Do any of them know what the word “liberal” actually means?
Do you know what the word ‘liberal’ actually means
It has 2 common definitions:
- Neo-liberal: a political approach that favors free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending
- Leftism in general.
You’re almost never going to hear the right-wing use #1. Authoritarian communists will use #1 as a catch-all for modern capitalism.
The US is such a right wing country that liberals are the mainstream left. In Europe, liberals are centrists and they aren’t further to the right than American libs.
The meme says “American Republicans” so I thought we were considering this from an American pov. Definitions are going to change going to other countries and doubly so when talking about politics.
It isn’t just about it meaning something else when ‘going to another country’. ‘Liberal’ has an actual definition with a history.
I’m honestly kind of confused about american liberals digging their heals in on this definition when it has historically been taken to mean something they don’t seem to agree with anymore.
I’m honestly kind of confused about american liberals digging their heals in on this definition when it has historically been taken to mean something they don’t seem to agree with anymore.
Because regardless of history or whatever, the definition were giving you is how the 300 million Americans who actually use the term define liberal. Doesn’t matter what you or I think, if we want to have effective communication we need to use words as they are used. I really don’t feel like dying on that particular hill.
I made my stand with “literally”, I’m not wasting effort on holding fast to a Eurocentric definition of liberal.
Doesn’t matter what you or I think, if we want to have effective communication we need to use words as they are used.
I don’t actually disagree with you, I just find it frustrating trying to use a more precise meaning to make a point and being met with resistance. I think a part of the problem is that leftists are trying to point at a distinction that exists within the overbroad american-liberal label that separates leftism proper and center-right democratic institutions, and i feel as if some centrists don’t enjoy the discomfort of being singled out from the more progressive side of the caucus. I could be wrong, and I don’t really care if I am, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the tensions and to try not to erase the diversity of ideology that exists within the ‘liberal party’.
I think Leftists are trying to play up those tensions more than they truly exist, and some of the smarter ones are specifically exploiting the difference in terminology to do so. “Liberals”, in the US, are actually quite left wing (outside of the “anyone right of Lenin is literally Hitler” lemmy bubble). But by associating US liberals with European economic liberals, it muddies the water and allows for a ton of motte-and-bailey style arguments.
‘Liberal’ has an actual definition with a history.
The word “awful” has an actual definition with a history too. That history starts with it meaning “full of awe”
https://www.etymonline.com/word/awfulWord usage and definitions change over time. If you know people use a word differently then you need to at least explain the definition you are using or you’re just going to confuse or alienate people who understand the word differently.
I’ll happily state my case for whatever usage I’m adopting, and ask for clarification when I suspect someone is operating on a different one, but I don’t see any case to be made for the vague american label when discussing anything beyond american electoral politics - for the same reason i’m happy to jab at the usage in the same context, because it’s the assumption of neutrality it asserts that I take issue with and am calling attention to.
But the definition doesn’t really change. Take universal healthcare. A liberal idea that’s considered common sense in Europe and left wing in the US. Obamacare would be something you expect from a center right European and a left American. Both are called liberal.
And if the meme was from an exclusively American pov, it wouldn’t specify “American Republicans”
You’re correct, I specified “American republicans” to refer to the political party because everywhere else “republican” means anti-monarchist
Yeah, this is about as confusing as it gets, I feel like those labels rarely make much sense :(
Liberalism has never meant “leftism in general.” It has always been an ideology supporting the individual via private property rights. Neoliberalism is the modern form of it.
Liberalism was considered left when feudalism was right, but liberalism has never meant leftism.
It’s extremely frustrating hearing this repeated so often here.
It’s fine if this is the colloquial definition you’re used to hearing and using, but this is certainly not the way it’s used outside of American politics and pretending like it’s the only use comes off as both ill-informed and condescending.
When used derisively from the left, rest assured it is not referring to either of your adopted generalizations but a very specific ideology.
Ok. But this meme says American Republican.
The meme also says ‘authoritarian communists’ but there are plenty of anarchists and socialists who use liberal as a disparagement.
Yeah, this meme was close to something, but I think OP doesn’t actually know much about politics.
ok, so among English speaking countries, how is it more often used? we’ve got multiple people in this thread aggressively telling him he’s wrong, but no other definitions.
how is it more often used?
Look up liberalism for liberals.
I wasn’t aware Americans made up their own meaning. Now I understand why upvoted comments mentioning “liberal values” receive a flurry of downvotes while I’m asleep, Americans have lost the meaning of another word, probably due to their media.
Though, just checking, the American dictionaries seem entirely correct still. Are you all confused?
Its the way the wealthy wamt the poor and middle class - undereducated and bombarded by agenda driven media.
The US propaganda machine is pretty damn effective domestically.
I think you’re right. It’s not like anything’s changed, so people are obviously buying someone’s bullshit from somewhere and it’s working exactly as the seller intends.
Going to have start signalling when talking about the two different concepts, like…
Today I’d like to discuss liberalism.
vs
Today I’d like to discuss 🛻🇺🇸LIBeralism™🎸🦅
Since they’re almost entirely opposing concepts sharing the same word.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/liberal
liberal 1
[ lib-er-uhl, lib-ruhl ]
Phonetic (Standard) IPA adjective
- favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs. Synonyms: progressive
Antonyms: reactionary
- (often initial capital letter) noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform. of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism, especially the freedom of the individual and governmental guarantees of individual rights and liberties.
Like I said, it’s fine assuming your own definition if that’s the one most familiar to you, but that doesn’t mean you have to stubbornly double down on semantics when confronted with a competing definition. When used derisively from the left it is almost certainly being used in the original sense of the word as per John Locke
The definition I see most often used here on Lemmy is: Liberal - literally anybody who doesn’t have Xi Jinping’s and/or Vladimir Putin’s cock(s) alllllllll the way down their throat
pretending like it’s the only use comes off as both ill-informed and condescending.
