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’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.
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.
I’m sorry but this is just flat out wrong in the way that only an American can be wrong
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
It means you support capitalism, hence why “liberalization of the economy” means selling off public utilities, land, housing, and resources.
That seems like one very specific definition specifically for economically-neo-liberal, only mentioned below all the actual definitions
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.
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.
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.
The Israeli flag guy would think freedom means the freedom to exploit others.
“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.
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.
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.
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”).
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
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.
