Thinking of the world as two directions is literal one dimensional thinking. The real problem is a society willing to operate with just one neural weight.
Neoliberals are right wing
All liberalism is on the right. The left starts at anti-capitalism. It’s been that way for quite a long time now. Liberals just like to act like they are “center-left” because it helps maintain the capital order.
The liberalism that is practiced in the US is neoliberalism, the same thing practiced throughout the developed world, and we don’t see ideological movements in power specifically because business interests have historically intervened to overthrow those governments in order to install friendlier regimes that let them plunder natural resources.
But then neoliberalism ultimately favors property rights over human rights, and as Marx observes in Das Kapital the owner class will influence the courts to favor property and business over the public good. It’ll also hack law to gain influence over the government to deregulate and protect the power of the wealthiest plutocrats and companies.
Democracies and leninist economies have existed. They just get put down before they have much of a chance to flourish. Even Wilson favored monarchists over communists.
In the US, we can’t imagine anything other than capitalism because of over a century of propaganda inserted into our primary schooling. That campaign has only gotten more and more conservative and now MAGA ideology is taught in class. This was deliberate, as the US education system was always regarded as an instrument of control and worker indoctrination.
Liberalism, in all of its forms current and historic, has always valued property over human lives. Property is the guiding principle of liberalism.
Yes, that’s what we need now more than ever as we approach the general election in the US: More in-fighting amongst anti-fascists.
idk if i’d call liberals antifascists; not credible as that. they specialize in losing to fascists while blaming everyone but themselves
Motherfucker we are the og antifats you better get your shit straight
The funny thing is there’s a comment from just a few minutes ago saying the auth-left definitely doesn’t oppose fascists either.
So if we want to play games with terms and further the exact infighting I’m criticizing, I guess nobody apart from anarchists is against fascism? Doesn’t make any sense, but I guess you don’t have to make sense if you’re just here to bicker.
By my understanding, the left seeks to diffuse political power as widely and evenly as possible, while the right seeks to consolidate it.
Communism works only if there’s a mechanism to assure that the command economy actually serves the public and not the political class. So when we look at USSR, it was authoritarian since Stalin.
Similarly the Democratic Republic of the Congo was a Leninist Democracy until France came in and installed a puppet dictator. It’s still called the Democratic Republic, I think.
Reagan did the same thing to Grenada in 1983. That was especially conspicuous since there weren’t any major resources or strategic points involved. It was about black folks making a public-serving government work.
This is why I don’t understand what Tankies are, unless they’re to the left what Christian Nationalists are to Christianity.
By my understanding, the left seeks to diffuse political power as widely and evenly as possible, while the right seeks to consolidate it.
No, that discounts the Auth-Left, who consolidates power in the form of a Vanguard Party and/or autocrat.
Communism works only if there’s a mechanism to assure that the command economy actually serves the public and not the political class. So when we look at USSR, it was authoritarian since Stalin.
It was authoritarian before that, but Stalin was definitely the cherry on top.
The rest of your comment is true; capitalists have an extensive history of installing pro-capitalist dictatorships.
This is why I don’t understand what Tankies are, unless they’re to the left what Christian Nationalists are to Christianity.
To me, a “tankie” is more or less the Auth-Left, more or less a Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist, in the sense that they believe that as long as the goal is ostensibly some form of socialism (or “socialism”), no amount of brutality, cruelty, or immorality can be too far.
On lemmy.world, they hail from @lemmy.ml 99% of the time, and you’ll see them doing mental gymnastics to defend Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and denying things like the Holodomor and the Uyghur genocide. You’ll also see them making moves to take down the USA rather than reform it for the better, no matter how many people suffer and die in the process. There’s a lot of overlap with accelerationism in my opinion, as I suspect a lot of the people in this thread and others are trying to convince people the DNC isn’t worth voting for because it will help the GOP win, bringing on a second US civil war and/or a massive and bloody world-wide class-war/revolution, killing millions or even billions but possibly resulting in a socialist government faster.
Tankies will claim that any non-tankie slaps “tankie” on any socialist or communist, but that’s not true for any reasonable person, hopefully myself included.
you simultaneously accuse me of bickering and try to get me to defend a caricature of a position… that you constructed for me
i said liberals are not credible opponents of fascism. my reasoning being they are not really opposed to fascism as much as upholding capitalism.
