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.
“Liberals”, in the US, are actually quite left wing (outside of the “anyone right of Lenin is literally Hitler” lemmy bubble).
Even with whatever scale you’re using to make that statement, there is still a distinct ideological divide between socialists/anarchists/communists and modern democrats. A centrist may fundamentally agree with the central tenets of liberalism (the right to property being the biggest point of disagreement), even if they ostensibly agree with many (if not most) progressive issues. Most people wouldn’t notice those differences because they result in the same types of value statements, but leftists see them in high contrast because liberals will cater their policy decisions around preserving liberal institutions (e.g. the right of private property, small businesses, market-based financial instruments, ect).
But by associating US liberals with European economic liberals, it muddies the water and allows for a ton of motte-and-bailey style arguments.
I don’t think it muddies the water at all, I think it precisely identifies the point of disagreement. I’m also not even sure what ‘motte-and-bailey’ arguments you could be talking about, let alone having seen one in practice.
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”
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, 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.
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?
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.
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
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).
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
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.
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.”
But capitalism doesn’t explain itself in terms of “the owning class” screwing everything up out of self-interest. Capitalism will talk about positively channeling people’s self-interest. The intent is to construct a system that benefits people the most.
It’s objectively not working as intended unless you think there’s like… a hidden conspiracy behind capitalism where the elites carefully inculcated an economic theory over generations in order to normalize a system that would end up solidifying their status for hundreds of years to come.
It’s not working as intended, and it won’t work as intended, therefore we shouldn’t try to fix it.
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.
OK, but that’s not what the word liberal actuallymeans 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.
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
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.
In the very closest definition, liberal means “if there isn’t a law against it, you’re allowed to do it”
liberal more broadly is just as simple: “if it doesn’t hurt me, you’re free to do it”
I mean, what do you think a “liberal democracy” is? The majority of Europe is made up of liberal democracies while also being social-democratic. France is a liberal democracy despite being heavily unionized and having huge welfare. How does that work?
It works because that’s not what liberal means.
Socially-Liberal, for example, is when you are liberal (freedom-loving / diversity-loving) in social aspects. You support gay marriages, you support freedom of religion, you support cultural diversity.
Other Examples include religiously-liberal, culturally-liberal,
or even politically liberal (you support the right to different political opinions than yours)
What comes closest to what you think it is is economically-liberal. Which essentially says that “as long as it doesn’t hurt me, you’re free to do what you want economically”. But even that isn’t what you mean. Is Pollution and accelerating Climate change harming me and therefore not protected under liberalism? yes, says the absolute majority of liberals.
Is lobbying harming me by making my Voice less weighted? Yes, say a lot of us.
So not even economically-liberal is a good term to describe what you mean.
I don’t know, what a good term for it is. But it isn’t Liberal. So please, for the love of god, stop misusing it. Words have meaning. Invent a new one if you have to, they all began that way anyways.
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
“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.
Do you know what the word ‘liberal’ actually means
It has 2 common definitions:
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.
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.
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.
Even with whatever scale you’re using to make that statement, there is still a distinct ideological divide between socialists/anarchists/communists and modern democrats. A centrist may fundamentally agree with the central tenets of liberalism (the right to property being the biggest point of disagreement), even if they ostensibly agree with many (if not most) progressive issues. Most people wouldn’t notice those differences because they result in the same types of value statements, but leftists see them in high contrast because liberals will cater their policy decisions around preserving liberal institutions (e.g. the right of private property, small businesses, market-based financial instruments, ect).
I don’t think it muddies the water at all, I think it precisely identifies the point of disagreement. I’m also not even sure what ‘motte-and-bailey’ arguments you could be talking about, let alone having seen one in practice.
Yeah, this is about as confusing as it gets, I feel like those labels rarely make much sense :(
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
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, 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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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
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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.
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.
But capitalism doesn’t explain itself in terms of “the owning class” screwing everything up out of self-interest. Capitalism will talk about positively channeling people’s self-interest. The intent is to construct a system that benefits people the most.
It’s objectively not working as intended unless you think there’s like… a hidden conspiracy behind capitalism where the elites carefully inculcated an economic theory over generations in order to normalize a system that would end up solidifying their status for hundreds of years to come.
It’s not working as intended, and it won’t work as intended, therefore we shouldn’t try to fix it.
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.
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
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.
“I spread my butter liberally.”
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted.
Liberal literally means free. As in “If it doesn’t harm me, you’re allowed to do it”. So yes, openminded, permissive, tolerant.
Don’t know why a lot of the US-Americans had to twist the meaning of it.
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.
In Americans politics, and you guys are completely bonkers.
No, not just in American politics. Liberal politics is a very specific thing.
That’s absolutely not what it means
In the very closest definition, liberal means “if there isn’t a law against it, you’re allowed to do it”
liberal more broadly is just as simple: “if it doesn’t hurt me, you’re free to do it”
I mean, what do you think a “liberal democracy” is? The majority of Europe is made up of liberal democracies while also being social-democratic. France is a liberal democracy despite being heavily unionized and having huge welfare. How does that work?
It works because that’s not what liberal means.
Socially-Liberal, for example, is when you are liberal (freedom-loving / diversity-loving) in social aspects. You support gay marriages, you support freedom of religion, you support cultural diversity. Other Examples include religiously-liberal, culturally-liberal, or even politically liberal (you support the right to different political opinions than yours)
What comes closest to what you think it is is economically-liberal. Which essentially says that “as long as it doesn’t hurt me, you’re free to do what you want economically”. But even that isn’t what you mean. Is Pollution and accelerating Climate change harming me and therefore not protected under liberalism? yes, says the absolute majority of liberals.
Is lobbying harming me by making my Voice less weighted? Yes, say a lot of us.
So not even economically-liberal is a good term to describe what you mean.
I don’t know, what a good term for it is. But it isn’t Liberal. So please, for the love of god, stop misusing it. Words have meaning. Invent a new one if you have to, they all began that way anyways.
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
“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.