For those in here that take offense to this distinction:
2 party political systems function to collapse diverse political perspectives into one of two camps and normalize an ‘average’ view for both parties. Leftists take issue with this collapse because it erases dissenting views within each party in service of defeating an ‘other’ at the expense of pursuing our real political goals.
The label matters to those of us who want to make the point that the US democratic party does not really represent our interests; at-best they represent a less-objectionable flavor of the same ideological framework, but one that needs to be dismantled all the same.
“Stop trying to divide us!” is a refrain spoken by those who are better served by the party than we are.
Put another way: “We are not the same”
How’s the saying go?
I know, I have three of them and I still can’t pay rent.
I think the current best demonstration on this is how hard people are pushing Mark Kelly as VP.
They push a center-right president onto the stage and then dangle another “centrist” to try and, what? Appeal to Never Trumper Republicans? Racists?
How about you offer actual progressives some goddamn enticement for once and offer it to Jamaal Bowman, who the Dems primaried in favor of a genocidal AIPAC stooge?
If he was that popular and progressives that numerous he wouldn’t have lost his primary, especially as the incumbent. Simple as.
You are clueless as far as actual policies supported by actual Americans. Policy wise, there is pretty much a super majority of Americans that support actual progressive policies
If that was the case then maybe they should get off their asses and vote then huh?
As soon as there’s a candidate that actually represents them… Imagine if the 2 candidates were Trump and Romney, both running as Republicans… Would libs be crying that everyone needs to vote Republican or the Republicans will win? Replace Republican with conservative in that last sentence, and maybe it will clear up why progressives don’t bother voting… There is no one to vote for
(I’m voting for Kamala, so should everyone)
You really do have the solution for everything maybe you should run for office
Don’t be mad at me that he either sucks or progressives can’t be assed to go vote.
Im just pointing out your suggestion is laughable because he can’t even win his primary as an incumbent.
Yes because Israel lobby spent the most money in history for any primary seat of congress. One district rep for congress is a little different than the whole country, but yes, money needs to be taken out of politics.
In other news the capital of Israel is about to get bombed by Iran, which is too bad I guess
Policy wise, there is pretty much a super majority of Americans that support actual progressive policies
There’s a huge trust gap in implementation. That’s why Donald Trump threaten a national victory via votes from dying Boomers convinced he’s going to unleash fantasy free health care technology while Bernie Sanders can’t squeak through a primary on the promise of increasing Medicaid enrollments.
People may want the same things, but they are deeply cynical in who they trust to deliver those policies.
Health care is a fantasy in the United States don’t get sick here it would be cheaper to fly to a hotel in Paris if you are sick I suppose
If he was that popular and progressives that numerous he wouldn’t have lost his primary
Propaganda works. You can bombard people with media attacks on a progressive politician to trick people into thinking he’s reactionary. In this case, a heavily Jewish district was flooded with “Jamaal Bowman is antisemetic” messaging for months straight and it cost him the election.
This has nothing to do with his popularity or his progressive bonafides and everything to do with his cash on hand to run counter-programming.
Again, he was down a ton before the AIPAC money came in.
That PAC bullshit is just that but it doesn’t explain his loss.
he was down a ton before the AIPAC money came in
George Latimer was recruited and sponsored by AIPAC on day one.
That you’re being downvoted for this totally reasonable comment only inches away from a top level comment lamenting a system that silences dissenting views is nice.
Lol because he’s citing the system being critiqued as evidence to make the case that progressive politics aren’t popular
“This system disadvantages dissenting views”
“Dissenting views just arent popular, just look at the outcome of this system”
They push a center-right president onto the stage
Like, 90% of the US Senate is center-right or worse. You’re in a country that is governed overwhelmingly to the right of the popular political view. I don’t think the VP pick is going to meaningfully shift any of that. Running Walz as your VP isn’t going to turn the US Senate into the Minnesota Governor’s Mansion.
How about you offer actual progressives some goddamn enticement for once and offer it to Jamaal Bowman, who the Dems primaried in favor of a genocidal AIPAC stooge?
Because the US has a huge geopolitical strategic interest in staying friendly with Israel and a vanishingly small interest in cultivating support among progressive New Yorkers.
Because the US has a huge geopolitical strategic interest in staying friendly with Israel and a vanishingly small interest in cultivating support among progressive New Yorkers.
This is an excellent explanation for the way things are but a really terrible reason to keep them that way
Am I the only one who thinks we need to pick someone no older than ~50 for VP? Based on the idea that VP is an understudy position?
It’s not an understudy position. The role of VP has historically been a way to “balance the ticket” between factions in the party. So, a Kennedy from Massachusetts and Johnson from Texas. Or California’s Reagan with a Connecticut Bush.
More recently, the VP has been a means of whipping votes in the House (Cheney and Ford) or the Senate (Gore, Biden, Pence) and raising money from affiliate donor networks (all of the above, but Harris and Vance more than ever).
If you want a Presidential job training program, look to the governor’s mansion or the State Department. But by the time you’re VP, you’re not training. You’re in the game.