MLs oppose both, i can work with them on those things at least. with liberals i have to worry that they’re going to turn me into the police.
The ridiculous part of this that you don’t seem to see is that liberals oppose fascism mildly and you refuse to ally with them to get rid of fascism.
Fascism is just over there in the corner smirking, glad you hate liberals too.
my issue is that liberals aren’t going to resolve fascism because they create the material conditions for fascism.
fascism doesn’t appear from nowhere, it emerges from the immiseration and instability that capitalism produces, something liberals are content to ‘manage’ without resolving.
Okay, imagine someone is blasting your house with a high-pressure hose, breaking all its windows, flooding it, etc.
Your argument is to target the people who make plastic because that hose nozzle has plastic, rather than either convincing them to stop selling hoses to psychopaths or targeting the psychopath with the hose.
Again, the guy with the hose is just glad you’re focusing your efforts elsewhere while he destroys everything you have.
that metaphor is incoherent and doesn’t really engage anything i said, so i’ll pass
idk if I’d call tankies antifascist. They just think it’s the wrong color
The auth-left does oppose the auth-right, so your pedantry is both unnecessary and unappreciated as it drives the exact divisiveness among [whatever preferred term you choose for the group we both know I’m talking about] that I’m criticizing.
Tankies don’t have left aligned values, only left aligned appearance.
So what? Whether the auth-left or the auth-right, talk about pedantic. It’s the auth. IT’S THE AUTH.
and I don’t appreciate your lack of appreciation
I’m well-aware both flavors of hyper-authoritarianism are bad, I’m pointing out that your picking fights with people who oppose fascism is the exact counter-productive bickering I was criticizing.
There was this dude at work I was trying to get to watch the first couple episodes of andor season 2 because the bickering in the woods rang so similar to liberals and leftists arguing, especially online. The rebels capture Andor(literal revenge driven super antifa spy and movement leader) by chance while he’s undercover and proceed to bicker among themselves and split their ranks in half while an ambush draws closer. Too busy with vanity and their purity tests to find common ground with their allies
This submission is exactly the divisive shit fascists love to see. Congratulations.
Fascists love people who bitch about boomers - they ignore all the young people coming up conservative and all the old progressives.
Fascists love people who bitch about various kinda of left-wing or pseudo-left-wing groups and ADORE threads where people argue over what those terms even mean. It all distracts from uniting against fascism.
Fascists love the "both sides’ bullshit - especially because it contains enough grains of truth that it is very compelling (like a lof ot their propaganda, they sometimes raise some good points that get lost in the fascism) - because ti causes people not to vote. Mostly progressives.
Fascists love this thread.
I fucking don’t.
bOtH sIdEs aRe tHe sAmE
You know what causes progressives to not vote? Telling them to fuck off and supporting a genocide.
There is no equivalent for liberals; liberals aren’t going to not vote because ICE isn’t hauling off enough of their neighbors or they don’t have to fill out enough forms and pay enough money to prove they deserve healthcare or that trans people don’t need to jump through enough hoops to get their medications.
This just reads like crybaby astroturf bullshit. Those issues are important to liberals too. Liberal by definition means you are PRO LIBERTY. Name one thing in that list that doesn’t align with being pro liberty. Go on I’ll wait
I’ve done my share of bitching about boomers but damn it you’re right.
I get that these terms get tossed around without people knowing what they mean, and I’m not against language evolving. But liberalism was never really intended to describe wherever you are on a progressive-conservative spectrum.
Pulling from Wikipedia, but it’s a similar definition in most texts.
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.
Classical liberals just tended to look progressive compared to people who weren’t liberals, because, well, read the definition. The countervailing force to liberalism is authoritarianism. It’s more of a government legitimacy and structure philosophy.
rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.
One of those things is not like the others, and that’s the fundamental problem with liberalism. Private property is antithetical to liberty, equality, and consent of the governed because it enables the exploitation of labor and creates a class hierarchy. By defending the individual’s “right” to private property liberals betray every other value they claim to uphold.
That’s a self-contradictory definition.
For example, ownership of limited resources (something which fall inside that “right to private property” part) actually reduces the “liberty” of most people (which is another part in that definition) because it means a few control access to those resources, something which is painfully obvious in the current prices of housing.
