this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Maybe Lemmy cares, but in practice Americans don't & even the left doesn't pay this as much thought as the weirdos here do. Finer distinctions don't come up all that much in the media or the press, only here. Almost like this place is an echo chamber.
Liberals are the left, conservatives are the right, and everything else is more extreme grades in those respective directions.
In North America, liberalism almost exclusively means social liberalism: progressivism, the expansion of civil & political rights, endorsement of social justice, social services, mixed economy, government intervention to address economic & social issues while emphasizing individual rights and autonomy. That's almost all the left except for the fringier, authoritarian elements.
That's the conventional breakdown in the US, it's fairly coherent, and anything else is noise that isn't speaking their language & doesn't seem to get us anywhere.
This is just the lie you've been fed by neoliberals for the last 40 years so they could take everything we've worked for. There's a reason why the Democrats lost control of the working class. It's this exact mindset.
See? Nonsense: there is no lie over a difference in words.
The fact remains that in the US liberal is used broadly to encompass nearly all the left & folk here are arguing over words, ie, a merely verbal dispute. Liberal doesn't mean what you say it means in the US: it doesn't mean classical liberalism, conservative liberalism, or neoliberalism (who are called conservative here). Modern usage & definitions explains it.
While Democrats have lost the working class, it's more over the loss of unions, the party's realignment with middle class professionals, & declining populist appeal than with the meanings of words that decide whether "a leftist is a liberal".