It’s absolutely been used as an under study position in the past. It can be all those things too.
It’s absolutely been used as an under study position in the past.
Name one VP who was a practical understudy for the job of President and I’ll name you ten that were equally if not more qualified for the job.
Here you go. Link
Very well put
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They didn’t like John McCain, so they lumped him in with the rest of us.
The upside of that is it works against their overton window dragging, if you are going to be called a commie leftist no matter what might as well lean into it
How does it work against overton window dragging if saying “maybe people should stop dying of preventable disease in the wealthiest country on earth” gets you labelled a communist? It’s precisely the sign that the overton window is shifted to the far right
Sure wish the libs would get this
i think it works against leftist’s goals we they lean into the straw man description of a tankie; it’s turns off liberals a lot
Meh, though the meme is true, most Americans would say liberals are EVERYONE left of center, and conservatives are EVERYONE right of center.
Yeah, but that ‘center’ is a relative term and people move ‘center’ to fit their opinion. Every American I know thinks they are close to center, but I know people that are far left and far right, as well as people that lean left and right from a mostly central position.
No one wants to consider themselves radicalized, but there are a lot of people out there that are.
Most of American politics is right wing. Democrats lean right and Republicans run right. You could change the slant of your statement with a left-bias, instead of the right, by saying everyone left of center is progressive and everyone right of center is regressive.
Correct, I invoked an unnamed speaker in my statement.
Rephrased: each asked American would describe liberal or conservative as capturing the entire spectrum, (left or right respectively) of what they consider center.
All I mean is that the terms are most commonly used (in America) to capture damn near half of the spectrum.
No one wants to consider themselves radicalized
Speak for yourself buddy, proud owner of the “radical leftist” label here.
What most Americans think of as ‘center’ is way fucking right compared to most of the world.
Here Bernie Sanders is a radically dangerous communist.
In other parts of the world he is just considered a bit progressive.
Bernie is barely left of center on the world stage
The center is now also conservative, unfortunately.
Doesn’t matter to my explanation
It does, really, if you understand what an Overton Window is…
They only say that because they’ve been trained to by conservative media. Just because education is bad doesn’t mean reality is different.
No, it’s a matter of colloquial semantics.
Yep, many people complaining about semantics here don’t realize that when the US calls something “the left” they aren’t referring to “leftism”, they are referring to a metaphorical graduated chart where democrats are on the left hand and republicans are on the right.
“The left” on this chart is anyone leaning towards the Democratic Party, where “the right” is anyone leaning towards the Republican Party.
It’s frustrating that we let this become a dividing topic, because it is pedantic at best.
And what’s annoying is conservatives certainly bicker, but are generally very unified.
True leftists seem so hellbent on distancing themselves from “liberals”. All they are doing is sowing division, in what conservatives consider a binary landscape.
Close; true leftists are hellbent on disillusioning liberals of the notion that they’re contributing anything by simply voting every 4 years for the democrat du jour.
The political goals of leftists involve a lot more than simply defeating republican opponents, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the majority of casual democrats. What’s more; leftists have an understanding that reactionary political movements don’t simply go away when you vote them out; they are created by real material conditions that need to be addressed, else they will return the next cycle having gained more momentum.
Liberals are either comatose leftists who are dragging progress to a halt, or reactionaries in denial who would rather a reactionary movement take over than see the hierarchical structure of their country change, even marginally.
Lol this is it
If there were no distance between us then you wouldn’t need to move to close the gap.
We’re distancing ourselves from libs because we don’t want the same things for the most part. Besides getting trump out of the picture we’re rather different.
Right, and conservatives want lots of different things, yet they generally act in a unified way when it comes down to voting day.
I always vote democrat
I wish you libs would do more than just vote a couple times a year.
People will casually remark “that’s just they way they’re using the word, no point in arguing” and then never stop to ask why and to what end.
The reason US politics operates along that dimension is explicitly because of the way their electoral politics work. It’s not simply a matter of it being the common usage, it’s also a core part of what capital L leftists are critiquing when they say ‘liberals are not left wing’. Democrats are dealing in exactly the ideological framework that is the target of leftist opposition, it isn’t sufficient to lump everyone on the democratic side into a single category.
Corporate media and cable news in general
Using neo-liberals to define liberals is like using national socialism to define socialism.
It’s authoritarian propaganda.
Libs and leftists are different
Sure, but liberals are still left wing, and saying they’re not is just making enemies out of other left wingers, with is a long standing left tradition.
You’d all get so much further if you recognised allies in one area don’t have to be allies in all areas. You can all have your own opinions and work together where it suits you towards set goals, rather than name calling, “no true Scotsman”-ing and in fighting. It honestly feels like the right have infiltrated the left at times, and just turned them on each other.
In what world are liberals left wing? Here in Europe liberals are all considered centrists. Even the ones that are for the well-fare state.
America and the rest of the Western world use liberal completely differently. We have a self enforced two party system in the US so it’s real easy to boil everything down to an either/or fallacy.