And don’t get me started on how the natural positive feedback-cycle that comes from the “right to private property” - whose ultimate effects can be described in simple terms as “the richer you are the richer you get” - in practice ends up subverting pretty much all of the rest: the rich aren’t treated by the law the same as the rest (because even in the fairest of Justice Systems they can afford better legal representation that those who aren’t as rich), they have far more political power than those who aren’t as rich (because they can buy politicians, which the poor can’t) and it’s a lot easier for them to ensure their rights are abide by than it is for those who have less money for lawyers and courts.
In fact that whole definition feels like the kind of thing concocted by a Think Tank or Marketing Agency to swindle those who can’t think their way past vague flowery positive sounding verbiage.
Liberalism is functionally as much pro-Liberty as the National Socialist Party Of The German Worker was functionally pro-Worker or the Democratic Republic Of North Korea is functionally pro having citizens freely choose who governs their country.
You’re comparing the “right to private property” thing to capitalism and communism, and considering it from the economic vantage, which is precisely what the OP was saying isn’t what the term was for.
Compare it to feudalism. “You’re allowed to have things that are yours, and the king can’t just take your farm”.
There are certainly systems that can be described as free that don’t acknowledge the concept of exclusive ownership, but they usually have to carefully define terms to handle why you can’t take your neighbors wedding ring while they’re showering.
The term is not without economic connotations, of course, but that part was not meant to imply a specific unlimited right. You could address everything on your list and be well within the definition because “you can have possessions” isn’t contradictory with public ownership of scarce or critical resources.
I really like this way of looking at it.
One thing though, the countervailing force to liberalism is illiberalism. Authoritarians can be liberal even if in theory they oppose individual rights. This is seen in liberal autocracy and ordoliberalism.
That’s fair, illiberalism is the proper countervailing force here, it just has some Venn diagram overlap with authoritarianism where the latter curtails political freedoms. It is easy to conflate them!
How do you oppose individual rights while supporting the individual right to self determination?
Liberal autocracy is an oxymoron, unless you define liberalism along the progressive-conservative spectrum. Which is what the capitalists and autocrats and tankies would like you to do.
Dictatorships which doesn’t enforce some specific social order, but which does aggressively stomp out criticism. See - people who moved to UAE and thought it was a free country until their government didn’t like what they said anymore.
I think you may be confusing authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
As some other people have pointed out liberalism can be across the spectrum and does not really define political leaning.
I think you perhaps hold liberalism to higher ideals when in reality it has always been the propaganda the wealthy use to obscure their actual goals.
Well. Yeah. All politics is the application of high-minded ideals to the real world. Communism is supposed to lead to the dissolution of the state, and it leads to a different group of wealthy people in charge. Capitalism is supposed to give the common man access to wealth, and it leads to a group of wealthy people in charge. Case in point:
Authoritarianism is the ideal implementation of a hierarchical structure in society. Totalitarianism is what it looks like in practice.
Liberalism is the idea that everyone should have the right to live how they see fit. Of course everyone is going to try and co-opt that.
I can agree with a lot of that except for capitilism. A byproduct of small business capitalism is it does an okay job at distributing wealth. This is not the goal of capitalism, but a side effect of its initial stage.
Liberalism is the propaganda the wealthy class use to maintain control.
That’s kind of the point. Everything in the ideal sense helps the common man, and everything in reality is co-opted by the wealthy into propaganda used to maintain control. Some things work better than others.
The concept that people have the right to self determination is, in my opinion, more resilient to co-optation by the wealthy, because even the most ardent modern bootlicker still fundamentally believes it is their choice.
I agree, but with the caveat that the concept and reality are two different things.
What makes a progressivist changes depending on the society they are in.
When liberalism was first invented, it was extremely progressive. People that deny it today are extremely regressive. But yes, it’s not progressive anymore, it’s just the bare minimum.
That’s just not true. Nearly every liberal revolution that occurred in the West was followed by at a century of abject mass poverty. This is because Liberalism posited that everyone who wanted a good life could work hard and get it so there was no need for the wealthy to contribute to society if they didn’t want to. Conservatives (not American conservatives who are actually liberals) said this would be bad and that one reason to maintain the monarchy and the aristocracy was to maintain the system of nobilesse oblige which had been developed to provide for the common good.
The people who spawned liberalism were all ultra wealthy and they hired people to write treatises to make their ideas into palatable systems. John Locke worked for the Earl of Shaftesbury and personally held investment in the Royal Africa Company, England’s slave trading monopoly.
