this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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This is all bullshit.
Who fucking cares about these definitions? All y'all have the same damn enemy. Worry about the enemy first. Iron out disagreements over terminology once the fascists are gone.
It's so weird that people spend so much time debating this pointless garbage.
Oh, the problem is much deeper than definitions. One group is socially progressive but economically right. Then, the other group is both progressive on social and economic issues. The economic policies is where the rift is.
Edit: wording
And the economic right have had all the power for the last god knows how many election cycles... They've been chasing the unicorn moderate that would somehow vote Democrat, which doesn't exist, but in doing so they lose the "left" vote.
Those "centrists" and "moderates" are conservatives that are disgusted by the GOP, but would never vote for Democrats because they don't agree with their policies. They have no party but the economic right liberals keep trying to attract them... Hopefully now with the change in DNC leadership they'll stop this losing game and actually be what their voters want them to be.
The "unicorn moderate" used to exist, and they grew from post-war up to the early 2000s. They were called the middle class. Back then when the middle class was much more prominent and bigger, they could still afford both private healthcare and keep up with the cost of living. One of the key litmus test of being "moderate" is the survey on affordable healthcare. In early 00s, socialised healthcare was deeply unpopular. However, it was from during and after the Great Recession of 2008 that the middle class shrunk and recognised that people need more public assistance. Affordable healthcare became increasingly more popular as time went on.
Rent have also become almost unaffordable since the recession. Ever since then, many proposals and plans to create affordable housing were made but have been blocked not just by corporations, but also by individual homeowners who don't want their house prices to go down. And one of the hard to swallow pills is that many of them are liberals. One could easily search online of affordable housing being voted down in California and New York, states that are liberal strongholds.
There is a reason why Zohran Mamdani's New York mayoral campaign is more widely successful than other Democratic candidates. He is addressing the growing cost of living by wanting to cap rent prices and providing government run grocery stores, which made him popular among the poor. Because the middle class shrunk and people had been shoved into fringes of poverty. The "moderate" voters that the Democrats are chasing is no longer there. At this day and age, "moderate" for centrists and neoliberals means the wealthy, while pretending that the word means the middle class voters from 2000s.
Leftists feel powerless and most are too insecure to go out and actually debate in right-wing spaces, so all they have is bickering internally about other leftists and complaining about liberals to satisfy their need for intellectual debate and drama.
You simply can't have an argument with a conservative, so I get how frustrating it is. But guys, there are other ways you can make progress, but I'm sorry to say it still involves leaving behind your discord polycule.
Debating in right wing spaces is futile. Those morons don't know the first thing about sourcing material or the truth
That's a reason to debate them.
Right? Do you want to get way more in terms of life quality? Then you are opposed to the hyper capitalist government. Do you want to get more money or do you want to give it to the oligarchs. It's not polarized anywhere
It gets trickier when you look at other countries where liberal means "(mostly) unfettered capitalism".
That's not what Liberal means, though. That might be what the Liberal Parties usually stand for, but that's not what the word means at all.
*sigh*
In my country, the formerly centre-right, now just right "the market will take care of it" party calls itself liberal ever since the 50s.
And the North Korean Dictatorship calls itself the Democratic Peoples Republic, whats your point?
The problem is we don't have the same enemies, there are people who claim to be left but oppose Liberals, such as Tankies. Tankies aren't the enemy of the GOP, they want the GOP to win over progressives like the DNC. They use words like "capitalism" to describe everything wrong with the USA because that way they can exclude the eastern dictatorships like Russia and China from the same criticisms.
Shit posts like the one above are the result of psyop campaigns.
It is a jab at Americans who can't tell the difference between left and liberal and often conflate the two.
And sure look, if liberal Democrats really want to win again, they have to deal with "kitchen table issues" as Mamdani puts it. And as I mentioned to one of the commenters, who are the ones who keep voting down affordable rent and housing, even in liberal states, because it will bring their house prices down? Mamdani forwarded a solution to that by capping rent prices and he won over people for that. That alone says why American left and liberals are actually different though mainly on economic issues.