At any rate we’ve stuck all the civil rights stuff, public goods, and people based governance under the tag of liberalism. And all the pro corporate stuff, anti rights, and privatization under Conservatism.
The biggest shift in that paradigm in the last 20 years has been a collective realization that both parties believe governance should favor corporations.
And all the pro corporate stuff, anti rights, and privatization under Conservatism
I think I’d contest at least the pro corporate stuff and privatization parts of this.
At a mininum, US liberals have a codependent relationship with corporate and private entities. If not flat-out pro-capitalist relationship.
I should have been more clear. When I said “we’ve stuck…” I meant that’s the idea most people have. Not that that’s what’s actually happening.
There is a wide gulf between political history and ideologies and party politics.
I’ve never met a liberal who was left of center
Capitalists are not left wing.
You don’t get to gatekeep “left wing” behind your nonsense failed ideology.
I don’t think he invented dialectical materialism
So all of the other leftwing ideologies are anti capitalist, but that’s not the thing that makes them leftwing? What is?
Aren’t you literally doing the thing you accused them of? Deriding their entire ideology? It’s almost like you aren’t an ally and you’re just lying through your teeth!
Words have meaning bud
They do, and you are making them up.
No they are center left or center right essentially being capitalist populist movements.
Yeah…
ITT: people who are in a state of BBQ flavored confusion.
Lemmy help y’all out.
leftist: some socialist policies, universal healthcare, publicly funded education, jobs programs, ubi, abolition, etc…
liberal: voting rights, property ownership, access to banking, civil liberties
neo liberal: global access to markets, global tade, international standards bodies, world banks, world courts, trade agreements.
Not sure I agree with your categories. I think you’re conflating stances on globalisation with econonic and social issues. I’m a left wing voter and I support pretty much all the things you listed
But I can see how people end up with those ideas. Media sucks at teaching actual stuff.
Well, neoliberalism isn’t just that, it’s also “privatization, deregulation, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society”
So you can’t really be a leftist and support neoliberalism. We’re seeing the catastrophic results now.
That was rather my point. You define neoliberalism in the way I do. And I vehemently oppose it, so defined. But the post I responsed to defined it more as an issue of globalisation which is a different topic imo
Ah sorry, I misunderstood.
Leftist - I own personal objects. Large things are owned communally. I have human rights.
Liberal - I own anything I can buy. If the law sees me as a person then I have human rights.
Conservative - I own personal objects. Large objects are owned by a predetermined elite. I do not have human rights. Even the elite only have as many rights as they have power.
This stood me well in my poli sci studies but obviously it’s hilariously top level and actual ideologies take more than a couple sentences to categorize. But this effectively covers OG Liberalism and Conservatism with Leftist ideas in their own category. Also any system of categorization is doomed to fail in the end because it’s actually a 5d shifting plane of color shades out there. Like going from leftist to totalitarian or liberal to effectively wanting a king again while still talking about liberal stuff.
“neoliberalism” is a term coined to be descriptive, it’s a subset of liberalism. “national socialism” is a term coined to hijack the rising popularity of socialism.
Calling liberal when you’re really just for the freedom to exploit and economically subjugate so nobody can stop you is also a slight hijack.
I believe in freedom or liberty as a word for a specific value. A vast majority of all normal human beings believe in this value. Not all are sane enough to understand that as a society you have to make compromises.
I feel like socialists and libertarians / neoliberals are trying to gaslight us into thinking freedom means something different, something materialistic. Well not gaslight exactly, but stealing or hijacking a word like you say. Like trying to redefine what feminism means.
Calling liberal when you’re really just for the freedom to exploit and economically subjugate so nobody can stop you is also a slight hijack.
The flagship liberals were mostly slavers who wanted to go from being merely the richest people in the colonies to the deified ruling class of a country. Liberalism is the leveling of political powers so that uneven economic power dominates. It was this way with slave plantations, with laissez faire, with the “progressive” era of finishing up slaughtering the natives but keeping more of the trees this time, with Jim Crow, redlining, the red scares and with neoliberalism. That’s all of American history besides the (you got me) illiberal World War I - II period.
Or we can just go and look at the social context of authors like Locke, who were advocating for the sacredness of personal property because he was among the wealthy and saw how rowdy the masses were getting.
I believe in freedom or liberty as a word for a specific value.
And it is . . .
A vast majority of all normal human beings believe in this value
Still no clue, but now we are declaring that a “vast majority” of all “normal” human beings believe in it! Are we to believe that some highfalutin theoretical value is just independent of culture? Must be something
Not all are sane enough to understand that as a society you have to make compromises.
If you remember one thing from my comment, remember the historical context at the start. If you remember two things, let the second one be this: If you were arguing with a libertarian, right there is where you lose. You let them question-beg what freedom is and let them play champion to it exactly like they want to, as even their hijacked name signifies [“libertarianism” used to refer to a strain of anarchism, and not the newage “leftlib” thing either].