In so far as liberal ideas were progressive, that was primarily their propaganda to get peasants turn on their lords, join the rebellion and fight for the merchants. Once the merchants were in charge, Liberals crushed any populism with the military.
I like this framing as liberalism is just the trojan horse the wealthy used to justify their takeover of the aristocrat class. It is the propaganda used to placate the masses because they don’t know what is actually going on.
No wait. That’s not it at all. Liberalism is the whole thing. It contains within it the myths and propaganda to motivate the masses to its defense, but it is not identical with those things.
Liberalism is, fundamentally, a political movement of, by, and for commercial interests. Commercial interests were international and thus could have greater span of control than national interests. But commercial interests could not be totalizing because national interests were locked into monarchical/noble/aristocratic structures that explicitly locked out commercial interests.
The idea of personal autonomy was absolutely felt earnestly and genuinely by the merchant class because they had gone out, many risking their own lives, and managed to find that one deal that made them an eye-watering fortune and then they had to work politics tirelessly to keep their wealth. They genuinely felt that they should be free by virtue of their wealth, so when they said men should be free to pursue their interests, they genuinely meant it.
They weren’t being devious by defining men to be white European men. That was in-built to their culture already. The Overton Window, so to speak, didn’t include a position that black people were men.
But yes, they ALSO said to the peasants “you can one day be as rich as us” and they sort of meant it
Oof, if you believed that last line that you can be rich you might just have fallen for propaganda.
You are very generous to their motives.
I don’t believe it. I’m saying they actually believed it and saw themselves as heroes. They didn’t really consider the poor to be worth thinking about and fully believed they would produce a utopia with their ideals.
Of course, you were just explaining their point of view.
got a source to back this up? Am genuinly curious.
Capitalism and extreme poverty by Jason Hickel
The Great Transformation by Polanyi (About England)
“What about the Poor?” From France
There’s a bunch more I am not familiar with regarding Latin American liberal transitions and there are others about different European countries.
But also, this is why Marx and Engels got anywhere at all
The definition of liberalism changed a lot, especially thanks to right-wing entryism.
Words lose their meaning over time. Once “alt-girl” meant a woman specifically into alternative rock, and not an umbrella-term also involving metalheads, goths, punks, etc. Once cuck meant someone with a cuckoldry fetish, now it’s a pejorative used against people who (at least supposed to) bend over and do nothing in situations really bad for them. Once LARP meant Live Action Role Playing, now it used to demean “fake” fans.
Liberalism once stood for liberty, equality, and paternity. But paternity stood in the way of capital, so liberalism split into three main groups: socialism, moderate conservatism (neoliberalism, classical liberalism, you know the rest), and social democracy.
For the cuck one, it’s not so much that they bend over and do nothing, it’s that that actively invite it. That’s the parallel to the fetish - just doing nothing but also not consenting would be adultery. Consenting and facilitating it is what makes someone a cuckold.
The LARP comment when I’ve seen used as a pejorative is mostly in “stolen valour” type situations. For example, ICE officers LARP as real cops, cops LARP as soldiers, etc. It’s use as an insult is to imply that someone is pretending to be/do something they’re not and likely could never aspire to be.
Liberals share one central feature with fascists; they both support private property rights. So if liberals have to choose between socialism and fascism they will always choose the latter.
So you’d like it if this current government seized your property?
In leftist theory, there is a difference between “private property” and “personal property/belongings.”
Private property is property owned specifically for generating profit. For example, owning a home to rent it out, or shares in a company.
Personal property/belongings are things you use. For example, the home you live in, your car, your toothbrush, etc. Under socialism, if multiple people use something, then you all partly own it, e.g. you would also partly own the business you work for (“the means of production”). You own everything you use and nothing you don’t
This is supported by history.
It’s 2026 and any talk of political labels outside an academic setting is useless.
Hitler wasn’t a Socialist; North Korea isn’t a Democratic Republic; the Chinese Communist Party has numerous billionaires.
Pick actual candidates and vote for them without tying yourself in knots over what they call themselves.
Second, stop pretending there’s some giant ‘Left’ majority in the US. Mamdani won NYC with 51% of the vote; Harris got 65%. She got more total votes and a higher percentage than the guy who called himself a Socialist.
