The funny thing is that communism is technically an evolution of actual liberalism, and tankies look a lot less down on conservatives because of conservatism’s “muh tradishun” lifestyle marketing.
No, that’s neoliberalism. Which is a misnomer, because actual liberalism emerged from the humanist tradition and was a political philosophy, not an economic one. It’s where we got ideas like human rights, and rules that restrict governments’ abilities to oppress their citizens.
Neoliberalism misapplies the idea of “freedom” the same way anarcho-capitalists do. But I don’t think anyone here would argue that all anarchists are anarcho-capitalists.
One author with a clear spin isn’t exactly a comprehensive literature review. You can probably find a book that says anything about anything.
If you pay attention to historical context you can see how liberalism was an improvement over the systems that had been in place prior, i.e. feudalism and monarchy.
The course of human society doesn’t magically jump from “terrible” to “great.” That never happens. More realistically, society makes incremental progress over generations as ideas develop and grow, catch on and are fought for and ultimately prevail over previous ideas and old systems which start to show cracks and ultimately fail. There are cycles of backsliding of course, and all progress is a battle where victory is never guaranteed, but that’s the gist of it, and it’s always incremental.
Without liberalism, there could never have been a civil rights movement, or suffragettes, or gay marriage. All these things built upon the foundation that was set for them by liberalism so long prior that people had already taken it for granted and forgotten about its origins.
Just because it wasn’t perfect from its outset doesn’t mean it wasn’t an improvement over what existed prior, or that it couldn’t be improved on further. And the course of history throughout the twentieth century is a story of liberalism prevailing. So much was achieved in those grueling years and decades that the world of the 1901 is practically unrecognizable to the world of 2001. That progress wasn’t achieved in a vacuum. It was achieved within a liberal system, in which ideas of human rights had already been formulated and enshrined in constitutional law, albeit imperfectly.
People were able to fight to expand the protections and rights of those laws precisely because they already existed. There were imperfect laws and systems in place that those activists were able to fight to improve and expand. Without liberalism, there wouldn’t have been even that.
More realistically, society makes incremental progress over generations as ideas develop and grow, catch on and are fought for and ultimately prevail over previous ideas and old systems which start to show cracks and ultimately fail.
You’re so close to stepping beyond idealism.
History has never been a struggle of ideas, where everyone gets together and the best idea wins, its always been a class struggle resulting from material reality.
Liberalism didn’t spawn the French revolution because somebody thought up humanism and everyone agreed it was a really good idea, but because the bourgeois were ascendant and liberalism reinforced their power so it was promoted. The same model explains why religion reinforced the power structures of the Roman empire/catholic church, why divine right reigned when the relation with means of production favored feudalism.
What I said wasn’t idealism, it was dialectical materialism.
You’re talking about class struggle but that doesn’t contradict what I said, because class struggle was a part of what I said. And you had to cherrypick my comment to find a part of it that you could portray as otherwise.
When did I ever say “everyone gets together and the best idea wins”? I said it’s a grueling struggle and victory isn’t guaranteed.
But, as the course of history shows, although humanity takes a couple steps backwards for every few steps it takes forwards, overall it moves on a positive trajectory. Or else we wouldn’t have made the progress that we have.
History has never been a struggle of ideas
History has always been about ideas, and you have to be very ignorant of the history of ideas to fail to see how they underpin everything that happens in an era. Whether we talk about Cartesian Skepticism quite literally defining the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Early Modern era (and giving rise to the scientific Enlightenment itself), or about the how the threads of existentialism underlie the countercultural movements from the beatniks to the hippies to the punks and beyond. It’s all about ideas. What humans do is informed by the ideas that they hold.
By and large, the ideas underpinning monarchical forms of government did not survive the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because the ideas of liberalism prevailed over them. Prevailed first in people’s hearts and minds, and then in their decisions and their actions, and finally in political and military victories. Without the ideas, none of that later stuff would have occurred.