I feel like socialists and libertarians / neoliberals are trying to gaslight us into thinking freedom means something different, something materialistic. Well not gaslight exactly, but stealing or hijacking a word like you say. Like trying to redefine what feminism means.
You are absolutely right on libertarians, as I described with their very name above. You are incorrect on both neoliberals and socialists.
Neoliberals have already indoctrinated basically everyone in the anglosphere because they have spent decades as the uncontested dominant power. It is the water you swim in that you don’t even have a name for, and that’s just how they like it. Americans are the best example of this because, while I think your definition of “liberal” is untenable, theirs is overtly pathetic. To them, it is a synonym for “left”. They just don’t have a word for what, say, Brits call liberal, because that’s kind of everything in their reference point! Well, except theocracy, but they’re still working on that word.
As for socialists, well, I think you’d need to readdress your objection first, because:
“Freedom” is a political concept.
Political concepts, I am sure we can agree, have no significance outside of reality.
Reality is material.
Freedom’s significance depends on its materiality. QED.
Conversely, anyone who told me that they wanted to tell me about their politics but that it had no meaningful relationship to material reality is not someone I would listen to talk for any reason. Now, I’m not saying you’re saying that – I doubt you are – but your explanation struggles to hold up to that. I used [admittedly crass] deduction for refutation there because it was convenient, but I hope you don’t think I have any particular interest in deceiving you. I just don’t think that a starving person in a desert is meaningfully free, though we haven’t gotten that far yet.
Complete aside, but the discussion about muddling word meanings reminded me of my favorite short text by Lenin:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/11.htm
Thanks for taking the time to reply, I think we believe the same things but disagree on definition of words and on tactics.
The flagship liberals were mostly
Why do they get to redefine the meaning of words and erase concepts? They were wrong or deliberately lying bastards.
joke
You think just because they planted their imperial flag in this piece of conceptual real estate they get to own it? I pick it up and throw it on the ground! I’m not part of your system! :D
When someone says he believes in liberal values (liberty as a synonym for freedom) it is just a bad tactics to (deliberately) misunderstand them to mean freedom to oppress and attack them for it. Even if your only goal were the pursuit of power (or wealth or influence) it would be bad tactics to insult those you wish to convince.
I believe it is important to wake people up that what capitalists say with freedom is a lie, that people cannot be free if they their socioeconomic situation doesn’t allow them to. We need to reclaim the word “freedom” as encompassing the freedom from exploitation, economic servitude, lies, constant imaginary terror, or threats of real violence. That news and social media has become a prison of distorting mirrors and lies.
PS: Obviously freedom cannot be an absolute or principle but a compromise with society. I’d be curious what you would call the concept of both individual and economic liberty. Like what “should” someone say when they want to say they believe in liberal values? Socialism? :)
PPS: Thanks for the short text, it’s hilarious
Why do they get to redefine the meaning of words and erase concepts? They were wrong or deliberately lying bastards.
When someone says he believes in liberal values (liberty as a synonym for freedom) it is just a bad tactics to (deliberately) misunderstand them to mean freedom to oppress and attack them for it.
It’s just a matter of what “liberalism” is. That’s how language works in material reality, that things gain new meanings based on social circumstances. It’s like saying “That person isn’t black! Their skin and their hair are clearly just dark shades of brown”. In some sense you are correct, but you only get there by ignoring the other meaning of the word, which is clearly the one being used. Words don’t have any other meaning except that which was socially constructed.
I believe it is important to wake people up that what capitalists say with freedom is a lie, that people cannot be free if they their socioeconomic situation doesn’t allow them to. We need to reclaim the word “freedom” as encompassing the freedom from exploitation, economic servitude, lies, constant imaginary terror, or threats of real violence. That news and social media has become a prison of distorting mirrors and lies.
You sound very much like a nascent socialist. I agree with this completely.
PS: Obviously freedom cannot be an absolute or principle but a compromise with society. I’d be curious what you would call the concept of both individual and economic liberty. Like what “should” someone say when they want to say they believe in liberal values? Socialism? :)
Well, without a definition of freedom, it’s very difficult to answer this question. Part of the reason is that we can (as even liberals will tell you) frame “freedom” as “freedom from” and “freedom to”, and these freedoms typically represent opposite values. As a crude example, consider the freedom to kill versus the freedom from being killed. Thus, there is no such thing as absolute freedom, though socialists certainly had things to say, as you did earlier, about the lack of freedom experienced by someone who is destitute, as well as the lack of freedom in a class system, where the state is necessarily organized by the ruling class to suppress the underclass.
Framed in terms of ideals, as I suggested earlier and the Lenin piece says, socialism is the political and economic equality of the people (economic equality here not meaning the equality of how much money you have, but the masses being able to decide production instead of an elite owning class, though that itself is conducive to everyone getting what they need on the basic principle of organizing production towards serving everyone).
PPS: Thanks for the short text, it’s hilarious
Lenin is an entertaining guy. The letter I shared is his punchiest work in that respect, but I think the book State and Revolution is also entertaining in its own way, as well as dealing with issues a bit larger in scope than liberal-professorial sophistry.