I like Mamdani, and I voted for him, but if he gets re-elected it’ll be because he’s a savvy pol, not because of some Left wave.
He won 51% of a three-way race, which means moderate Democrats and independent voters had another option that wasn’t a Republican, and he still kicked both of their asses with a majority.
I support what you’re trying to say but your argument is built around a very disingenuous framing of the election outcome.
A better argument is that Mamdani won DESPITE being a known socialist. He won despite the tag. Just like he won despite his religion and name.
Understanding why he won despite those things is how we can best use his election to inform our other candidate and voting choices.
He won despite running against a known sexual predator and a radio shock jock.
The argument I keep hearing is that there’s a giant Left majority that stays home every election because they can’t stand voting for corporate Dems.
When the time came for these folks to show up and vote for a Socialist they didn’t vote?
It’s a big conundrum:
- On one side, most people when told actual policies which are generally considered left-wing (say, Free Education) agree with them
- On the other side, most people don’t have the attention span to read long lists of policies (hands up anybody who ever read the entire electoral program of even just one candidate in an election they voted in) so even the most well-intentioned politicians end up using short political terms with vage-ish definitions which are easily subverted, to describe their own set of policies or those of others.
So we end up with Liberal this, Socialist that and if you try and get down to tightly defined nitty-gritty details of their meaning, no two people fully agree on the definitions.
Mamdani won NYC with 51% of the vote; Harris got 65%. She got more total votes and a higher percentage than the guy who called himself a Socialist.
What Harris are you talking about? Kamala Harris? And what election? Because if you’re talking about the presidential election, she got like 48% of the popular vote. And what do you think the effect of cuomo ratfucking the election and splitting the vote was, on Mamdani’s performance?
I think you misunderstood them, aren’t they referring to the vote in NYC? Harris won in NYC by a good margin
Thanks for the clarification, that wasn’t very clear indeed! Then OP’s argument is stopped dead in its tracks by the fact that the mayoral election had more than two candidate, and the presidential election did not.
Yes, I was referring to the NYC vote.
I thought that would be obvious, but apparently some folks need more explanation
Thanks for replying to them.
Yeah no that wasn’t very clear. Still it’s a very misleading (or ill thought out) argument. As others have pointed out, you’re comparing apples and oranges here because the races had different number of realistic options for the electorate to choose from.
Second, stop pretending there’s some giant ‘Left’ majority in the US. Mamdani won NYC with 51% of the vote; Harris got 65%. She got more total votes and a higher percentage than the guy who called himself a Socialist.
Ok, but now suppose you were to alter time and space and switch them so that each is now running for the other’s office.
We’d have President Mamdani and Mayor Cuomo.
Yeah most Americans wouldn’t call themselves leftists. But most Americans would agree with leftist policies. Anything less than that and Americans will just be voting by party, name recognition or by how bad the Republican candidate is.
You tell me how to alter time and space and then I’ll consider it.
Judging from the hammer and sickle, OOP thinks North Korea is a Democratic Republic, and the billionaires in the CCP are all self-made unlike the ones in the GOP…
I feel like this all ignored the complete bastardization of any sense of language or definition in American politics. None of these words mean anything and engaging in it is playing party to the fucked up games people have invented to delay any sort of growth or action.
“Neoliberal conservativeism” was a thing. They’re all nazis now. ‘Liberals’ is a slur against anyone who isn’t left enough. ‘Liberalism’ is the blood-shy self-blind median our parents and grandparents wanted for us so we didn’t have to watch our friends die in imperialists wars in Asia. Libertarianism was supposed to be a rejection of any of this and got coopelted by some of the most evil freaks in the system. The Left represents the most meaningful and poplist messaging we can mannage and is still consumed by bickering from people who can’t walj and chew gum or breathe at the same time.
Stop trying to argue the labels.
Top comment:
Stop trying to argue the labels.
Rest of comments arguing labels.
But, I think we need a banner to gather under, don’t we? Maybe it’s “proletariat”, but not many people know what that means. Your typical American family hasn’t a clue. Most of us aren’t arguing about labels on social media. Most of us are posting TikToks of our dogs, and watching Mr. Beast or Cocomelon(?), apparently. And, whoever-the-hell Charli Grace D’Amelio is. They know “socialist bad” and capitalism is money and they like money. They know Rs on the ballot let them have guns and promise lower taxes.
