Probably just as well the president is unlikely to visit Adams Park in Roslindale

Calling JFK and RFK far left and now bifurcating the term into the far left of the 1960s and the far left of the 2020s is confusing if not bordering on misleading.

Far left of the 60s were people who questioned and challenged the assumption that Capitalism and American consumerist society were necessarily ideal. While some folks on the far left still foolishly looked to an ideal state of Marxian Communism, most of the left advocated (knowingly or not) an ideal society closer to early Christianity than the modern Totalitarian explication of the concept of Communism.

The far left of the 60s nevertheless challenged the assumption that the best kind of society is one where everyone is pitted against each other in a dog eat dog world of constant competition, where cooperation is secondary value but where competition, all all levels from individual to society as a whole, is treated as the best political-economic philosophy.

Far left and left of the 60s in the US included a presumed openness in society. Far right and right of the 60s presumed that society should be closed to only a set number, rejecting any who are different.

Today is mostly the same. Left means openness, big tent; right means closed, exclusive.

The nation as a whole has shifted to the more limited, restrictive philosophy over the past 60 years. That I believe reflects the changing of the US from the only super power to having to match wits with the Soviet Union. Today of course the US now has to match wits with a new super power, Communist China, which figured out how to maintain a totalitarian government while becoming an economic powerhouse.

That shift was encouraged and promoted by the anxiety and paranoia of Nixon, the validation of Great Greed and Selfishness by the Reagan administration, the economic vacuum that has put the most money into the fewest hands and the purchase and perversion of the Evangelical Christian community as the foot soldiers of the extreme right. By extreme right I mean not just politicians but, for example, the literal descendants of the founders of the John Birch society, the two Koch brothers who promoted rightwing organizations. Add to that the development and ascendancy of extreme right wing academic societies such as The Federalist Society, Cato Institute, Hoover Institute, George Mason University and it cabal extreme right wing academics. A painful example being James Buchanan who provided the philosophy justification for Augusto Pinochet's reign of terror in Chile.

A way to sum this up: In American there is far more blood and a present far greater threat to the positive American values of community, family, as nation of "the many," and the spirit of what the Founders started in the 18th century.

Another way of saying this is that while the nation is many ways has shifted leftward, that is toward "the many" in e pluribus unum, the people who are scared of the idea of the many, of diversity and difference, are fighting tooth and nail to create just the unum. In the case of today's far right, but much of the less extreme right, that includes white, male dominated, some kind of conservative Christian, with some allowance for Jews, and an economic stratification which begrudgingly allows for the presence of some women and non-whites in positions of power.