Do any of them know what the word “liberal” actually means?
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.
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.