That works both ways. Pretending the European usage of the word is the only use comes off just as ill-informed and condescending.
The people who are using liberal derisively are playing off the american liberal self-identity. They’re acknowledging both definitions in the jab.
deleted by creator
I’m sorry but this is just flat out wrong in the way that only an American can be wrong
Thanks for your input. I learned a lot.
This discussion is funny from a German pov, as our main local liberal party (the FDP) is pretty right wing and has been so since the 1940s. “Liberalism” always had a quite neative connotation to me therefore. They are also the party most open to working together with the far right (the AFD).
Liberalism can be right wing or left wing. It makes more sense to structure the political specrum like this. But even that is far from prefect.
Liberalism can be right wing or left wing.
Eh. Its traditionally in that “economically conservative, socially liberal” pocket, wherein you can do whatever you want so long as you’ve got enough passive income.
Fascists tend toward a more rigid social caste system (ideologically) wherein being rich isn’t enough to save you from state violence. That’s a big part of its popular appeal, particularly when liberal institutions decay into kleptocracies.
Traditional Marxism tends toward the social egalitarianism that fascists can’t stomach (race mixing, gender equality, and worker internationalism) while advocating full public ownership that liberal rent-seekers can’t stomach.
So, in the modern political spectrum, liberals tend to be “centrists” who use their economic influence to rent out social egalitarianism. Fascists tend to be “right wing”, advocating for those same private entities to purge themselves of unpopular social groups. And Marxists tend to be “left wing”, advocating for an abolition of rents and a full egalitarian economy.
But if you go back a century (or move over to a country that’s more left or right leaning) the colonial era monarchies and theocracies end up forming the right-wing pole, while fascists join liberals at the social center, and Marxists join a much more lively native anarchist community that’s in its last-gasp efforts to resist colonial occupation.
If you are saying gender equality is Marxist then I am guessing you haven’t read much Marx friend. Marx was very about women being relegated to traditional gender roles and was more about whole “seperate spheres of excellence” thing. You are thinking more of the likes of Saint Simone and Robert Owen’s Owenites.
Feminist scholarship has tried to adapt Marx by stripping out the veiws about women and applying his rhetoric more unilaterally but that’s not his text and quite frankly there are other contemporary philosophers and movement leaders which did it better.
There is this habit to slap the name Marxist on a the most idealized reads of the work and call it his because he’s the name people know and the few well known political labels on the far left or because people who have claimed the label of his movement after his death decided to non-canonically add to his work- but I personally wish that people could normalize other schools of leftist philosophy and not treat Marx particularly as the magnet that all of us will inevitably be drawn to or attribute stuff to him that he doesn’t particularly deserve. Marxism as a sort of brand name philosophy is misleading and disappointing to those who read his work and find that their ideals aren’t actually well represented there.
If you are saying gender equality is Marxist then I am guessing you haven’t read much Marx friend. Marx was very about women being relegated to traditional gender roles
Marxism does not end with Marx any more than Newtonian Physics ends with Newton.
That said, I’ve seen plenty of liberal writers approach the original works with cynical and dishonest takes. So it helps to cite your reference if you want to be taken seriously.
that’s not his text and quite frankly there are other contemporary philosophers and movement leaders which did it better.
Sure. Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Chavez, etc, etc.
but I personally wish that people could normalize other schools of leftist philosophy and not treat Marx particularly as the magnet that all of us will inevitably be drawn to
It’s hard to escape Marx’s gravitational pull without abandoning 19th century modes of industrial economics.
So long as colonial powers continue to apply old liberal economic theories of endless expansion and consolidated ownership in the face of diminishing returns, Marx’s insights into failing rate of profit fueling economic contradictions will remain relevant.
I believe what you are referring to is Communism. Let us divorce at least the name of a singular man from a body of work that by your own admission is made up of a number of different writers on the subject just as the elaborations on Newtonian Physics is considered also a part but not whole of Classical Mechanics.
The reductions of bodies of political thought to singular authors is often used to exclude others. Very often on this platform I am told that I am not a Socialist because I am not a Marxist simply because he simply coined a term to a body of thought that predated him and extended far beyond him so why should I extend to Marx the authorial intent by the political realm of thought baring his name? If you said you were a Maoist or a Leninist or a Chavezist would I not conclude that you are in agreement with their very specific realms of their personal philosophy?
Let us divorce at least the name of a singular man from a body of work
If we had a collection of competing working applications of communism, that would be easier. But trying to divorce it from Marx is a bit like trying to divorce capitalism from Adam Smith or the more modern Anarcho-Capitalist attitude from Rothbard and Rand. Like talking about Protestantism without mentioning Martin Luther.
Show me a fully realized anarchist state and we might be able to talk about Peter Kropotkin or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. But anarchists from Republican Spain to the Bodo League of Korea to American Native Tribes were wiped out by fascist militarism.
You could draw sharper lines between Leninism, Maoism, and Chauvism, but you’d still start from their common Marxist heritage.
The reductions of bodies of political thought to singular authors is often used to exclude others.
They’re influential for a reason.
I am told that I am not a Socialist because I am not a Marxist
I mean, you can call yourself whatever you want. But I see the term “Socialist” pitched around to describe everything from corporate liberalism to primativist anarchism. If you want to talk about AES states, you’re talking about countries that rooted themselves in Marxist philosophy.
If you said you were a Maoist or a Leninist or a Chavezist would I not conclude that you are in agreement with their very specific realms of their personal philosophy?
If I said I was a Maoist, I just didn’t agree with anything in Mao’s Little Red Book, I would not blame you for calling me a bullshitter.
that’s because liberalism in Europe is mainly “liberty” for rich people to do what they want
Isn’t it the same in the US though? They still don’t have universal healthcare or basic worker protection like protecting women from being fired over giving birth.
see, the difference is, in the US they already won, tho in the American context liberal s still more progressive than the neo-cons/fascists on the other side
deleted by creator
Are they? I would say the CDU under Merz is more likely to work with the AfD
Open-minded, permissive, tolerant
Look rather than dunk on you, I’m going to recommend Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast, because it gives a fair overview of what the liberal revolutions were about, why socialism grew out of that moment, and how there came to be this irreconciliable beef between liberalism and socialism. The whole thing is great, but 1848 is the real crisis point if all you care about is the schism.