Man, looking at Nextdoor where I live is disheartening.
But, I think we need a banner to gather under, don’t we?
Your typical American family hasn’t a clue… They know “socialist bad”…
This is why the specific banner probably doesn’t matter very much. The association “socialist → bad” just comes from a long-running campaign by Western Capitalists to make sure that the peasants make that association. It basically goes,
- The USSR is bad, and
- they are socialists, and therefore
- socialism is bad.
And that’s enough for most people. It’s easy to highlight a country’s flaws and convince someone that the country is bad, so 1 took hold, for reasons both reasonable and unreasonable. And 2 is free because they have socialism in the name. And 3 is a common logical fallacy, but it works, because it turns out people aren’t very rational.
If we picked up the “Proletariat” banner instead, the same thing would happen.
- The USSR is bad, and
- they implemented some of Karl Marx’s ideas, and so
- Karl Marx is bad, and so
- the proletariat are bad.
It’s not a marketing problem. It’s a problem with who gets to control all of the marketing narratives.
‘Not a marketing problem, it’s a problem with markeing’…
Look I don’t want to drag you too hard here but you do have .ml in your handle so I’m gonna just do this as briefly as possible:
You are referencing a 70 year old political movement as if we haven’t had 70 years of history happen since then. We are so far past red scare tactics that everyone who found out how fucked it was died and now they’re trying it again but stupider.
We have a crazy unbelieveable opportunity happening right now, actively, in New York, where someone openly referring to themselves as socialist is making massive moves where they are proving that Government can actually be leveraged to make improvemnts for the working class and can also remove incentives for weath hoarding. People are actually paying attention to the DSA and D’s are actively campaigning against ‘themselves’ with more effert than we’ve seen them use in 10 years against Trump.
So no, not a marketing problem, it’s an availability to actually express power and follow through on actual governance problem. I know you haven’t said anything about electoralism so I will take ownership for bringing it up, but it’s effective electoralism that is going to keep this door open. It’s happening.
That is the issue. I want to say people need to operate on more of a policy facing. “What do you support?” “Affordable housing and reasonable weath distribution”, sick. Easy vote. Don’t care if they’re D, don’t care if they’re a liberal, don’t care. Obviously that’s very simple and naive. You have to do some labeling.
The problem is people have just given up on identifying the doublespeak. Trump got elected promising no new wars and some mediation on Gaza and was just straight lying. The median voter felt no reason to question it and a lot of well meaning people said ‘this is better than silence on a genocide’, and that was it. The thinking stopped and we threw the world’s easiest choice the the most belligerantly narcississtic, indigent, and negligent person on the planet.
Now these dumbfuck tankies who crowd all of our pleasant fringe online communities are taking the bait again and using their refusal to acknowledge context to feel some kind of superiority about it. I’m so tired.
Edit because my typos were out of control.
The truth is dead. There is no democracy, there is no politics. Just rich people throwing bones.
USA is just an oligopoly.
And they’re using a.i. to make it a sloppy oligopoly.
Challenge: say ‘sloppy oligopoly’ six times really quickly.
It rhymes too well. Makes it easier to say. A good tongue teaser has similar sounds but not in a way that they rhyme.
Representative democracy is worthless anyways. It favors short term, short-sighted solutions to problems that require long term, sometimes painful corrections. But the party that implements such policies will be heavily punished as soon as the public feels that pain. So instead the public continues to vote in short-sighted but temporary joy seeking politicians.
An epistocracy combined with a civic service model would be far better. To be able to vote you must demonstrate a baseline capability of intelligence and rational thought along with having performed civic service in some way. Otherwise you cannot vote and simply live life normally.
Democracy is simple and instinctual, democracy has the mechanisms to solve the issues you mention, that is what the parliament is for.
But democracy requires good faith, unity and solidarity. The oligarchies have bombarded the baseline of those three by means of the new technologies.
I have hope thought, this conflict between the few against the majority is always there. Twitter made Obama president, Twitter made Trump president.
Who gets to decide where that baseline is?
Can you type it again? I am unable to read what you typed.
Ah, the Great American lie. Well one of them. The idea that American liberalism is somehow different. And yet when you actually start examining it it looks exactly the same. I mean you just said that liberalism in America is Anti-Imperialist and anti-war. If you’ve never opened a history book I suppose you might have come to that conclusion. How else you do it I have no fucking idea.