Nowadays we’re seeing other ideas compete: in this context specifically, the ideas of neoliberalism versus the ideas of democratic socialism. Clearly the latter are gaining the edge, but they’re doing so because first the ideas exist, second enough people are convinced that they could work that someone who will implement those ideas wins office, third they implement them and prove they work, fourth the ideas gain traction as people see that they work and the momentum begins to snowball.
It takes years or even decades. Bernie Sanders and AOC have been working at this for a long time, and if you can’t see how the ideas they subscribe to inform their policy decisions, then I don’t know what else to tell you. Do you seriously think they’re just winging it without a clue what they’re doing?
Liberalism didn’t spawn the French revolution
There absolutely was an intellectualist movement which underpinned the French Revolution, without which it would have been disjointed riots with no shared conviction or cohesive structure, easily quelled and doomed to fail. All successful revolutions have been underpinned by intellectuals. That includes communist revolutions.
The ideas that we’re discussing now, both mine and yours, are exactly that: ideas. You think the twentieth century would have seen the Soviet Union if the nineteenth hadn’t had Marx and Engels?
Ideas inform decisions, and decisions inform actions. Actions without solid ideas behind them are lunacy. Actions require decisions, and decisions require ideas. It’s not that hard to figure out.
Yes, historically that is the case. Semantics drift over time, though. Even though both liberals and conservatives are classical liberals, only one actually still uses the liberal label. When you don’t acknowledge semantic drift, you alienate others because they can’t follow what you’re saying. If you want to destroy capitalism, you need to make the circle of people bigger, not shoulder people out before they begin.
Phrased another way, you want to move the Overton window leftwards, not contribute to it shrinking to the right.
Nah. We don’t need to surrender the overton window to liberals and let them dictate that the alternative to capitalism is capitalism, except the workers get more crumbs and minorities get conditional protections. Moving the Overton window left of the current rightwing framing requires people to realize how rightwing the current framing is.
Yes… by teaching people. Meaning you need to reach them. If the way you talk is a barrier to being understood, you’re going to reach way less people, my man.
I’m gonna quote scripture, not cause I’m Christian or anything (catholic apostate atheist), but because my sister fell into a Christian cult so this is an example that quickly comes to mind (her “church” had a real goofy interpretation of this that a lot of new American Christian Cults regularly have). 1 Corinthians 14:3-8, where Paul tells the Corinthians, who were holding mass at the time in Hebrew, that they need to speak to be understood. If they hold mass speaking a language that no one outside their church understands, they only lift themselves up. But if they speak to be understood, then they can lift up everyone.
Sorry to say, while using liberal in the way you do is definitely a nice shorthand to be able to identify people who are safe for you to express your views with, it also alienates those who don’t know what the historical term means. Speak Latin, dammit (that was how the catholic church misinterpreted Paul’s teaching in this letter. And the new Christians use it to promote speaking tongues. Aren’t religions great? /s)
I’d also chime in that definition change and can mean very different things in different places. It’s a bit silly how frequently I see other left leaning people, purely online, demonize anyone using liberal as a label.
To me it comes off as a bit manufactured division. It’s far too abundant to see on spaces like Reddit and certain Lemmy instances, yet near complete absent from offline discourse.
No one calls fascist chuds “liberal” anywhere outside of the US, either. And this is literally the first time that I’ve seen anyone call extreme rightwingers “liberal”.
It really depends on how you define things; a black and white definition doesn’t account for scenarios where one could logically be both leftist and liberal. So it’s not exactly nonsense.
The terms are not mutually exclusive, you can want more things to be publicly owned or operated but still want some forms of private ownership such as in the case of owning a home.
Do I think corporations should own the land for corporate enterprises or even for apartment buildings? Fuck no, that should be public since the land owners are incompetent and will try to generate a profit on things like hospitals, low income housing, or forcing out all of the good restaurants in the community.
Individual ownership for private use I don’t see a problem with though, such as home ownership, at least for one house. Although I see that as an incentive that should be there to encourage and reward work. Transportation could be mostly solved by a better public transit system that was connected.