For a more succinct answer:
It’s obviously tongue-in-cheek, but it gets the point across lol
A liberal believes capitalism is broken and needs to be fixed.
A socialist believes capitalism is working as intended and needs to be destroyed.
What’s someone who believes capitalism is broken and needs to be destroyed?
Confused.
Anarchist, maybe?
Nah anarchists also fall within the “capitalism is working as intended and must be destroyed” camp. They just have different ways of doing it.
Zoomer
Someone who doesn’t have conspiracy-brain. The people that say capitalism is working as intended seem to live by the inverse razor of “never attribute to collective stupidity of the implementors what can be attributed to deliberate malice by illuminati-like mechanisms.”
“Deliberate malice,” “rational self-interest [of the owner class]” — tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to.
Leftism is just secular religion.
Liberals are, to quote Phil Ochs: “ten degrees to the left of center in the good times, ten degrees to the right of center when it affects them personally”
First time I’ve heard of that podcast and it sounds interesting. Is there a season that touches on it more than others or is it just an overarching theme throughout the different seasons and revolutions covered?
I highly recommend this podcast. He does a great job of differentiating what the different authors say and what are his own opinions. And he adds corrections to the episode when listeners point out his mistakes. The French, Haitian, 1848, and Russian revolutions really changed how I see the world. Be warned, they can hit dozens of episodes each.
The American and English civil war are OK, not Duncan’s fault, it’s just the non Anglo revolutions were better material IMO.
I’m going to echo everyone else recommending this podcast, it’s absolutely incredible non-fiction story telling and it will really deepen your understanding of how we all got to this point in history.
To answer your question, I actually think season 8 (all about the French Commune in 1871 and how external pressures can end up causing liberals and socialists to go to war with each other) is the best one for explaining it, but it will be really confusing if you don’t listen to season 7 first (which is all about 1848, when France revolted against a liberal monarchy and most of western Europe went “hey, we should do that too, but differently”), which will be really confusing if you don’t listen to season 6 first (all about France 1830, when the liberal monarchy who would be overthrown in 1848 overthrew the absolutist monarchy that came before them) and all its supplemental episodes (all about different western European leaders who would see rebellions in 1848).
Season 3 (all about the French revolution everyone knows about in the 1790s) will help understand a few things going on in 6 and 7, and is also worth listening to just to understand why and how liberalism got going, but I don’t think it’s strictly necessary to get seasons 6-8, and 3 is ridiculously long season because the French revolution is just an insane series of back and forth plot twists that doesn’t let up.
That all said, if you’re prepared for something ridiculously long, the final season (all about the Russian revolutions, 1905 and 1917) is an incredibly informative and interesting listen too, and kind of completes the series (this is extremely reductive, but season 1-3 are sort of the “liberalism was a big improvement over what came before it” seasons, 6-8 are sort of the “but liberalism had its problems, which socialism tried to answer” seasons, and 10 is the “but socialism has its problems too” season).
Lastly, it doesn’t really touch on the liberalism vs socialism thing, but season 4 (a history of the Haitian revolution that highlights how incredibly destructive racism and colonialism are) is probably the one season I would make everyone in the world listen to if I could.
Yeah agreed, Haiti really opens your eyes to how race and class intersect imo — and the potted history at the end to bring us up to the present is absolutely heartbreaking.
I recommend Revolutions too. Mike Duncan is an awesome researcher and writer.
added, should I begin at the beginning or are there recommended episodes I should listen to first over others?
Pff… you’re way too nice to not be a liberal
There’s a difference between ideology and affect. I’m sure plenty of Nazis are “nice”
OK, but that’s not what the word liberal actually means to most people in my experience. Or perhaps another way of saying it is that a lot of people I see getting angry on Lemmy read the word “liberal” and assume economically liberal, whereas every person I’ve ever encountered IRL would use it to mean socially liberal.
In the US political media ‘Liberal’ is deliberately used to reference the policies of the Democratic Party, which is demonstrably Neoliberal. This confusion is working as intended.
Thanks Rush Limbaugh and all the hellspawn you’ve enabled.
This confusion is working as intended.
And is exploited by tankies/fascists. By making “liberal” an insult from both the right and the left, using different definitions, they solidify in the mind if low information voters that Democrats are bad. Republicans, by being left out of this insulting, sound better by comparison.
It doesn’t even need to be an insult. It was and is an inherently anti-left strategy to correlate ‘Liberal’ to the Democratic Party and it is exactly what American political media does. (Hence my reference to Rush Limbaugh.) The goal is to inject confusion into the terminology to the point where your average low information voter/liberal can’t differentiate between the left and the right: or a tankie and a fascist.
With respect, if you describe yourself as liberal, vote for an economically liberal party, and refuse even to accept economic policy as part of the question, I think the “authoritarian leftists” have your number tbh
That’s because the socially liberal definition is almost exclusively American, and lemmy has a large number of EXTREMELY Eurocentric users. Almost like a weird mirror world of the typical “everything is assumed to be American until proved otherwise” in most social media.
According to lemmy, there’s the American definition, and then there’s the correct definition. And they’re not being tongue in cheek about it, they’re serious.
The very idea that a liberal can’t be socialist and a socialist can’t be liberal is nonsensical. They are orthogonal concepts.
The division between liberals and socialists is plainly promoted in order to divide people.
Liberalism supports Capitalism, Socialism supports Socialism. They are incompatible.
That’s ridiculous. Liberal socialist societies have been and still are the best to live in.
No such thing.
lmao
It means you support capitalism, hence why “liberalization of the economy” means selling off public utilities, land, housing, and resources.
That’s not true.
