Arianna Huffington: Beyond left and right

Are you tired of the old concept of the political left and right?

Arianna Huffington, the co-founder of The Huffington Post, the online home for hundreds of journalists and opinionated celebrities, is.

She tells Al Jazeera: “I don’t see American politcs as a left-right game. I think that in fact when we continue to see it as a left-right game we are having a much harder time laying out the choices for the American people. Caring for the middle class, caring for jobs, wanting to prioritise that – is that a left-wing position? Shouldn’t everybody care about that?… I think we are using these terms in a way which has made this type of national conversation much, much harder to have and which really marginalises issues.”

Born in Greece, Arianna Huffington emigrated to the US where she married former US Congressman Michael Huffington. After their divorce she embarked on her own political career, running for the governorship of California in 2003.

Two years later, she started the Huffington Post, which she sold last year to the internet giant America Online for more than $300m.

Her website draws two per cent of the world’s internet traffic and now she is taking her brand of journalism to Europe. There is already a UK version of the site and now there is the French version, Le Huffington Post. Plans are also underway for L’Huffington Post in Italy.

On this episode of Talk to Al Jazeera, Arianna Huffington talks about the ‘Arab Awakening’, the impact of the financial crisis, the upcoming US election and her expanding empire.

“My family and every other family had friends and relatives who had moved to America ‘in search of a better life’. This was the term associated with America. And now you have a hundred milion people in America who are worse off than their parents were at a similar age. And you have over 20 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed. What’s happened is really a gradual erosion of the American Dream, it’s become harder and harder to actually play by the rules and do well and expect your children to do better. The bailout of Wall Street…has unleashed a lot of discontent and disillusionment and mistrust of our institutions – whether it’s through the Tea Party or the Occupy movement, people may express their discontent differently, but the heart of it is the sense that we have privatised the gains and socialised the losses and that’s very dangerous… The founding fathers of capitalism knew that capitalism had to have a moral foundation if it was going to prevail.”