CaPitAlIST LIbrUhLS CoNFLaTe HuMAn riGHTs wiTh ProGRESS HUURRGGH DURRRR Yeah I know your whole spiel
Affordable housing, freedom from want and jobs are human rights.
Then why are you opposing them?
You should be asking yourself if you can read at all.
Is this what shitlibs tell themselves?
Any leftist will use words like capitalism to describe the issues because it’s fucking all pervasive. And China and Russia are also both capitalist despite whatever tankiefuck will tell you.
We don’t have the same enemies, because you ally with the ownership class and not your own.
Liberal means advocate of human rights, bare definition. If there is at all an ownership class then liberalism is not being administrated. And I assure you, the word "Capitalism" on Lemmy is used the vast majority of the time as a dogwhistle for "Western Nation".
In what way does exchanging money for goods cause outlawing gay marriage or banning books? In what way does it cause not taxing the rich? Makes no goddamn sense. Authoritarianism and Conservatives cause those things.
Not unless you're creating your own personal definition. At best, liberalism means advocating for individual rights, and where you or I might disagree with the application of that idea is where individual rights are in tension with communal or collective rights more broadly
Markets are not the same as capitalism. It's a description of a system that enshrines abstract ownership over systems of production. If you dont take issue with the coercive mechanisms within capital relations, then im not really sure where to put you 'on the left'.
Mandated, unconditional individual rights ARE collective rights and also human rights.
You also appear to no know the definition of Capitalism because if Capitalism is not a regulated Market System then the USA is also not a capitalism. Not surprising since you people use it as a dog whistle to mean "western nation" that you lack understanding of what it actually means.
Not when those rights are in conflict with another individual's. The classic example is the individual right to private property, but there are many others. American liberals do recognize these limits and contradictions, but accept as granted the right to private property. It's the center tenet of leftist critique, so it makes a lot of sense why there's a lot of cynicism about liberals claiming to occupy the same space. Sure, they have some overlap, but the main contention is left unaddressed by American liberals and so leave themselves open to derision.
It's a type of regulated market system, but it's defined by its mode of production being capitalist in nature. Socialist and communist systems still employ regulated markets, but collectivize ownership over productive capital instead. Abolishing capitalism isn't a way of saying we should abolish markets, but to remove capital as the mode of production
If rights to one person contradict the rights of another, resulting in loss and harm then guess what? Individual rights aren't being mandated and upheld and that's not Liberalism.
No, they don't, because that has never existed and will never if you keep bending over backwards to dictators.
I dont think you're getting it, honestly. There are a ton of examples where liberalism exposes tensions between individual and collective rights, and most of them revolve around the right to property. Liberal democracies are constantly having to enforce new regulations because capital owners are constantly finding new ways to abuse their ownership of property in ways that harm others. You can say all you want that isn't 'true liberalism', but then what democracy would qualify then? What happens when the accumulation of wealth under liberal democracy leads to such a disparity of power that government can no longer function as a regulating body? hint, you're living it, bud
Are you sure? There have been no examples of socialized systems of production?
I think you're confusing socialist and communist states with socialist and communist systems.
I think you accidentally just said the antithesis to your entire argument by claiming liberals are protecting individual rights from those who would take advantage of them.
Yes, they are protecting individual rights to property, and that's a huge issue.
Personally I think a much bigger issue is that no rights are being protected and we're devolving into a white nationalist militaristic dictatorship which refuses to tax the rich.
But keep wingeing about the horrors of copyright laws and small scale landlords.
Nah, I can just see past the noise of nationalism to what systemic conditions gave rise to it. Thinking we can return to liberal democracy without seizing some portion of our means of production away from private ownership is nothing more than naivete.
But keep winging about the horrors of socialism.
Lmfao, Tankies talking about nationalism and the conditions that give rise to authoritarianism. What a fucking joke.
Lmao, liberals deluding themselves thinking authoritarianism just pops into existence out of happenstance