If you actually read what I said it’s what out parents and grandparents wanted to achieve in lieu of imperialism and war. They were wrong because they couldn’t face the truth that the country their parents died for in WW2 would go on the put a boot on the neck of any country that tries to challenge their one sided control over worldwide economics.Then they died in droves in Korea and Vietnam for an ideal they just couldn’t believe mislead them.
If you actually read it, of course.
well yes it is capitalism with regulation
better that that populist bullshitters that have no idea what they’re doing
look at this magical dream! every time we get in control and try to get to it, it turns into a genocidal nightmare. yipeeeeee
Reading this comment indicates you have a lsss-than-desirable understanding of politics.
I want you to literally get a dictionary and encyclopedia and look up each term you just used. You’re about to learn some wild shit and become slightly less chauvinistic and ignorant.
You noticed you got downvoted, and I’m going to explain this for you very slowly, but if you can show me where in any real execution of the terms in our national political discourse you can find a unanimous adoption of your ‘dictionary definition’ of these terms then I’ll concede you are so, so much more smarter than me. I don’t think Fox news has ever spit at a dictionary. You missed the fucking point.
True leftism doesn’t threaten a damn thing because they can’t stop killing each other long enough to agree to start killing the right.
Sweet meme.
Liberalism is therefore a right of center, a.k.a. conservative, ideal.
When Liberalism requires and promotes directing money towards a commons used to lift and/or equalise people in need, that’s where it’s starting to touch upon left of center.
Conservatism is not just right of center. Conservatism is monarchism. Liberalism is mercantilism. Communism is class dissolutionism.
When Liberalism requires and promotes directing money towards a commons to aid the poor, it’s still not on the Left, it’s just trying to prevent rebellion. They’re called concessions.
In this context you’re wrong.
OP talks about the economic distribution scale of politics (for capitalism to be relevant), where (fiscal) conservatism stands in opposition to socialism.
There are plenty other ways to divide ideologies, but capitalism is irrelevant to most of them, including the one you’re proposing (power distribution?)
Conservatism is a very specific political philosophy. Liberalism is a very specific political philosophy.
“Conservative” the adjective that is not about politics is about reducing risk. “Liberal” the adjective that is not about politics is about reducing restraint.
Conservatism the political philosophy emerged as a response the development of Liberalism the political philosophy. Liberalism’s position was that the source of political power should be private property. Conservatism’s position was that the source of political power should be heritage/lineage.
Separating economics from politics makes very little sense conceptually and it results in mass confusion, like we have in the USA today. There are no (or very very few) Conservatives in the USA today. The USA is split between two factions of Liberalism. On the one hand you have Liberals who wish to reduce restraint on individuals with wealth and power. These would be classical Liberals. On the other hand you have Liberals who wish to restrain individuals with wealth just a little bit as a concession to the masses and to offer the masses a few concessions, most of which are symbolic and not pragmatic, to ensure that the masses do not revolt.
There are no fiscal conservatives in US politics. Republicans have almost never reduced spending when they take office. They shift where the budget goes, but they don’t spend less. That’s not fiscally conservative, it’s factional priorities. Democrats do not spend more than Republicans when in office. That’s not meaningfully different. They prioritize other allocations. Again, factional priorities.
Fiscal conservatism does not stand in opposition to socialism. Liberalism stands in opposition to socialism, because Liberalism situates the source of power in private property and socialism is a private property abolitionist movement.
Capitalism is not irrelevant to the separation of ideologies. How could it be when literally the feudal economic system literally could not manage the economies of states sufficiently which gave rise to the capitalist mode which needed a political power system that allowed it to function which monarchy could never do? Capitalism and Liberalism are fundamentally interconnected.
You are missing the forest for the trees.
In the US political landscape there is de facto a group identifying themselves as conservative, in contrast to other groups identifying as liberal, libertarian, socialist, among others.
Your models and perspectives might be self satisfying, but are for this context irrelevant — reality doesn’t agree with you.
Missing the forest for the trees means missing the bigger picture for the smaller specifics. In this case that applies to you, not me.
The history of Liberalism is older than the US and spans more countries. The forest here is political philosophy. The USA is a tree.
To assume that the USA, which is only 250 years old, and it’s local use of the word “Conservative” which has not even been for 200 years, is “the forest” in this metaphor is exactly the sort of skewed perspective Americans have on the world.