Sure words change meaning but they also have multiple meanings and concepts evolve. Nobody really uses the word liberalism anymore. Like how would you define the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism? That word was specifically created to delineate the “rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law”. There are further issues:
Using concepts as defined pre 1960 is problematic at least because we had massive advances in science and understanding of how humans, society and economics and systems of power work. Game theory, mass psychology, sociology, and technology has advanced so that we know these ideas as seen originally do not work, since we have historical evidence of their failure. So to continue to use them is a fallacy - or in the case of reactionaries a bad faith attempt.
Most people don’t see ideology as absolutes, they pick and choose. The opposite of someone what believes in liberal values is a fascist, not a socialist. Principles or absolutes in e.g. freedom are just bullshit talking points that politicians and pundits sell us for profit and to polarize us.
In my opinion, any serious socialist or communist today must be in favor of “limited personal free market” where individuals or small groups of individuals have the liberty to produce, innovate and become entrepreneur, because we now know that this is a fundamental expression of human nature. E.g. build some cool keyboards and sell them on etsy or whatever. Or a family that runs their own restaurant in cuba. Only when a corporation grows and becomes too big does it have to become a coop or similar. Like all the big internet companies started small and wholesome, but now should be nationalized and turned into democratically (worker+user) controlled cooperatives.
I do believe you have concepts like that in variations of socialism, so much that I’d argue that 90% of the values defined in liberalism are fully compatible with a hypothetical “neosocialism”. And I doubt you’d find serious socialists today that really want to defend the original maxist/leninist or maoist theories of socialism. Unfortunately I’ve never found a textbook from after say 1990 or 2000 about an improved economic theory for socialism.
But fundamentally I don’t believe in any ideology. I believe 90% of all humans share the same values but are reprogrammed through lies and emotional manipulation. And that a small percentage of humans value power/wealth/influence above anything else and will spoil any system we can come up with. And THAT is the problem, one that traditional socialism doesn’t address either.
I believe that instead of arguing about the finer points of old ideologies from the barbarous times pre 1950 we should be working on tools to control or negate these corrosive and corrupting influences (Wealth caps? Sortition? AI?). But we’re not even talking about that today any more.
But what has changed is that the “right” is now reactionary and heading towards fascism and no longer believes in liberal values. The liberals should be your allies.
PS: Sorry for the long rant lol
I go on plenty of long rants, I have no right to complain. I’ll try to address what I find to be the more productive points.
Nobody really uses the word liberalism anymore
Here and elsewhere you exhibit a serious myopia. Can I imagine that there are some places, especially in the US, where use of the term as anything other than “Democrat” has died out? Of course. Does that mean in the whole world no one is using it? Absolutely not, there are many countries where its use is much more common and political analysts still use it even in America.
Like how would you define the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism?
Liberalism is a general philosophical movement that I have already defined. Neoliberalism is the dominant strain within the broader movement that is oriented around American imperial hegemony.
That word was specifically created to delineate the “rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law”.
I don’t care what Wikipedia told you about neoliberalism, that is not the history of the term. Neoliberalism emerged as a reactionary opposition to social democracy (which was popular due to the gains socialism was making in the East) once the Cold War started drawing to a close.
Using concepts as defined pre 1960 is problematic at least because we had massive advances in science and understanding of how humans, society and economics and systems of power work. Game theory, mass psychology, sociology, and technology has advanced
When I read this, I screamed into a pillow, I am so sick of seeing this fucking argument. It’s just an excuse for philistinism (i.e. ignorance and refusal to study), and for throwing out ideas hostile to American hegemony (since the apotheosis of neoliberalism was circa 1980). Let’s just throw out gravity, nitrogen fixing, democracy, representative government, and all the rest of it because now we have smartphones! But I’m being uncharitable, you give a more specific condition in a moment:
so that we know these ideas as seen originally do not work, since we have historical evidence of their failure
When a new system emerges and is smashed by the old powers, that does not establish that the idea “doesn’t work” but that the historical circumstances of its emergence then and there was unable to resist reactionary forces, which is a useful datapoint, but not for the argument “gommulism doesn’t work”.
The opposite of someone what believes in liberal values is a fascist
If we’re using “liberal” like most people in the world use liberal, this is completely incorrect and that fact is well-established by history. Fascism as a historical movement was born as anticommunist resistance aimed at preserving capitalism, which is why the Nazis had immense help from liberal foreign powers who they would later attack. Fascism is not the opposite of liberalism, it is liberalism in decay and fighting viciously for its own preservation.
In my opinion, any serious socialist or communist today must be in favor of “limited personal free market” where individuals or small groups of individuals have the liberty to produce, innovate and become entrepreneur,
This is too big a topic, we can get back to it later if you want. My short answer is that you are relying on buzzwords that completely obfuscate what you are talking about.
because we now know that this is a fundamental expression of human nature. E.g. build some cool keyboards and sell them on etsy or whatever
??? This has the fun quality that you are either saying that trying to be, like, a CEO is fundamental to human nature, which is baseless nonsense, or you are saying something more along the lines of “humans like creating things and changing their environment, perfecting and reinventing tools to streamline production and so on” which is literally basic Marx!
