Liberal has different meanings in different countries.
It comes from the word Liberty, which loosely means freedom from oppression. There are many different types of oppression,, so more terms have evolved from it.
Social liberal means freedom to act as you please in society, economic liberal means freedom to spend or earn money without it being taken or used by someone else. Both are vague,, as is the term liberal itself, so it doesn't really have a definite meaning. That's why it's different in different countries.
A Canadian liberal would probably favour small business, a massachusetts liberal would favour taxes to unions, a british liberal favours third way centrist economics, a French liberal favours higher taxes, a German liberal favours lower taxes and a Dutch liberal favours party time. (I joke, they favour nationalism)
Point is, liberal means many things.
Leftists are lunatic terrorists who watch my little pony and celebrate soviet russia.
__________________ Sig by Nuke Nixon Last Edited by Blakemore on Jan 1st, 2000, at 00:00 AM
Leftism doesn't really exist in the US. The Democrats are "neo-liberal" capitalists, and the Republicans are "neo-conservative" capitalists.
The fringes are all social crap, which while important, has no real effect on the "business" of business as usual.
Occupy Wall Street promised to do that, and where are they now? Funny how the left let that one fade away.
__________________ What CDTM believes;
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
That is an incredibly broad topic, that has a lot of overlap and a lot of different definitions.
The left right divide traditionally comes from the assembly during the French Revolution, where the people in favor of the republic and change sat on the left, and the people who wanted to preserve the status quo and the monarchy on the right. That is the traditional progressive/conservative divide. And that's sort of the broad sense in which Democrats are on the left and Republicans on the right in the US, even though in a lot of contemporary politics both are quite right, in their support for corporate capitalism.
Liberalism goes back to people like Adam Smith and John Locke, it is basically the idea that human freedom is important, and that a regulated market can create a lot of value for people. Often liberals are the kind of people that want to save capitalism through some minor welfare programs, people like FDR or JFK. Democrats since the 90s, since Clinton have been something that is called neoliberal, which is a philosophy that holds that privatizing and marketizing everything leads to the best results (this is clearly historically absurd, but it is also very beneficial to the extremely wealthy, so it continues to be a popular philosophy)
Since about the time of Marx, as capitalist republics have become the status quo, the definition of Left has moved towards people who want to change this status quo in favor of more freedom and self determination to the vast majority of people, rather than a relatively small group of elites. That's why it is often said that "Socialism is the real Liberalism", in the sense that Democratization of the workplace would fulfill the philosophical ideals of liberalism.
That's why in a international and political science sense people like Bernie Sanders are on the left, while people like Clinton (both), Obama and Biden are not considered to be on the left (even though they are relatively further left than most Republicans)
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