The USA’s usage of the terms Liberal and Conservative are local, short term aberrations. It is the US that is missing the forest for the trees. And this is important. It’s why people in the US who are fighting the Republicans think they are “on the left” and why they get so confused when actual leftists won’t make common cause with them.
If conservatism was monarchism and liberalism was mercantilism that is what they’d be called. They’re different and it matters especially when discussing these concepts specifically together.
It’s like calling pink red or turquoise blue. They’re related but they are not the same and we don’t call them the same for a reason.
If conservatism was monarchism and liberalism was mercantilism that is what they’d be called.
I understand why that would appear to be the case. But it’s not. Conservatism and Liberalism are political philosophies and movements. Monarchism is a system of governance. Conservatism the movement supports Monarchism the system. Liberalism the movement supports Capitalism the system. Just because they are one-to-one doesn’t mean they are identical.
it matters especially when discussing these concepts specifically together.
It does matter indeed, I agree with you, and it’s important that we understand that Liberalism cannot lead to universal liberation because it is foundationally tied to private property. Eliminating private property is an illiberal move, and it is the foundational move of communism. Moving from aristocracy to private property ends Monarchism and it is the foundational move of Liberalism. Conservatism fought against private property in favor of the old system. Liberalism fought for private property in favor of Capitalism. And Communism fights against private property in favor of universal liberation.
…what do you think the conservatives conserve?
Liberalism is based on the word liberty, i.e. the right to self determination. Mercantilists are generally liberal. As is anyone that isn’t trying to conserve the monarchy.
…it depends who or what you’re talking about doesn’t it?
Monarchism is pretty clear about what it is, support of a monarchy or basically a bloodline that rules the government. Conservative is a broad political outlook that depends entirely who or what topic or group you’re talking about. You can be a social conservative, you can be fiscally conservative, National conservative. None of those have anything to do with a monarchy.
Mercantilists are literally not liberal at all. Mercantilism and Liberalism at a time were completely opposed to each other, you know laissez-faire capitalism and whatnot. Mercantilism is about government regulated trade where Classic Liberalism was about unregulated trade. A social liberal has basically nothing to do with Mercantilism. Then you have neoliberalism which is a rehash of classical Liberalism electric boogaloo style.
Honestly China’s system is closer to being like mercantilism than the neoliberal governments today because of their focus on exports and heavy handed government intervention but you wouldn’t really call what they’re doing mercantilism.
So it’s all pretty different. Words matter you know?
Oh, no, no, no. There is a very specific thing that conservatives conserve. Its like the people that claim the US civil war was about “states rights”–states rights to do what?
Conservatives are traditionally an explicitly monarchist party. They just didn’t call themselves monarchists, because the French were getting a bit choppy when it came to kings back then. Liberals were the anti-monarchists. Even now, modern conservatives all seek to implement some sort of hierarchical power structure, economic, social, whatever.
Mercantilism is a rebuke of government controlled trade. Hence mercantilism–from merchant. Regular folks could become merchants and make fortunes that were not the purview of the crown.
No they’re not. In some countries conservatives might embrace those ideas but that is not true across the board. I’d agree conservatives generally support power structure but claiming they’re monarchists just isn’t true. Conservatives in China for instance have absolutely nothing to do with a monarchy.
Mercantilism is literally not a rebuke to government controlled trade. It is government controlled trade. Like you can literally Google this and read about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
It was intended as a means for the crown to have even more control. It maximized wealth and authority of the central state which is why the term laissez faire came about. You’re literally mixing up a core belief of Liberalism with Mercantilism.
…fair enough. I was looking at mercantilism as more state-adjacent trade. State-chartered corporation type stuff, East india company and such. I guess it was more directly centralized outside of Britain. I still see it as the beginning of the decoupling of the economic system from the crown to some extent, as it implied trade could happen without the direct involvement of the king.
I don’t think you can ignore that conservatism was developed as a method of reinforcing the control of the aristocratic feudalist system over society in the face of anti-monarchists change. Sure, it ends up with a slightly different flavor in every country, but the fundamental push towards a central authority and “knowing your place” in a rigid hierarchy is pretty much monarchism in practice. I’m pretty sure the thing that makes it a monarchy is that the hierarchy is justified by the divine right of kings.
Not a meme 👎
Oh, shut up, Lauren.
Why
