this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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I mean, you gotta define your spectrum. If you want to get French with it, the Monarchists are on the right and the Liberals are on the Left. The communists won't really exist for another fifty years (as a European economic school).
Liberalism only exists "on the right-wing" in the modern era thanks to over a century of Socialist nation building. Even then, the very term is muddled by decades of fascist rebranding - first as Anarcho-Capitalists and then as National Socialists and then as Neo-Conservatives and then as Neo-Liberals and now in a return to White Nationalism - with "liberal" being embraced or rejected in turns as our corporate media needed it to be.
As a case in point, I challenge you to tell me whether liberals are libertarian. In Europe and Asia, they functionally are. In the Americas, they couldn't be further from it in mainstream politics.
The political spectrum is full of double-speak. "Liberal" is a textbook case. It can mean anything and nothing.
If we're being consistent, it's an ideology centering private property and capitalism, which puts it on the right in the global context.
That's the economic angle. But it also promises a host of libertarian social reforms included within the free market system. What's more, liberalism isn't just an attempt to yank socialists back from their economic progressivism. They're often efforts to balkinize the power base of local dictatorships and feudal aristocracies.
The original liberals were trying to break up the Old World feudal system, establish economic mobility through cross-border trade, and secularize states that had historically been married to a single branch of a particular religion. All of that was incredibly left-wing from the perspective of the theocrats and monarchists.
Hell, the whole pitch aimed at The Dictatorship of the Proletariat that liberals make is that Socialists/Communists are just Monarchists in disguise. Unipolar parties aren't really democratic. Centrally planned economies aren't really communally owned or beneficial. And atheist leaders are just advancing their lack-of-religion as its own kind of faith.
Are these liberals full of shit?
spoiler
YesBut the political spectrum is wide, and they're nowhere near the right-most end of it.
I feel that this is just a consequence of trying to firmly place ideologies on a spectrum beyond whether they affirm capitalism or affirm socialism. I don't tend to bother trying to compare how right or how left ideologies are, but instead judge the various left and right ideologies on their own propositions, which can't be easily graphed.
The left starts at anti-capitalism, bozo.
Now go read a book.
Well liberals today forgot about equality so they can just fuck off
It's not a spectrum