Medical care, insurance, social security, childcare expenses, and many more could be covered by taxes, at least taxes on corporations. Yet alone having something like a Universal Basic Income to cover people’s daily expenses. There could be better union protections and such but I feel that’s branching the conversation off a bit much.
I’m sorry but you completelly misunderstand the idea of liberalism.
If we’re going with that route of thinking and we only focus on privatization, then being a liberal starts at “I’m extremely fucking enthusiastic about privatizing EVERYTHING”, not “yeah, it’s ok to have some things private i guess idk”
Do I think corporations should own the land for corporate enterprises or even for apartment buildings? Fuck no, that should be public since the land owners are incompetent and will try to generate a profit on things like hospitals, low income housing, or forcing out all of the good restaurants in the community.
Congrats, you are most likely NOT a liberal.
Individual ownership for private use I don’t see a problem with though, such as home ownership, at least for one house. Although I see that as an incentive that should be there to encourage and reward work. Transportation could be mostly solved by a better public transit system that was connected.
Oh yeah, such a disagreeable thing for non-liberals, huh? Very controversial, we socialists want to have EVERYTHING public, NO EXCEPTIONS! No, actually no.
Medical care, insurance, social security, childcare expenses, and many more could be covered by taxes, at least taxes on corporations. Yet alone having something like a Universal Basic Income to cover people’s daily expenses. There could be better union protections and such but I feel that’s branching the conversation off a bit much.
Yup, that’s definitely not a thing a liberal would say.
Yes, and as I already said elsewhere, speak to be understood. In the US, I have to account for semantic drift. You don’t, which is great, but 4chan is an American institution.
So, when the comment we’re all replying under drew the comparison between liberal and 4chan, the underlying context was that this was from an American perspective. So I talked about that, instead of talking about all possible contexts. Isn’t language neat?
Yes, Americans are ignorant, but it’s because of our incredibly loud propaganda. I would ask for kindness, but I’m certainly not gonna force it. I get being frustrated by the American-centric-ness that we all sort of drag around with us. I try to be humble, but it’s really hard to know the shit you don’t know, ya know?
> 4chan user
> lib
Pick one.
I do agree that anon’s take is bullshit.
The funny thing is that communism is technically an evolution of actual liberalism, and tankies look a lot less down on conservatives because of conservatism’s “muh tradishun” lifestyle marketing.
Lemmites just be spouting buzzwords at this point.
Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism, the guy in OP is definitionly a lib.
No, that’s neoliberalism. Which is a misnomer, because actual liberalism emerged from the humanist tradition and was a political philosophy, not an economic one. It’s where we got ideas like human rights, and rules that restrict governments’ abilities to oppress their citizens.
Neoliberalism misapplies the idea of “freedom” the same way anarcho-capitalists do. But I don’t think anyone here would argue that all anarchists are anarcho-capitalists.
Actually jokes on you, none of the words mean anything and they are all word games used to keep the masses in their places.
https://annas-archive.is/books/289061-289061-liberalism
Heres a book going through all the major liberal philosophers and how they dealt with the conflicts inherent to liberalism.
Tldr, core, overriding freedom of liberalism is and has always been for the dominant class to economically exploit the working class.
One author with a clear spin isn’t exactly a comprehensive literature review. You can probably find a book that says anything about anything.
If you pay attention to historical context you can see how liberalism was an improvement over the systems that had been in place prior, i.e. feudalism and monarchy.
The course of human society doesn’t magically jump from “terrible” to “great.” That never happens. More realistically, society makes incremental progress over generations as ideas develop and grow, catch on and are fought for and ultimately prevail over previous ideas and old systems which start to show cracks and ultimately fail. There are cycles of backsliding of course, and all progress is a battle where victory is never guaranteed, but that’s the gist of it, and it’s always incremental.
Without liberalism, there could never have been a civil rights movement, or suffragettes, or gay marriage. All these things built upon the foundation that was set for them by liberalism so long prior that people had already taken it for granted and forgotten about its origins.
