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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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My brother called me the other day, and after explaining how nature isn't "take or be taken from" when there's enough to go around. We got more into the myths about humans we're taught, and eventually he asked how I identify politically, and about the difference between a leftist and a liberal
I told him liberals want the system to work, to be fair. Leftists look around and say "there's so much food we leave a third of it to rot, why the fuck are people starving? What the fuck are we doing? No one is happy with the world we've created, why are we doing it? Why don't we start with the assumption that everyone gets to live, and figure out the details from there?"
Leftists/progressives say "the reason for all of that is the oligarchy hoarding all the resources, so we need to start with stopping them from doing that"
Liberals kinda want the same things as progressives, but they don't want to "hurt " the rich to get it. But of course if 5 people are hoarding literally everything the only way to get more for everyone is to take it from those 5 people. Liberals just can't get themselves to take that next step.
(This is US liberal btw, might be different in Europe)
liberals say they want the same things as leftists. they do not.
In Europe, the Liberal party is pretty far right, tbh.
The rest of the world uses the name "liberal" for different things. I think left and (American) liberal are pretty much the same thing, but obviously since America has two words, America divides the left into two.
We used to think the conservative side of politics was fairly united, while the left was a mess, ranging from leninists through environmentalists through workers' rights through people into the public good (and a thousand other divisions)
Now that conservative politics has been replaced by a radical mix of authoritarianism, individualism, anti-government, so I'm not all that sure they're as united as they used to look
I don't think that's true. At the heart of it ...
Liberals want to fix the system. They want to tweak things to make it fair, to make it work better
Leftists want to change the system. They want to rewrite the rules in a way that works better, the way things are currently be damned
Maybe I'd say liberals think the system CAN be tweaked enough to make it work for the people, progressives don't think it can and want to create a system that does... But I do think the major difference between liberals and progressives is liberals serve the oligarchy while progressives want to eradicate it
I think it's more like the system is built for the oligarchy, and liberals want to preserve the system. They'll often support things like taxes on the rich or worker protections - but they don't like the idea of something more direct
Neo-liberals do directly serve oligarchs, because they're liberals who operate under myths about how capitalism works - the efficiency of corporations, billionaires as innovators and job creators, voting with your wallet. They think if you fix the economy, everything else will work out, and for every social service they make sure to send a pile of money into someone's pocket. Thank God this seems to finally be declining
I think what makes this topic so complicated is we're taught a lie - that the political spectrum is a line. It's not two dimensional or a horseshoe - tankies are leftist authoritarians, but they're not further left than anarcho-communists. On some aspects they're pretty close to christo-fascists, but it's not because they went so far around that they're curving towards the far right. They just also want their end goal enforced from above, and also are willing to overlook a little genocide of the "enemy"
Meanwhile, anarcho-communists are on the other side of a different spectrum. They don't believe in a large system of enforcement from the top down, they believe in building community from the ground up. They don't believe in a system of rules, they believe in social bonds
The end goal is the same, but the methods couldn't be more different
My point with all this is that the left want change, the right wants the status quo. Conservatives want a hierarchy under de facto aristocrats, liberals want a system of rules, and anarchists want community rule
This doesn't all fit on a 2d spectrum, but it all makes sense when you break it down in more dimensions - you can nail down any coherent political stance to a point in this multifaceted graph space.
American liberals are different from liberals elsewhere, but what they have in common is they hold the legal framework as sacred. We already live in a world managed by English common law, they all want to perfect the laws, but resist anything that threatens the status quo