Just a little thought I wanna discuss.
Unlike the more massive social media or the real world where theres not many leftists and we are gladly more united Lemmy and its left leaning tendencies with the instances providing natural cult grouping tendencies. Add to that the matrix in groups there and we all seem to be making a thing out of how to anger each other. How to troll each other or annoy x or y instance.
I hate this.
Living in an extreme right wing nation I know no other anarchist. A few left wingers. Even the libs here are right wing extremists by the standards of a western nation. I hold dear any solidarity.
I support unions here even when everyone there is a religious fundamentalist who wants sharia law bc they still qantnto improve the conditions of the working class.
Many folks here, who again I don’t have any hate for, I see intending these fights and dramas. Having the goal to be banned from x or y community or instance.
- Why!?!?
- What do you gain?
- What is the desire here??
I’m kind of surprised to not see this answer, so I’ll throw it in: it seems to me that there are a lot of people from various countries who have built-in language for politics that they believe is shared across the world - but it isn’t.
As a dumb American, I’ve always been a liberal because that was the inclusive, progressive, luxury-gay-space-communism option as opposed to the conservative, regressive, racist, ignorant violent option. People from other countries don’t seem to appreciate that at all, because their “liberal” is what we’d call neoliberal or corporate Democrat, and they apparently don’t have a FPTP / Slaver’s College fix on their elections and they just don’t grok the two party thing.
As you can imagine on here there’s a lot of hate from both conservatives and leftists for “liberals”. I think that’s ridiculous but it’s usually easier to try and adopt their definitions than to explain why the other 379,999,999 of us don’t use it that way. (Well - 350M, say. Parts of the PNW use it that way too.). It’s just kind of exhausting in threads about American politics.
If someone calls me a “liberal” (or libtard, libcuck, etc) I naturally assume they’re racist, fascist, AM radio fuckwits. But then they want to jump into some world where H4A, UBI, No Oil is what they’re all about and once again I’m like - well, yeah we agree, again. So.
(Usually the retort is, “well then why are you a liberal?!” Which. Goes back to the exhausting thing.)
Liberalism has an actual definition. Neoliberalism is a subset of liberalism. Either way, neither position is socialist and both are capitalist. That’s the distinction. That’s always been the distinction. Leftist politics is distinctly anti capitalist.
To leftists, liberalism, even progressive liberalism, can never address the material concerns for workers, inequal accumulation, and capitalism’s contradictions because it cannot attack the central tenet of its ideology: the private ownership of land and resources. And most of the social stuff was being advocated by leftist groups in the west for years before they became popular enough for the mainstream, liberal parties to embrace.
I’m an American. Conflating liberalism with leftism is a media game that has successfully ensured the Overton window does not shift left. It reveals the mass political ignorance here. Of the policies you’ve listed, only H4A is arguably socialist.
You can understand the two party system and make decisions to support certain candidates/policies in an election without identifying as a liberal.