Just because it wasn’t perfect from its outset doesn’t mean it wasn’t an improvement over what existed prior, or that it couldn’t be improved on further. And the course of history throughout the twentieth century is a story of liberalism prevailing. So much was achieved in those grueling years and decades that the world of the 1901 is practically unrecognizable to the world of 2001. That progress wasn’t achieved in a vacuum. It was achieved within a liberal system, in which ideas of human rights had already been formulated and enshrined in constitutional law, albeit imperfectly.
People were able to fight to expand the protections and rights of those laws precisely because they already existed. There were imperfect laws and systems in place that those activists were able to fight to improve and expand. Without liberalism, there wouldn’t have been even that.
You’re so close to stepping beyond idealism.
History has never been a struggle of ideas, where everyone gets together and the best idea wins, its always been a class struggle resulting from material reality.
Liberalism didn’t spawn the French revolution because somebody thought up humanism and everyone agreed it was a really good idea, but because the bourgeois were ascendant and liberalism reinforced their power so it was promoted. The same model explains why religion reinforced the power structures of the Roman empire/catholic church, why divine right reigned when the relation with means of production favored feudalism.
What I said wasn’t idealism, it was dialectical materialism.
You’re talking about class struggle but that doesn’t contradict what I said, because class struggle was a part of what I said. And you had to cherrypick my comment to find a part of it that you could portray as otherwise.
When did I ever say “everyone gets together and the best idea wins”? I said it’s a grueling struggle and victory isn’t guaranteed.
But, as the course of history shows, although humanity takes a couple steps backwards for every few steps it takes forwards, overall it moves on a positive trajectory. Or else we wouldn’t have made the progress that we have.
History has always been about ideas, and you have to be very ignorant of the history of ideas to fail to see how they underpin everything that happens in an era. Whether we talk about Cartesian Skepticism quite literally defining the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Early Modern era (and giving rise to the scientific Enlightenment itself), or about the how the threads of existentialism underlie the countercultural movements from the beatniks to the hippies to the punks and beyond. It’s all about ideas. What humans do is informed by the ideas that they hold.
By and large, the ideas underpinning monarchical forms of government did not survive the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because the ideas of liberalism prevailed over them. Prevailed first in people’s hearts and minds, and then in their decisions and their actions, and finally in political and military victories. Without the ideas, none of that later stuff would have occurred.
Nowadays we’re seeing other ideas compete: in this context specifically, the ideas of neoliberalism versus the ideas of democratic socialism. Clearly the latter are gaining the edge, but they’re doing so because first the ideas exist, second enough people are convinced that they could work that someone who will implement those ideas wins office, third they implement them and prove they work, fourth the ideas gain traction as people see that they work and the momentum begins to snowball.
It takes years or even decades. Bernie Sanders and AOC have been working at this for a long time, and if you can’t see how the ideas they subscribe to inform their policy decisions, then I don’t know what else to tell you. Do you seriously think they’re just winging it without a clue what they’re doing?
There absolutely was an intellectualist movement which underpinned the French Revolution, without which it would have been disjointed riots with no shared conviction or cohesive structure, easily quelled and doomed to fail. All successful revolutions have been underpinned by intellectuals. That includes communist revolutions.
The ideas that we’re discussing now, both mine and yours, are exactly that: ideas. You think the twentieth century would have seen the Soviet Union if the nineteenth hadn’t had Marx and Engels?
Ideas inform decisions, and decisions inform actions. Actions without solid ideas behind them are lunacy. Actions require decisions, and decisions require ideas. It’s not that hard to figure out.
Lol no
Indeed, its why Australia’s main conservative party (middle right) are called The Liberals
Yes, historically that is the case. Semantics drift over time, though. Even though both liberals and conservatives are classical liberals, only one actually still uses the liberal label. When you don’t acknowledge semantic drift, you alienate others because they can’t follow what you’re saying. If you want to destroy capitalism, you need to make the circle of people bigger, not shoulder people out before they begin.
Phrased another way, you want to move the Overton window leftwards, not contribute to it shrinking to the right.
Nah. We don’t need to surrender the overton window to liberals and let them dictate that the alternative to capitalism is capitalism, except the workers get more crumbs and minorities get conditional protections. Moving the Overton window left of the current rightwing framing requires people to realize how rightwing the current framing is.
