Memes

You've upset a lot of liberals who think liberals are leftists.

Americans are so liberal that they have like ten words for it and every mainstream political opinion is just a type of liberalism.

I hate how these terms are used colloquially. Here are wikipedia's definitions:

Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.

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.

So no. The definitions are very different. Now you can say that liberals and conservatives are similar in your country or that you live in liberalism and therefore trying to keep it is conservatism, but there is no necessary overlap afaik.

Even funnier when you tell them you hate liberals too and their brains short circuit

If you believe in democracy, personal rights, and capitalism ... congrats, you're a liberal.

(Though, given how much modern 'conseravtives' hate democracy and personal rights, a lot of them aren't really liberal anymore. They're fascist.)

“Conservative” means wanting to conserve the status quo of an existing system. In that sense, the “liberals” are far more conservative than the self-proclaimed “conservatives”.

What these “conservatives” want is to destroy the current status quo and return to the values of the Confederates. This can be defined as being “reactionary”. Fascist governments have a capitalist economy model, so we can say they too are liberals.

All in all, both of them are the enemy of the working class, and must be crushed wherever they are seen.

During the French Revolution, the Conservatives were on the side of the aristocrats and french nobility. Squarely against the revolution and democracy.

Not much has changed really.

We're all libs down here

Ok… if we're looking at this dispassionately and considering history, this meme may be accurate only in some places, but not in the rest.

Conservatism was articulated in response to liberalism. Liberalism argued for rationality, contractual social relationships, and natural rights. When liberalism proposed this, conservatives articulated a response: it argued for tradition, organicist and inherited social relationships, and traditional wisdom.

These two worldviews were so incompatible that hundreds of thousands of people died defending their views against the others'. An example is France in the 18th century.

Some conservatives recognized the power of liberalism: a bourgeois elite was burgeoning. Faced with this reality, some conservatives adapted to this change. This is what some people may take as evidence of "liberalism contains conservatism". But that's not the whole story.

Historical materialism may point out that both conservatism and liberalism have fought for capitalism, and that therefore they serve the same function. If that's all we ask from an analytical framework, then that's okay. But I want to understand why there are hundreds of thousands of dead people in the 18th century. And, luckily, historical materialism istelf can, at its best, explain the difference between liberalism and conservatism.

For example, the 18th century revolutions occurred in response to the growth of the bourgeois. Conservatives defended pre-capitalist social structures and modes of production. This was not capitalist versus capitalist. And historical materialism can explain this violence by distinguishing between these class formations, not by collapsing these class formations.

Even if both conservatives and liberals later prove capable of ruling capitalist societies, I believe we shouldn't settle for a reductionist view of history.

There's a further complication: America. The American Revolution is as American as the French Revolution was French. They were not the same. Americans lacked the aristocracy that the French had. Therefore, conservatism in America is not at all the same as conservatism in France. American conservatives defend a country that was born liberal.

In my view, saying that conservatism is the same as liberalism is problematic. It seems reductive and reduces the explanatory power of both concepts. For example, if someone truly believes there is no difference between liberalism and conservatism, how would they explain the hundreds of thousands of dead in the 19th century revoutions? Plus there's the following problem: at its worst, conflating conservatism with liberalism is a way of imposing the American lens on the rest of the world.