Liberalism vs. Leftism
Liberalism vs. Leftism
120 comments
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I don’t understand the difference and I don’t think I ever will
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I think the best way to put it is that a leftist is someone who believes that workers should own the wealth that they create, while a liberal is someone believes in "socially progressive causes" without examining the underlying systems that bring about the necessity of "socially progressive causes".
For example, a liberal would want more woman CEOs, while a leftist would want to get rid of CEOs.
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Slight addendum: liberals fight against any real progress until it's inevitable and then take credit
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Liberals want to throw money at problems forever, Leftist want to tackle the root causes so they end.
Liberals are licking the wounds, leftists are applying antibiotic and bandages
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Liberalism stands for individual liberty, equality before the law, political freedom, government limited by a constitution and the sanctity of private property (and capitalism). The last point is the most important when making the distinction.
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Both Classical Liberalism and Neoliberalism are at their core capitalist ideologies. While the Republican party is more conservative in both social and economic issues, both parties still operate within the framework of neoliberalism.
In America we only have the Democrat and Republican Parties which are usually labeled as Liberal and Conservative respectively. Since the Democratic party is relatively left of the Republican party, we see the conflation of the label Liberal and Left in American politics. But that's not really accurate when looking at the Ideologies of the parties.
There is Social Democracy, which is still a capitalist ideology where some of the profits are redirected towards social welfare. This is more common in Western Europe and will still rachet towards Fascism.
Leftist ideologies, such as Socialism and Anarchism are fundamentally anti-capitalist, unlike liberalism and neoliberalism. Richard Wolff explains socialism and capitalism very well.
On Liberalism:
What is neoliberalism? A political scientist explains the use and evolution of the term
How the Democrats Traded the New Deal for Neoliberalism
On Leftist ideologies:
Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Communism and Revolutions
Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism
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At its core, liberalism is fairly anti-capitalist. There are many arguments against capitalism from liberal principles such as the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. The workers in the firm are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but receive 0% claim on the positive and negative production while the employer solely appropriates 100% of the positive and negative result of production
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From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics:
Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole or certain social hierarchies.
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In modern politics, the term Left typically applies to ideologies and movements to the left of classical liberalism, supporting some degree of democracy in the economic sphere. Today, ideologies such as social liberalism and social democracy are considered to be centre-left, while the Left is typically reserved for movements more critical of capitalism, including the labour movement, socialism, anarchism, communism, Marxism and syndicalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.
(Emphasis added)
Basically, liberals care more about equality of opportunity, while leftists care more about equality of outcome. (And, of course, conservatives actively oppose equality and promote hierarchy.)
On a "political compass," leftism is the left half (obviously). Liberalism is a fuzzy blob centered somewhere below and right of center, but big enough to extend at least a little ways into the other quadrants because of how many different kinds of "liberalism" there are.
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Liberals view the status quo (the underlying mechanisms of the government, economy and society) as sacrosanct, legitimate, that it just needs to and will allow itself to be tweaked a bit, that the rules must be followed lest we collapse into chaos.
Leftists view the status quo as widely illegitimate, that a vast multitude of the rules which society operates by are contemptible and functionally evil, and are willing to break the rules to meaningfully change society, that often the entire point is that breaking rules is the only way to establish newer and more just ones.
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Liberals view Leftists as an extreme part of their fold because they often have similar goals.
Leftists view Liberals as often sharing goals, but as ultimately delusional, magical-thinking self righteous fools, as their methods of achieving these often similar goals are laughably naive, impotent and ineffective, thus functionally making them into conservatives.
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You can pretty much boil it down to Liberalism is capitalist, leftism isn’t (although where the line is depends who you ask and how left they are).
The confusion mostly comes from from conservative neoliberals lumping social liberals in with the left, even though they’re only separated by a philosophical debate on what “individual freedoms” are and if they’re more important than a completely unregulated economy or not.