And I doubt you’d find serious socialists today that really want to defend the original maxist/leninist or maoist theories of socialism.
You will find Marxists all over the world, myself included, who will tell you that the basic principles of Marxism are correct and that having an actually successful socialist movement depends on not distorting them. Incidentally, you can read the Lenin I linked you to learn all about people trying to distort Marxism back circa 1914.
Like before, you are demonstrating myopia. I’m sure you don’t know any Marxists (evidently) and you probably haven’t met very many on the internet, but there are multiple Marxist countries and countless Marxist movements around the world. Maybe they (not necessarily I, but they) have something to teach you that you can’t get from pontificating and navel-gazing.
I believe 90% of all humans share the same values but are reprogrammed through lies and emotional manipulation.
This is elitist nonsense and I will link you to my favorite essay, though it’s a little long and circuitous: https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
The short version is that people act in their self-interest and it takes a fair amount of education, whether through lived experience or exposition, to understand that their interest is with the common interest. People broadly espouse falsehoods not because they have been cleverly tricked, but because they care about what is “really true” far less than they care about what it does for them to do that espousing.
I believe that instead of arguing about the finer points of old ideologies from the barbarous times pre 1950 we should be working on tools to control or negate these corrosive and corrupting influences (Wealth caps? Sortition? AI?).
AI is garbage techno-rapturism and sortition was literally used in ancient Athens, meaning it should be thrown out if we follow your logic (along with voting generally). Wealth caps are not asset caps, so they are meaningless here.
The liberals should be your allies.
You have two choices, either start using liberal like the world does or, I guess, conclude that the Democrats are also part of the right, because I can tell you with confidence that Biden has never been and never will be my ally. Either choice is an improvement from current conditions, I suppose.
When you have only two parties you can only have one dimension.
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Do these labels really have any benefit or value in society, or are they just yet another lame excuse for us all to hate on a group of ‘others’
They referred to specific ideologies and economic and social policies before the modern corporate propaganda machine really started in the 80s. Pretty sure they’re meaningless to most Americans these days.
I hate that the left is so hell bent on creating division among itself and allies with this “nobody is left enough for me;” bullshit.
There are absolutely people who are too right leaning to be called Leftist
Kamala Harris for example is not a leftist; nor Biden or buttigieg…. They are still less evil than Trump though lol
If they’re voting against conservatives, they can be as far right as they like. I’ve seen people who vote left get called “too right leaning”. So what you would prefer they don’t vote along you? You don’t want an ally cause they’re too different from you??
They can vote however they like, but if our ideologies are different I want a way to distinguish that difference.
Voting is like the bare minimum you can do. I know lots of people who make a more material difference in their communities than voting ever has.
A liberal will turn my ass into the cops and then lick their boots clean after they kick my door in and lock me up. Don’t need that kind of “ally”.
Enjoy a second Trump presidency and more conservative wins then. Cause at least those fucks on the right accept each other’s votes and support without turning on each other like children
We do vote. I never said we don’t.
That’s a silly argument… please stop making it
My point was more that there shouldn’t even be labels such as left, right, conservative, liberal, etc. Putting everyone into these little boxes and arbitrarily pitting them against each other only serves to create problems where non existed and solves precisely nothing along the way.
There can’t be division if there are no groups for people to be divided into. There can’t be any of the “nobody is left enough for me” bullshit if there is no left or right.
The only true purpose of these labels is for those at the top to divide those at the bottom so they keep their silly little power a bit longer. I for one, fail to see a logical reason to continue playing this game.
Putting everyone into these little boxes and arbitrarily pitting them against each other
Just because you apparently don’t have any strong political opinions and the status quo works fine for you, doesn’t mean that everyone else’s opinions are “arbitrary”. What an ignorant thing to suggest.
I’m not disputing the validity people’s opinions and beliefs, only that it’s unnecessary to place a label on everyone based on those beliefs. What’s arbitrary is insisting that we are different than those people over there just because they think xyz should be zyx and deciding they are the enemy based solely on that supposed difference.
Also, the status quo is to have a left vs right and to push everyone to one of those sides. Kinda exactly what I’m arguing against.
You are wrong on so many levels.
Let’s go to the most basic one - ‘left’ and ‘right’ are ideological opposites of the one question:
Who should have more power?
Individuals (control everything through capital) or government (redistributing capital amongst the people, so no one is left behind).
That is not just some silly division, that is the real distinction between how people think the government should work, and those are not compatible at all.
The US has very luke-warm ‘leftists’ compared to other countries - even Bernie Sanders, the most known ‘radical leftist’ is considered borderline right just because the country is so far right as of now.