Here a chicken definitely came before an egg. Read up on laissez-faire. There are also entire groups of anti-capitalist liberals and liberal ideologies as moat agree that capitalism breaks the fundamental rule of encroaching on people’s freedoms, which is obviously the main point.
Adam Smith was famously big on this, but also Henry George, the father of Georgism which is a famous liberal economic ideology that is staunchly opposed to capitalism for its many dangers to liberalism. It’s even from the US.
You can’t just take what you learned from the US media and US social media and force that onto everyone else. You’re spreading misinformation about ideologies in the hopes people won’t notice.
That seems like one very specific definition specifically for economically-neo-liberal, only mentioned below all the actual definitions
It’s also the definition used in any serious literature since the mid 1800s.
My parents used to called corned beef stew “Pig soup” so my brother and i would eat it. That doesn’t mean it was pork in there.
300 million Americans call corned beef “pig stew” and it’s in the dictionary. Welcome to living languages. Corned beef is now pig stew.
You cannot be open minded, tolerant and support human rights and freedoms while opposing capitalism. If you oppose capitalism - you’re pretty much an authoritarian shill.
This doesn’t even make sense, you’re very confused.
Very bad take. Do better.
Care to elaborate? Why is wanting to democratize production more authoritarian than wanting many competing dictators?
Because capitalism is what allows to democratize production.
Definitionally, it cannot. Capitalism is individual ownership, Socialism is collective ownership. By definition, workers in Capitalism have no real say.
Capitalism is individual ownership, That’s the key! It gives you all the rights and freedoms to create your own business and lead it the way YOU see fit. By definition, Capitalism doesn’t have workers or other classes, everyone is equal. Socialism is an authoritarian ideology, which puts the needs of a social construct (a virtual entity, if you prefer) over the needs, rights and freedoms of an individual. One must be very delusional to support authoritarian socialist ideas in any way, shape or form.
“I spread my butter liberally.”
Removed by mod
Because in politics, liberal means something else entirely. It’s an ideology defined by support for capitalism.
Free as in markets, not free as in people.
I understand we don’t like capitalism on Lemmy, but I’m curious how liberalism fares versus the other capitalism-supporting ideologies that are more commonly found in the world.
I’ve thought about this for most of the day. Social Democracy (think Denmark, Norway, Sweden, etc) is probably the best out of all capitalist ideologies, but is still subject to the regressive nature of private capital. Other than that, most of them are complete dogshit. Capitalist monarchies, “anarcho-capitalism” (read neo-feudalism), US libertarianism, capitalist oligarchy, fascism*, etc are awful for regular people and horribly lacking in their analysis of capital and it’s relationship between the capitalists and workers. We’re currently living under neoliberal democracy, so imagine things getting much worse for us. That’s what most of those ideologies are like.
* it should be noted that fascism is mostly just a death cult that loves hierarchies like capitalism.
Fascism isn’t merely a randomly appearing death cult, but the violent death throes of crumbling Capitalism. Where Capitalism is failing, fascism rises. That’s why Leftists must thoroughly stomp out fascism while also pushing for Socialism.
In European politics.
American liberals do not support free markets. They’re advocates of greater regulation amd stronger unions.
yes, they do. Both* US political parties are neoliberal parties. Regulation of markets is still a free market. Unions do not inherently oppose free markets either.
* must go back at least 10 years for this to be true for Republicans
Stop prevaricating.
More regulation = less free markets. It’s a spectrum, not a light switch. Dems want more restricted markets. Repubs want more free markets.
It sounds to me like you don’t know what a market economy is.
In Americans politics, and you guys are completely bonkers.
No, not just in American politics. Liberal politics is a very specific thing.
It’s actually specifically not true in American politics.
Liberal in America = left wing, favors greater regulation of markets
Removed by mod
The problem here is that in the US it means a very specific thing, while in Europe it means another specific thing. I think it gets mentioned every other time when this holywar reappears in comments
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_Europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United_States
Which would be fine except the fucking Europeans keep insisting the American definition is WRONG and refuse to use it, making communication very difficult.
“if there isn’t a law against it, you’re allowed to do it”
That’s literally every system.
Removed by mod
There are/were a lot of systems where you need to be granted a privilege in order to do something.
Meaning there’s a law against doing it without said privilege.
“If there isn’t a law against it, you’re allowed to do it”
Even in liberalism, what you said is still the case. I need to be granted the privilege of a driver’s license to drive a car, I need the privilege of a medical license to practice medicine, etc. You’re talking nonsense.
And just as many where the laws aren’t defined so anything can be laid out as illegal
Such as?
The Israeli flag guy would think freedom means the freedom to exploit others.
Removed by mod
Freedom to do what exactly? To spend half your income on rent and have no hope of anything better?
America is a democracy for the bourgeoisie, and a dictatorship for us. China is a democracy for the people and a dictatorship for the bourgeoisie.
Removed by mod
“free” means nothing though, it’s just a substitute for other values. It’s not just free as in “if it doesn’t harm me, you’re allowed to do it”. As another commenter pointed out, one person, they would espouse the freedom to have and own and use guns for self-defense, right? I could just as easily make the argument that guns, collectively, when this right is enabled, impinge on my freedom not to live in a gun-free, potentially less violent, or at least less lethal, society. The freedom provided by publically subsidized or collective single payer healthcare, vs the freedom to "not have to pay for everyone else’s healthcare. If I just rely on freedom as a value, it indicates nothing. It’s a sock puppet ideology. There’s always another value there which is being substituted for it. Liberalism can’t just equal freedom, or else it’s just totally meaningless. While it does have a broad specific meaning as it refers to a specific school of thought, it’s not totally meaningless as it otherwise would be.
Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy which espouses the merits of the free market as a collective decision making structure, which can allocate resources according to price signals. I.e. take resources in the economy and allocate them to where they best need to go, which is sort of what any idea of the economy has to do. It also generally espouses an idea of a naturally occurring meritocracy and rational actors, which the free market relies upon to be of real merit. At the extreme end you get shit like idiot anarcho-capitalism and the austrian school of economics, which is very resistant to government interventionism and kind of holds a religious adherence to free markets and their freedom from governance or regulation by governments. Guys like adam smith. Maybe in the middle you have more standard forms of liberalism, that still support free markets, but also support a pretty decent government and sort of see the two as being opposed to one another. Probably that would slot in a little more into neoliberalism, on the side of markets, and then classical liberalism leaning more towards government intervention. And then on the far end you get shit like nordic government and social democracy more broadly, which would try to engage in capitalism while still building out large support structures, as generally opposed to democratic socialism which seeks to basically eliminate conventional capitalism altogether. You also maybe get “market socialism” somewhere in there, inasmuch as a kind of inherently contradictory ideology like that can exist.
None of what I said really has any commentary on general social issues. You won’t find it in there, in any of those mostly economic philosophies, you won’t find positions on gay rights or trans rights, generally, civil rights more broadly, or drug use, or crime and punishment. There’s not any position on civil rights more broadly which is specifically intrinsic to any of those philosophies. Nothing on “open-mindedness”. The same could be said of communism, or really any economic philosophy outside of like, normal fascism, which everyone kind of has a hard time defining. Libs, mostly, but I won’t elaborate on that one until you press me on it.
In any case, that’s what liberalism as an economic philosophy all tends to mean, tends to refer to, that’s the larger, broader category. As you might intuit, it’s mostly just kind of, “capitalism”, in it’s many different forms. None of this is meaning-twisting, this is all just shit that’s existing in the academic literature for a long while. I’m not a language prescriptivist, so I’m not going to say that it’s wrongly used, when it’s not strictly conforming to academic definitions, and I will freely admit that most of the reference I see to it in colloquial conversation is kind of just like, to mean “woke”, you know, to refer more to socially progressive outlooks more broadly. But I think it’s important to question kind of why that is, why it’s seen as this thing that’s only kind of half-invisible to the population, why it’s completely divorced, colloquially, from any economic definition, and instead just refers to like, ahh, that guy, that guy’s a lib, that guy thinks black people should have rights, what a lib cuck, kind of a thing.
Tracking the warping of language is a pretty important thing to do, because it tells you all about the intentionality with which it’s used, the broader political strategy, the core philosophies of the people using it, it tells you where they’ve come from and what they’re referring to. More specifically, these kinds of changes of meaning that take place within certain words, they serve to cordon off, or, serve as an evidence of the cordoning off, of certain populations from others. The word is transformed in such a way as to make communication between groups impossible, and is also transformed in such a way as to totally eliminate that to which it previously was in reference to.
I don’t think using liberal to mean “socially progressive” is necessarily the wrong way to do things, but I do think that the academic definition, the academic reference, the idea there, it still has a lot of value. If one serves to obfuscate the other’s shorthand, I would find that to be kind of a tragedy.
You should either replace Ukrainian flag with a Russian one or Israeli flag with Palestinian.
I’m on the left, but I’m far from a communist, much less an authoritarian one, and I 100% use lib or liberal as an insult. I think to most people younger than 50, Liberal refers to a certain type of Democratic voter. They’ll hang a BLM sign in their window but support NIMBY policies that keep people of color out of their neighborhoods. They’ll talk a good game about labor rights and unions, but still go to Starbucks and throw a shit-fit if their order is wrong. They cared very deeply about Iraq and Guantanamo when Bush was President, but stopped bringing it up once Obama was in office.
The Third Way Democrats of the 90s basically turned American Liberals into Neo-Liberals. I will still support them when I have to, since they hold all the levers of power over the only ostensibly progressive party in America, and not siding with them at this point basically ensures the rise of fascism, but I have no love for Liberals.
You can tell this was made by a salty neo lib
It’s really funny how no one really likes liberals but liberals.
Conservatives: “They’re too freedom loving for my tastes! Why can’t they just stay and home and be good corporate stooges like us?”
Auth-Communists: “They claim to like freedom but still willingly use the capitalist forces to oppress who they like. Liberals are okay with personal freedom until it impacts the white moderates.
That’s our job!”Anarchists: “It’s literally weird to call yourself a liberal when all they do is oppose any movement against the status quo. If they can’t convert them to sell away their soul to the state or capitalism, they’re terrorists. They’re more like conservatives than any actual progressives, and even progressives admit 100% capitalism isn’t great.”
Libertarian capitalists: “They claim to be for freedom but constantly require the state to check in on if people are enjoying their freedom like that Nanny’s they never had. I just wanna grill for god’s sake!”
Like it’s just funny to me no matter where you are on the political spectrum, you have a somewhat decent reason to hate liberals (except conservatives are too stupid to tell liberals apart from “commies”).
You could build that list for every political party/perspective
Yeah but it’s funnier with liberals because they get all persecution complex-y when people left of them give them shit, just like conservatives do when libs give them shit
Literally swap the words in your comment, it works everywhere
That’s why the bots use templates like that.
“My party is committing genocide and lost all of its credibility and ethos. Boo hoo.”
At least they aren’t using the word “progressive” anymore.
don’t usually agree on that much
Where have you been the last 8 years
Yeah Tankies/AuthComs are just such an odd mixture of accelerationists, “own the libs” and just general stupidity of “a strong man makes strong men” bullshit that they support any fascist if it means maybe someday they might not be on the chopping block.
If Tankies were an actual voting bloc they’d be somewhat impactful for the first time since maybe 1949. That would imply going outside however.
Remember, men who want a strong man want to be dominated, therefore they are themselves weak
Yes, leftists absolutely know what the word “liberal” means. It refers to a pro-Capitalist ideology centered around the idea of individual freedoms via private property rights.
Leftists disagree that allowing private property creates a freer population, and understand that Liberalism is the dominant ideology in developed Capitalist nations.
Software developers are staying silent on this one.