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There are anti-capitalist liberals though
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It gets even more confusing when you consider anti-capitalist classical liberals
https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Classical-Liberal-JurisprudenceJune2018.pdf
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that's the biggest difference between the two groups: the leftists are at least vaguely aware that something in our system is not right and the liberals don't care to pay attention because they're too busy trying to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table.
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Conservatives want us to go backwards. Liberals want us to stay the same Leftists want us to go forward
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I think european liberals would rather work with fascists than even collaborate with the left, let alone call themselves "left"... oh, wait, they do.
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Macron is turbo economical liberalism, and he does everything he can to not be affiliated with the left.
He even dissolved the Assemblée Nationale (our Parliament), and when a left-wing coalition came out on top, which should have secured them the prime minister's seat, Macron delayed the appointment for months trying to buy time for the right to secure an agreement with the far right, and ended up choosing a prime minister from a right-wing party who did had only 7% of votes.
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US liberals also would rather work with fascists, but they would call themselves left regardless.
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You're all equally left as far as the right is concerned.
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Honestly, that's just it. You'll get people on the right using hyped rhetoric about "the left", "liberals", "leftists" and other synonyms that can be used to describe anyone from Hillary Clinton to AOC and beyond. Are there people (particularly in the "and beyond" category) that an average person may be concerned with? Sure. Are they clearly explaining that they don't mean half the country? Absolutely not.
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For the average Republican voter yes. Neo-Nazis and rulers are probably more intelligent though.
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We need to start calling liberals what they are. Conservatives.
And we need to start calling the conservatives what they are. Authoritarian elites.
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Democrats should actually do that. Maga vs conservative. It would be a huge marketing win.
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Go touch grass. You’d rather divide the left instead of unite and push back against actual fascism. Only people who say this sort of shit are people who are chronically online and completely disconnected from reality
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Get your head out of your ass. There's a reason why Progressives keep getting frustrated. We're literally the liberals reaching across the aisle and voting for conservatives. It's not condemnation, it's just reality.
And I'll vote for a conservative who supports freedom over an authoritarian any day. If anything it's admirable that that both the liberals and conservatives in the party work together as well as they do.
We are the freedom party. And the other party is authoritarian.
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Remember the poem? 'First they came for the communists'. They never came for the liberals, they worked with them. There has always been a difference, and there will always be a difference.
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"Fun" fact about the quote (or poem) you refer to: It's by Martin Niemöller and meant in a self critical way. He was a conservative Christian and really couldn't bother about godless communists or Jews. Only when they came after him we woke up.
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Left-wing can be relative to the nation. The most meaningful faction of American "left" is the Democratic Party. The global definition is based on socialist vs capitalist ideological splits, in which all forms of ideological liberalism are right wing or, in the case of social democracy, arguably what centrist actually means.
The Democratic Party is therefore left-wing internally and right-wing globally, thus people saying "America does not have a left wing."
Leftists are socialists. It is not relative. Democrats are not leftists. Bernie Sanders is, as a democratic socialist. You are not "An American leftist" because you like billionaires existing but don't want to genocide brown and gay people. That's just liberalism as it is supposed to be.
This is also why a leftist would deny that "liberalism" is left wing. Liberalism is a broad ideological judgement and can be assumed to be using the global standards as a result, America does not have sole claim to defining it. So American liberals are the American left, but liberalism itself is right-wing.
This really isn't that complicated if you know the basic meanings of the words in question, which is why liberals find it so confusing. Liberalism is the status quo position of the American electorate and moving beyond it requires education while going along with the binary party politics does not.
Edit: this was supposed to be a response to the first comment instead of me telling OP things they already know
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It's okay to not know what words mean. You can fix that rather easily by reading something.
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By definition absolutely. But most countries' "Liberal Party" is almost always conservative.
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Not by definition at all.
A political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
It's not necessarily right either, but it's closer to that than left.
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Just to add a little bit to it:
"The greatest good for the greatest number", a basic leftwing principle, sometimes collides with "everybody should be free to do what they want with their own things and willing adults", a basic liberal principle, for example when it comes to some people excessivelly hoarding resources or using their ownership of an exclusive resource to extract rents from others, because it goes against the "greatest good for the greatest number" even whilst it is aligned with the whole freedom to do what they want with their own things.
