this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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I'm not sure exactly what a liberal is, but nobody seems to like them.
Way too much jargon in the political comms, I feel.
Pretty sure liberalism no longer has anything to do with whatever it used to mean and has just become shorthand for neoliberalism. Basically center-right free market conservationism, austerity, privatization, and is ok with whatever your identity is as long as it can be commodified.
Classic liberalism probably looked more like what social democracy is now.
In the US it means exactly "Not conservative (or centrist)". Same as left-wing, progressive, etc. There just isn't really any distinction or nuance, and I only learned after joining Lemmy that outside the US, liberal has a completely different meaning, and basically means capitalist as far as I can tell.
I had the same, although opposite, realization. I'm used to Liberal meaning somewhat right-leaning; rights to private property, personal freedom, limited government, etc. Apparently in the US it's basically a "bad leftist dumb-dumb".
Here it's any leftist of any degree, so yeah, the conservatives use it as an insult, but otherwise it's not.
Liberalism is the ideology that created the modern meaning of democracy.
Explain?
Explain what exactly?
That seems to be a third definition I wasn't familiar with at all, but Klear covered it.
Hum... He didn't go far enough.
The law treating everybody equably is literally an idea taken from Liberalism. Representative governments where every person gets to vote is taken from Liberalism. The government regulating markets so companies compete on selling the best product is an idea taken from Liberalism. And yes, the part he got into, the entire idea of human rights and protecting them, that's also from Liberalism.
Huh. I wonder why it's so hated here on Lemmy then?
Everything is hated here on Lemmy.
There's a group of people around here that honestly hate it for what it is. That's probably a minority.
There's a group of people here that don't know what it is, and don't want to know, it's just BAD and nothing will make it any good. I suspect that's the majority.
There's a group thinks that it's a pretty underwhelming set of ideas. 400 years ago it was all the rage, but if it's all you defend today, that may not even be enough to qualify for the bare minimum for being a "good person". I suspect this group is way smaller than the other 2.
And there are also probably more reasons out there.
Edit: sorry for the wall of text. I had some time during my morning coffee and it got out of hand a bit
The issue with the US is that only having two parties warps and squishes all nuance in political discourse. Everything gets forced into one of two boxes. Plurality reduced to a binary choice.
Conservativism is associated with right and liberalism with left, but it doesn't have to be. We have a communist party - definitely economic left, but it's packed with old conservative fucks, with focus on the so called traditional values, hoping to return to the good old days, when they were the only ruling party and they could throw people in jail for reading the wrong book or having long hair. And their voting base is mostly uneducated rural folks, much like the GOP.
Liberalism stands for personal freedoms - expression, religion, movement - hence the name. The state's role is supposed to be to facilitate these freedoms. Think feminism, LGBT or environmental protection rather than the "government can't tell me what to do" libertarian types.
Overall the idea is the opposition to the totalitarian forms of government - monarchy, communism, fascism - that we have faced in not too distant ~~future~~ past (god I hope the typo is not a prediction), right here. I suspect in the US these are much more distant, abstract, easy to think of as bogeymen rather than a real threat.
Liberals are the people in power roughly half the time usually lowering the deficit and improving the quality of life for a bunch of people who typically don’t give a shit about it.
liberalism is when im mad but not at anarchism
liberalism and anarchism are also fascism
read theory
only libs downvote this
Your last line caused my downvote just so you know.
if you have the reading comprehension to understand that the most likely meaning of "liberalism is when im mad" is making fun of tankies i will choose to interpret that as participating in the joke and that's fine
Yes, anarchism, the ideology that is fundamentally opposed to hierarchy, is the same as fascism, an ideology that is steeped in hierarchy.
Motherfucker you need to read theory.