“We’d like for our software to ThingDo. Our team has estimated 4 weeks for this work. What’s your estimate?”
“Wait, you want to write it from scratch? Why not just plug in ThingDoer library?”
“…ah, right. Damn libs.”Only good library is the standard library, packages are much better 😤
But I like my libs… Often enough produced with a pretty communistic and anti-authoritarian mindset… (And too often, lack of support for the workers… Ups) But I like them.
I thought I was in programmer humor for a sec when I first saw the image, then I died a little bit
I am the only true leftist. The rest of you are posers and/or feds.
Hey, I’m neither of those. I’m an op!
look, tankies aren’t leftists, they are fascists wearing the skin of the lefties they killed
Fascism isn’t just authoritarianism. It is a certain set of conditions that can essentially be boiled down to as “colonial violence against the imperial core” but it is incredibly more complicated than that.
Words have meaning, and you should look up those meanings before you start just throwing them around.
Words DO have meaning, and you just butchered so many of them it’s not even funny.
fundamentally, fascism is the belief that social hierarchies are not only natural but preferable to any other social system that attempts to disrupt said natural order, all other aspects of fascism stem from this one line of understanding
Social hierarchies are always going to be present, even anarchists believe that. Fascism just assumes that they are natural and inherent, while leftists beleive that those hierarchies should be voluntary or chosen by the people.
Just becauae you haven’t done any political reading doesn’t mean i don’t know what words read.
the entire idea of the progressive moment is to abolish these hierarchies, then again the American “leftist” understanding is so fucked at this point that I can see you believing this, as most “communists” in the states are tankies, that would also explain the horrible misunderstanding of fascism along imperial lines, because you literally don’t have any other larger critical lens in the states, as most of you aren’t upset about the existence of hierarchies, but just have the feeling that you are not in your deserved spot of said hierarchy
Fascism has nothing to do with colonial vs imperial, wtf
Can’t have fascism without a strong national identity and an activist military.
Which again is an entirely separate thing from colonialism. The two may go together but they’re not necessarily linked in any way.
Which colonial power lacks a politically influential profit-seeking military?
The political spectrum is not linear, but circular and fascism and communism sit on the join but with different lie.
Coming from a country that experienced both several times in the past century, I hope the real people tankies would just shut up and move to Russia to learn a life lesson.
nope, the Marx Leninist idea of a vanguard party doesn’t even purport to be communism, rather the idea that you must go through a phase of state capitalism to grow the nation’s capital after a revolution (revolutions tend to destroy capital) before you can enact communism, it’s just that during the age of ML Fascism was the popular new political ideology, and Lenin did heavily base the idea of the vanguard party on a lot of the same basic understanding as the fascists did.
and of course the fascists did what they do and killed the lefties
fascism and communism sit on the join but with different lie.
Don’t leave us hanging.
that’s a stupid definition of fascism.
tankies aren’t leftists
Counterpoint:
The Other Kind of Leftists
Please tell me this tweet isn’t real
Godammit
Would him putting on the Darth Vader armor be an analogue to many “toxic” leftists using doxxing sites dominated by the far-right to try and ruin the lives of people that aren’t 100% into Stalin?
putting on the Darth Vader armor
doxxing sites dominated by the far-right
Yes. Becoming an unkillable cyborg space wizard and outting someone paying for a message board full of Nazi copypasta are the same.
Republicans are also liberals. At least in the true sense of the word. So it’s low-key funny when they use the term liberal as an insult.
I myself am not a liberal. Fiscally at least. Socially I’m a progressive.
I’m just excited to see what happens when they find out their PC has been invaded by libs.
And then proceeds to own them by deleting them all
In American political terminology, “liberal” means a different thing than in Europe. It implies being left-wing on social issues. Republicans by definition cannot be liberals (in the American sense of the term).
It would be like saying “it’s funny when Americans say they’re going to ‘wear their boot’, how are you going to wear part of your car?”
They are using a different definition of the word, and pretending they aren’t is being wilfully ignorant at best. Pretending the other definition doesn’t exist just serves to alienate people who might actually agree with you.
Lmao check out all the salty libs seeing themselves get called out in these comments.
- sincerely, an anarcho-syndicalist
The only time I ever see evidence of Anarcho types they are being literally as annoying as possible.
Edit for clarity, it’s never “I started this charity/group/political campaign with signups/events/or public engagement.” Only ever “fuck everything, I can’t wait for society to fall apart such that the magic future can begin”
Bro you gotta be constructive not destructive if you want to sway opinions
Anarchists are pretty active in their communities, with mutual aid and direct action being cornerstones of the ideology and whatnot. If you spent any time in activist spaces you’d know that
The point is they need to bring the nice side to public spaces, not be insular with the nice, and turn the mean to everything else.
I think what you’re describing is less of an anarchism problem and more of a “people in general” problem. I’m an anarchist and I’d like to think I conduct myself pretty well for the most part, even in political discussions. I won’t say I haven’t been an ass online or in person before but that’s not due to my ideology. I’m just an ass sometimes. Same as everyone else. I will concede that we can be a bit insular at times and that’s certainly a weak spot for many anarchists
I’ll level with you on that. Everyone is an ass sometimes for sure. I’ve been pretty facetious so far so I’ll try to be more legit in this comment, as you have been legit too.
I’m of course discussing an anecdotal perspective. I totally get down with a lot of what leftists discuss, when they do so constructively.
To clarify: much leftist discourse is about what’s wrong, and destruction of society (to build something better). Eventually it all smells of doomerism. I was anecdotally calling for leftists to talk about constructive things they are attempting, that “the rest of us” could see, and align with.
I acknowledge the world is in a rough spot right now. I acknowledge liberals are not always right. I acknowledge many liberal policies need to go. But from the perspective of the observer… The skeptic… The dude just paying bills and living, liberals are trying to build things, and affect change. Leftists seem to just want to destroy.
My hope would be that through constructive cooperation liberal “realistic” policy is brought closer to leftist idealistic goals.