Perhaps once upon a time left and right simply represented two ideological extremes, but today that is not what it means. If you were to ask people on the street what the other side is, are they more likely to say “Oh that’s just my friends that happen to believe something different” or “Those evil fuckers are ruining the world and getting in my way”? In my experience, it’s overwhelming the later.
The question of who should be in power should exclusively be answered by the people as a collective whole regardless of personal opinions. It should never be answered by vaguely definable groups having a pissing match. If two siblings are fighting, you don’t lock em in a room and egg them on. You sit them down, tell them to apologize, and make them share the toys.
These labels might have a use in the field of sociology, but in the real world they only act as a wedge and an excuse to be mad at someone else. I’m not saying that they don’t exist because they very much do, only that need to stop existing if we ever want to learn to work together as a species.
So you are left leaning, and that’s great, but there is a giant push from the very wealthy to take our power away from us.
That’s all that it is.
If you think I’m either left or right leaning from all this then you’ve completely missed the point
So we are both wasting our time here, have a good one!
I think at this point the average American conflates “liberal” with simply an attitude on how much you hate or don’t hate queer people, regardless of any other political sentiment. One time a chud told me the only real political issue is abortion.
us americans are not, to put it lightly, an intellectual country
I mentioned this anecdote in another thread a couple weeks ago, but I think it fits here too:
It’s not even just chuds ime, it’s the majority of the US population that thinks the “further left” something or someone is, the more “liberal” it is. Even many liberals think this.
A while back I told someone (an acquaintance I met irl) that I considered myself a communist and their response to me was:
“I’m pretty liberal myself, but communism is too liberal even for me.”
There were several other people present and none of them thought this was a strange thing to say.
It may in part have something to do with how only American liberal spaces allow for anyone to say they’re a communist without severe social and professional ramifications.
Can’t say I’ve experienced this. According to American liberals I’ve talked with, communism is just about synonymous with fascism. No way I could mention that I’m a socialist, that’s like an insult towards liberals here. But I also live in Georgia where they ran ads about “radical socialist anti-israel anti-American Fidel Castro supporting communist Raphael Warnock” for the entire election, and that was supposed to scare us, so… maybe there’s the reason. Yes the ads were by the Heritage Foundation
For the most part yeah, that’s pretty spot on. This is just in comparison to conservative spaces in America, mind you.
But say on the campus of a liberal arts college? Its like an alternative anarchist.
What are you talking about?
At this point, I honestly don’t know what “liberal” actually means. I don’t even know how to ask/find out. When I was growing up, I always thought it was good.
Now I don’t even know what “good” is, other than not being racist or anti-LGBTQ+.
When a conservative says liberal, it just means Democrat.
When someone with a vague clue says it?
Liberalism is a political ideology that holds that the primary role of government is to protect the rights of its citizens.
What those rights are, and who the liberals consider to be worthy of protection vary but as a general rule the right to private property, some form of democratic representation, due process with at least a gesture to equality before the law, freedom of religion and expression tend to be core rights.
Historically liberalism is deeply invested in capitalist and humanist thought. You could probably argue that liberalism isn’t strictly required to be capitalist but quite frankly it’s unlikely that will change before humanity is at the point of free energy and absolute post scarcity productivity.
The founding nations of liberalism are, roughly, America, France, and the UK and it’s Commonwealth. If you want a intuitive understanding of what liberalism is in practice and reality, just think of their history in the past two centuries or so and the struggles of governance they have undergone.
Those aren’t the only form of liberalism however. Social Democracy (the so called Scandinavian model) is a form of liberalism, neoconservatism (GW Bush, Romney) is liberalism (in theory), etc. Even “right wing” libertarianism is ultimately a form of liberalism, no matter how much that upsets the ones that don’t know what words mean.
Anyways, political parties that officially call themselves Liberal tend to be fairly conservative by modern standards. It is a uniquely American degeneracy sponsored by Reagan that sought to call progressives liberals.
One might note that you can broadly characterize the defining ideologies of the past century into three broad categories.
Liberalism, Socialism, Fascism.
When a supposed ideological liberal like Reagan and his successors, modern conservatives say no, actually, I hate liberals and I REALLY hate socialists you should believe what they tell you, and consider what that makes them.
Thank you for the extremely detailed explanation! That makes it make a lot more sense to me. I grew up “liberal is da left and conservutiv is da right” and I really didn’t identify with either? Then I saw right-wing fuckheads bashing “the libs,” and now left-wing peeps are also bashing “the libs” and I was so confused like “HOW COULD YOU HAVE COMMON GROUND WITH RIGHT-WING GARBAGE”
I would counter relative to the other answer you got that liberalism is based on a leveling of the political rights of citizens while resisting a leveling of economic rights (despite some calls for it even at the time). Feudal governments absolutely were also based on the defense of the rights of their citizens and indeed even some classical slave societies, but the difference is that those societies had [more pronounced and varied] castes which each had different political rights.
Liberalism was a revolution led by merchants and other propertied people against the aristocracy, i.e. people with the greatest economic rights opposing those with the greatest political rights, leaving the former completely unchecked except sometimes by popular power.
