the general if she wins the primary. But, this really does say something about what passes for political discussion in our country.

CNN will invite, say, Pat Robertson on to give an opinion from the perspective of people whose politics run just barely to the left of Goebbels. But when they get the response, what "leftists" do they go to? Hillary? Obama?

When's the last time you saw, say, Noam Chomsky on CNN?

Now, mind you, I don't see this as an intentional vast right-wing conspiracy among the media. I'm a journalist myself, and I know too many journalists to take that accusation seriously. I think it simply doesn't occur to them that the opposite of Robertson is someone like Chomsky, not someone like, say, Bill Clinton.

That Politicalcompass.org graph may be slightly off, but its point is spot on -- the war we fight in American politics is over a small amount of territory in the upper-right quadrant. So, here's my question: How did left and libertarian thought get so thoroughly dismissed in America, and what can be done to resuscitate it?

I can understand the more civil libertarian aspects of my political philosophy not being addressed by the government -- government is inherently somewhat authoritarian, and libertarianism is the opposite. But how did we get to the point where we're just fighting over a minuscule space of the political spectrum?

Yes, there is a big difference between Democrats and Republicans. But it could certainly be much bigger. What happened to the left in this country? Is it simply a 50-year cold war with authoritarian leftists that destroyed any hope of a viable left in this country? Is it the failure of the New Left in the 1960s? Something else? Something more? What are your thoughts on the issue?