*Realistic in that the policy actually gets voted on and made into law
I returned because I noticed your edit. I was being a bit snide, mostly because the meme is assuming everyone who calls someone a lib is authoritarian-aligned. If you’d like to know about the positive work I do as an organizer, I’d be happy to share. However, to me those actions are just the right thing to do and not worth bringing up randomly.
That’s fair. Below I clarified as well, this is a meta.thread. of course no one is discussing their work here. Also my opinion is anecdotal. Of course there are leftists who work very hard to move the window, and help others.
…you said, being literally as annoying as possible and contributing nothing constructive
…he said, fully cognizant of the hypocrisy, which is why he decided to contribute a snarky editorial comic
Yeah, that
Bro you gotta be constructive not destructive if you want to sway opinions
At least I admitted my hypocrisy and did something about it. You’re just doubling down on a lazy stereotype to avoid engaging with constructive criticism.
To paraphrase your own claim, it wasn’t “I started this charity/group/political campaign with signups/events/or public engagement.” Only “fuck anarcho types always annoying me”
This is a thread about how folks act. So this is a “meta” politics thread.
This isn’t the place I, or leftists would describe /do that. I’m describing other times and places where said behavior was observed.
Critical thinking.
They agree on a lot more than you’d think, once you parse out each cult’s different groupspeak
FDR, Churchill , Hitler, and Mussolini also had a lot in common when you get down to it. Same as humans and chimpanzees. It’s the differences that actually matter.
I mean they each protected capitalism in their own way:
FDR, being old money who’d just seen MacArthur send in the tanks to raze a camp of rebellious soldiers and knew how these things tended to go, invested in guillotine insurance via the New Deal.
Hitler and Mussolini used the other approach, privatizing/selling off state assets and applying colonial methods they’d perfected in Africa back home to buttress capitalism and protect profits.
I’m not gonna get started on Churchill.
Removed by mod
Hitler sold off nationalized companies to his buddies, and awarded military contracts to Germany’s ultra wealth like Ferdinand Porsche. Literally the first people Hitler killed were his brown shirts, the socialists he utilized to gain power, during the Night of the Long Knives. His entire schtick was that he wanted to kill all the slavs to rid Europe of “Cultural bolshevism” and all leftists thought.
You know literally nothing about history, and actually have your knowledge reversed. You just think “Hitler = bad” and “communism= bad” so “Hitler = communism” I’m sorry to be a dick here, but you are either totally uninformed and are a moron who is just making shit up to feel smart, or you are intentionally spreading wrong information bevauae you want to associate socialism with fascism to push your own nefarious agenda. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that your education system failed you.
Edit: i found the issue. You actually have brain worms from eating so much raw pork.
damn, these kindsa guys are really gonna bring about the human-prion shit huh
Fun fact, the word “privatization” first appeared to describe the policies of the Third Reich. It later became a rallying cry of Rageanonomics, Thacherism, and Pinochet. What now a days we often qualify as Neoliberism.
I bet the poor fellas ended up like RFK’s worms too. Starved to death
Removed by mod
when the American education system has failed you
Tankie mods can’t accept the truth, how typical…
I will not stand for this anarchist erasure
It’s more that OP seems unable to fathom anyone to the left of them being both rational and uncool with liberalism. That’s why they specifically said “Authouritarian Communists,” the SpOoKiEsT LeFtIsTs.
Almost like AuthComs are authoritarian before they are communist, and thus have more in common with the American Fascist Party than any actual leftists.
I’d say they both agree on the main point of both philosophies “everyone has to follow every ridiculous rule I come up with except me”
Conservatives, fascists, and Auth-Communists just disagree on what color the flag should be, and the name of the party in charge handing out the police to dispatch onto the people.
Right? Some people say it’s horseshoe theory, but it’s more just a pallette swap.
I mean, there is a reason why redfash is sometimes used as an insult for authcoms
Good things and bad things are exactly the same. A justice system that enforces the will of the capitalists is exactly as bad as a justice system that enforces the will of the people.
I used to think it just was synonymous with the left, but I’ve recently been seeing a lot of comments on Lemmy saying liberals aren’t leftist so now I am not sure if it means anything or if those Lemmings are just dumb.
I’ve grown up with the term “bleeding heart liberals” being applied to groups like Green Peace and hippies that promote love and unity by people who are just complete pieces of shit, and in that context I was always like “I guess I’m a liberal 🤷🏻♂️”
Liberals are somewhere between center left and center right. In the US, the alternative to republicanism is the “liberal party” and because they often encompass people further left than the party line, they are seen as left wing. Generally, I associate people who are always in favor of slow electoral measures, a strong state, strong individualistic rights that are positively defined (the right to do rather than not having the right to do) and the view that capitalism is the only method that had worked so far and is therefore best with liberalism. But thats far from an academic definition.
When you add in the fact that people usually end up seeing another person’s politics in relative to their own, things get unintelligible for someone trying to pinpoint an ideology.
An anarchist like myself will probably point towards someone like Biden or Obama and say they are a liberal or neoliberal, which is probably accurate enough (if I do say so myself), but I’ll also call conservatives like Romney, Bush, and Raegan, liberals or neoliberal even though those are people most self titled liberals would hate. A staunch authoritarian communist might call AOC or Sanders a liberal because they aren’t revolutionary communists, even though I’d personally consider them somewhat socialist progressives. Heck, I’ve ben called a liberal by hardcore communists even though my views are more similar to their definition of communism than theirs, and I’ve been called a liberal by some alt right people even though their views are closer to liberalism than mine.
Fox news, on the other hand, would call a pink haired person on a college campus a liberal for the pink hair alone. They might label a gay trump supporter who has a pride flag a liberal because of their homophobia combined with the association pride has with liberals to them. They might call someone who is genuinely far left a liberal because they either can’t comprehend their beliefs or because they don’t catch some of the indicators that they are looking at a communist, anarchist, etc.
US Dems and mainstream liberals are definitely right to far right by (mainland) European standards.