Yes… by teaching people. Meaning you need to reach them. If the way you talk is a barrier to being understood, you’re going to reach way less people, my man.
I’m gonna quote scripture, not cause I’m Christian or anything (catholic apostate atheist), but because my sister fell into a Christian cult so this is an example that quickly comes to mind (her “church” had a real goofy interpretation of this that a lot of new American Christian Cults regularly have). 1 Corinthians 14:3-8, where Paul tells the Corinthians, who were holding mass at the time in Hebrew, that they need to speak to be understood. If they hold mass speaking a language that no one outside their church understands, they only lift themselves up. But if they speak to be understood, then they can lift up everyone.
Sorry to say, while using liberal in the way you do is definitely a nice shorthand to be able to identify people who are safe for you to express your views with, it also alienates those who don’t know what the historical term means. Speak Latin, dammit (that was how the catholic church misinterpreted Paul’s teaching in this letter. And the new Christians use it to promote speaking tongues. Aren’t religions great? /s)
I’d also chime in that definition change and can mean very different things in different places. It’s a bit silly how frequently I see other left leaning people, purely online, demonize anyone using liberal as a label.
To me it comes off as a bit manufactured division. It’s far too abundant to see on spaces like Reddit and certain Lemmy instances, yet near complete absent from offline discourse.
Americans sure love making everything miserably fucking stupid for their own convenience and ignorance.
No, liberals are not leftist ANYWHERE outside the US. And we don’t want that. That’s because that doesn’t make any fucking sense.
No one calls fascist chuds “liberal” anywhere outside of the US, either. And this is literally the first time that I’ve seen anyone call extreme rightwingers “liberal”.
Who’s calling them that? No, that would be libertarians.
It really depends on how you define things; a black and white definition doesn’t account for scenarios where one could logically be both leftist and liberal. So it’s not exactly nonsense.
Okay then, surprise me, what beliefs would a man posses that would lead him to calling himself a liberal leftist?
The terms are not mutually exclusive, you can want more things to be publicly owned or operated but still want some forms of private ownership such as in the case of owning a home.
Do I think corporations should own the land for corporate enterprises or even for apartment buildings? Fuck no, that should be public since the land owners are incompetent and will try to generate a profit on things like hospitals, low income housing, or forcing out all of the good restaurants in the community.
Individual ownership for private use I don’t see a problem with though, such as home ownership, at least for one house. Although I see that as an incentive that should be there to encourage and reward work. Transportation could be mostly solved by a better public transit system that was connected.
Medical care, insurance, social security, childcare expenses, and many more could be covered by taxes, at least taxes on corporations. Yet alone having something like a Universal Basic Income to cover people’s daily expenses. There could be better union protections and such but I feel that’s branching the conversation off a bit much.
I’m sorry but you completelly misunderstand the idea of liberalism.
If we’re going with that route of thinking and we only focus on privatization, then being a liberal starts at “I’m extremely fucking enthusiastic about privatizing EVERYTHING”, not “yeah, it’s ok to have some things private i guess idk”
Congrats, you are most likely NOT a liberal.
Oh yeah, such a disagreeable thing for non-liberals, huh? Very controversial, we socialists want to have EVERYTHING public, NO EXCEPTIONS! No, actually no.
Yup, that’s definitely not a thing a liberal would say.
Yes, and as I already said elsewhere, speak to be understood. In the US, I have to account for semantic drift. You don’t, which is great, but 4chan is an American institution.
So, when the comment we’re all replying under drew the comparison between liberal and 4chan, the underlying context was that this was from an American perspective. So I talked about that, instead of talking about all possible contexts. Isn’t language neat?
Yes, Americans are ignorant, but it’s because of our incredibly loud propaganda. I would ask for kindness, but I’m certainly not gonna force it. I get being frustrated by the American-centric-ness that we all sort of drag around with us. I try to be humble, but it’s really hard to know the shit you don’t know, ya know?
Edit: oops responded to the wrong person
Why when both are accurate