Incidentally, and this explains some of the bickering in this thread, communists of all stripes are people who advocate that both political and economic rights are leveled, which manifests as the economy being controlled by popular mandate rather than private ownership.
Anyway, I’m mainly commenting to say if you have other political questions, you can usually get very thorough answers from c/askchapo
Hmm, interesting! I should probably actually check out the Chapo podcast. I have never heard it and folks here seem to be fond of it. I have heard some of the hosts on Cumtown, and they’re very funny.
A lot of people on hexbear hate chapo (despite that being where c/askchapo is, due to hexbear formerly being chapo.chat) but I think it’s alright. The most recent episode starts out with a very informative segment about sanctions.
Draw an equal triangle. One line is ‘public policy’, another ‘private interest’, and the last ‘state authority’. You can label the two endpoints of ‘state authority’ as ‘left’ and ‘right’. The third point is ‘liberal’ which lies in opposition to the political spectrum of state authority. Liberals tend to fixate on authoritarianism over whether it serves the public or private interest.
People rarely fall on the points or lines as all concepts are in perfect tension.
I’m still too stupid to fully understand but BOOOOOO AUTHORITARIANISM
You’re fine. Ability to pull political abstracts off Lemmy is not a sign of intelligence or lack thereof.
But anyway, unless you go full primitive anarchist most people generally want some level of authority: like laws, codes, contracts, etc.
Whether those things serve public policy vs private interests will generally split ‘left’ or ‘right’ respectively.
flashback to my college days getting asked on surveys what my politics are on a scale of liberal to conservative
they’d always mark me as “independent” since their scale had nowhere to put communists
Linguistically, that’s usually how it is used in America (but not elsewhere), “liberal” means “left”
.ml has entered the chat
TBF there are about seven mutually exclusive definitions of “liberal” in each country.
Not so much “in each country” as “between countries”, right? I’m European and in my home country “liberal” tends to mean Neoliberal
Here too, but colloquially it means something like “unburdened by tradition” or “freedom loving”, which is, well, not how our liberals roll.
Americans are actually taught in school that the entire American political spectrum is inside liberalism.
They then immediately forget that anyway and fall into the conservative/liberal false paradigm.
false paradigm
I think you mean false dichotomy
I knew it would be this brilliant piece of poli-historical analysis!
The thing I love about lemmy is instead of neoliberals and weird racists silencing Leftists like reddit, it’s Leftists and Social democrats constantly at each other’s throats.
The latter is much more amusing
The latter is much more amusing
same here; but likely for different reasons.
i like learning about viewpoints that differ from mine; i think they help me question my own beliefs and, usually, it re-enforces them.
Yeah, on reddit, if you’re not the mainstream reddit opinion you have to hide in an echo chamber, if you are the mainstream, then most of the platform is one giant echo chamber.
It doesn’t help that they’re all exceptionally rude and confrontational
wholly agreed and i find it troublesome that the reddit refugees have pushed so hard to turn some lemmyverse instances into mini reddits, complete with that mainstream reddit opinion.
lemmy.world has become my main source for finding opposing view points to learn from and, fortunately for the entire lemmyverse, the engagement is (very-very-VERY) slightly better than reddit.
As an Egyptian, I’ve had to constantly talk back against multiple people with the usual “all middle eastern countries are iran” bullshit, I thought I’d escaped it when I left reddit, but nope, apparently in Egypt Hijab is forced by law, I just didn’t know Egyptian law and needed a European
redditorlemming(?) to give us all a white-savioresque lecture on it.Many people don’t know this (surprisingly), but reddit is racist as fuck, like one of the most racist platforms I’ve ever been on, it’s really well cloaked racism (usually, r/Europe and r/Worldnews are openly racist) , but it’s everywhere, and OH GOD the white Savior Complex so many redditors have is infuriating.
But hey, at least on lemmy I can correct it, on reddit I’d be swarmed by westerners who think they know more about my country than I, a person living there, do, and will proceed to tell me I’m very wrong.
They push this so far, I’ve had them lecture me, someone FROM GIZA, on the “correct” position of the pyramids.
Even apps like Bumble don’t make a distinction, as an European I find it quite annoying
Well, the apps have other problems too…
An anarchist believes in liberty for people to live freely
A capitalist believes in liberty to freely exploit people
Unfortunately the capitalists also own the means of mass communication and have gaslit the socialists into thinking liberty only means the latter!
Resist imperialist redefinition of words!
That’s why lefitist is usually an unhelpful term. I only hear it used as a self descriptor by libs who want free healthcare and support imperialism.
I use it intentionally all the time to distance myself from liberals, especially when talking to liberals (it’s a pointless distinction to conservatives). It breaks liberal brains a little less often lately than it used to, but while the repetitive conversation about the distinction is annoying, it also usually results in some wheels turning a tiny bit inside them.
i outright use the word communist to describe myself to liberals and that usually cuts off any potential liberal camaraderie pretty quickly lol
Welcome to the No true Scotsman party.