The political window in the US is very different from the European ones.
Yeah. The US is a shit show. At least the Overton window now includes antizionism, small victories!
I do think a lot of liberals are further right than they realize. But I don’t think it’s accurate to call them far right unless you solely are considering their economic ideology (which is reductionist), or are lumping in people who would probably be more accurately described with a better label. Or your perspective is skewed from being far enough left.
My thoughts exactly! Every real-life human I’ve ever spoken to uses it to mean open-minded and every definition I look up agrees, yet for some reason half the people posting here think it exclusively means economically-neo-liberal capitalist.
The context is typically pretty important for how it is being used. The user of the term often provides more than enough context I find.
If ‘liberal’ is being used in a derogatory sense, which isn’t going to be captured by an academic definition, it’s often aimed at neoliberalism in a pretty broad sense.
Which is probably what this meme is referring to: the shared rejection of neoliberalism. The motivations are different but that’s immaterial to these things. I mean: it is specifically referencing an American political party here: so I wouldn’t be looking for a political science definition on ‘liberal’.
American liberals are not neolibs. Neolibs are Republicans.
Those statements are both true, but: Neoliberalism dominates both political parties in the United States and has for generations. The Democratic Party is also neoliberal, (often in spite of their voters.)
The Republican Party’s neoliberalism has fostered fascist and christian nationalist factions to the point they may take over.
The Democratic Party’s stance has been to try and absorb disaffected Republican neoliberal voters from the above.
Which leaves ‘non-neoliberal American liberals’ with the choice of supporting… well it is and has been a successful right wing strategy to say the least.
The Democratic Party’s stance has been to try and absorb disaffected Republican neoliberal voters from the above.
That’s a leftist idea that Leftists just made up and are running with due to their own echo chambers. Dems do like capturing centrists, especially now the GOP has gone off the rails, but the coalition is absolutely led by progressives who push progressive policies as much as they can. The theory is to capture disaffected centrists and win them over with clearly superior Democrat policies and positions. Doesn’t always work, but that’s the play. When the Democratic party allows oil leases or higher border funding, it doesn’t do so skipping with joy. It does so reluctantly as part of a compromise to win other gains.
This is the part where you get out the tin foil hats and claim that despite all evidence to the contrary, Democrats actually secretly want every bad thing ever to happen. Because they’re just that evil.
Dems do like capturing centrists,
Doesn’t always work, but that’s the play.
Sure doesn’t. Very strong arguments to my point.
You didn’t even read it did you lol
Just like “aha, everything you said actually supports me!” like you think it’s some sort of debate uno reverse card
Yeah these are old school definitions, like how a “liberal education” means you get a broad education in differing perspectives (ironically, this term is now associated with a Eurocentric take on topics). In the same sense, “liberal policies” would mean freedom of religion, sexuality, etc.
All good things that progressives agree with, but it also entails more pernicious property rights, and the protection of the state/establishment against those who threaten those rights.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be this way, but this is what I believe it’s come to mean in practice. It also has very little to do with how one votes, especially in a democracy like the U.S. where you’ve just got your “monkey loves you” and “monkey needs a hug” choices.
Perhaps they are seeing “free enterprise” and associating that with being something only pertaining to capitalism, even though you can have free enterprise without capitalism.
It’s easier than accepting nuance, and it’s usually from the same people who demonstrate that same lack of nuance in everything else they post.
1 favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
2 noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform.
3 of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism, especially the freedom of the individual and governmental guarantees of individual rights and liberties.
4 favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, especially as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.
5 favoring or permitting freedom of action, especially with respect to matters of personal belief or expression:
6 of or relating to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.
7 free from prejudice or bigotry; tolerant
8 open-minded or tolerant, especially free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.
Only 5,7 and 8 are “open minded” Being favorable to progress does not mean being open minded and what constitutes as progressive is in itself up to debate. Individual rights and liberties can be understood as neo-liberal capitalism of “well the law allows you, your economic situation doesn’t concern us, and now back to slaving 60 hours a week.” Or it could mean “We need to enable people to enjoy their liberties so we need to ensure their basic human dignity with healthcare, education and social welfare to empower them.”
what the fuck is number 1 then?
favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
what is number 2 then?
noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform.
I think if you go point by point and ignore the rest then you can argue semantics, but I don’t see how you can take all 8 together and argue what “progressive” means
Being favorable to reform does not mean being open minded. Open minded means to respect different people and their life choices. People hostile to traditional family or religious values are also “progressive” but often not open minded as they criticize people who choose a traditional way of life.
The same goes for economic aspects. Neoliberalism is highly authoritarian. Specifically it is embraced by neofeudalists who want to reestablish their old feudal privileges but not through formal aristocracy, but by the merit of “free contracts” and them holding on to wealth. These are technically “progressive” yet they want to reintroduce power structures from a time past.
‘Liberal’ is one of those words that has so many definitions that it can have contradictory meanings. It can mean ‘open to / tolerant of’. It can denote a style of education that tries to be broad rather than deep. It can describe various political positions - the ‘Liberal Party’ is left-wing in Chile, centrist in the UK and Canada, and right-wing in Russia, Japan and Australia. This is also what OP is memeing about. At this point, to avoid confusion, I would just avoid using the word except in the purely academic / technical sense.
I used to think it just was synonymous with the left, but I’ve recently been seeing a lot of comments on Lemmy saying liberals aren’t leftist so now I am not sure if it means anything or if those Lemmings are just dumb.
I’ve been fucking telling you, insisting on a Eurocentric definition confuses people, and that confusion is exploited by fascists.
American definition of liberal: socially liberal
European definition of liberal: economically liberal
Some authoritarians strongly believe that they’re far left. But an authoritarian regime cannot be left. If you’re not liberal, you’re an authoritarian, not left, and it doesn’t matter what type of authoritarian bull shit you’re subscribing to.
wait until you learn about fiscally liberal vs socially liberal.