At other times both are perfectly aligned: for example when it comes to the freedom from discrimination for those with a different sexual orientation than the majority, since that freedom both fulfills the "the greatest good" principle and the "freedom to do what they want" one.
Now, if one really digs down on it, maximum freedom turns out to actually require different ownership laws (if exclusive resources have owners rather than being shared, then the freedom of the non-owners is being restricted), but in decades of following and even being involved in politics, I have yet to hear a single Liberal (even those who supposedly are not Neoliberal) even mention that specific form (probably the most widespread and highest impact one) of restriction on the Freedom of most people, much less suggest changing it.
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See the problem with this stupid labeling is that everyone has a different definition so no one knows what the fuck anyone else is saying. Just knock it off with the labels, attribute the quality or idea you mean instead of a lazy fucking label...
You know how many conversations Ive been in where i was confused until i realized the word meant different things to us. Seriously the labeling in politics is getting out of control, everyone groups everything up into a category because it makes it easy to manipulate people against it, so noone knows what the word means anymore because everyone is defining it as something different every day.
Not using labels is double plus good...
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You've just described the gender argument.
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The stupidity of American labels you mean, most of the rest of the work understands politics
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Around 15-20 years ago these idiots so easily manipulated with labels in the US were only on the fringe (or at a minimum, less obvious in their existence), now they're a political force. Do not sit there in smug self assurance that it definitely cant happen there, because that's how it begins...
Then again I dont think the first world countries have the world have been cutting education for decades now. And you also didnt have Regan and Citizens United.
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You can go further and say that they're inherently enemies.
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It wasn't until Ron Paul was running for office that I learned that "liberal" was mostly used as a shorthand for "libertarian" and what a libertarian was. Before that I thought it just was a synonym for progressives/democrats. They're not left-wing. They're just not as far right as a fascist.
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Libertarianism started out as a left wing philosophy. Then it got corrupted by Ayn Rand fanatics and right wing think tanks. I categorize myself as a left wing libertarian, and don't agree with the US Libertarian party on pretty much anything.
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Liberal isn't shorthand for libertarian.
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Although liberalism and libertarianism share some important characteristics (strong emphasis on equality before the law and civil rights), they're not the same thing.
Notably, libertarianism can be left-wing in a way that liberalism cannot (e.g. anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism, green politics, etc.). Some left-libertarians even reject the concept of private property entirely.
Liberalism doesn't completely overlap with right libertarianism, either. Liberals are more willing to accept some authoritarian ideas, such as e.g. having a military to protect trade.
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I disagree with Grue about Libertarianism, and also with you about the relation of the terms. Liberalism's definition is an ideology of personal freedoms and civil rights.
While that can be interpreted as deregulatory conservative by some, it is primarily a nonviolent ideology that protects disenfranchised.
Thats why its always so shocking to me to see tankies and anarchist thrashing Liberals on Lemmy. It's literally an ideology where people are treated fairly and equally. If they spoke out about specific Liberal Parties then I could hop onboard because those usually suck.
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You seem to have the truest take. It just boils down emancipation. Leftist policies are liberal in nature, seeking freedom from the hierarchy of capitalism.
Most of the confusion seems to come from neoliberalism or market liberalism co-opting the term for conservative and authoritarian uses and now everyone is confused.
Leftists who need a distinction in the terms seem to fall into two categories; those who see liberals as reformists instead of revolutionaries (too moderate), and the false leftism of Lenin/Stalin etc sects who aim for an authoritarian model but without capitalism.
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The irony that you used that episode to emphasize your point is not lost on me.
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Americans are so divisive they love to hate even on their own side. No true leftists, according to all of them
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Unconstrained campaign financing and lobbying will always dilute the power of democracy and liberalism, but liberalism is a good alternative to bloody revolutions or forced changes. Humanist philosophies prefer liberalism to some degree, but I could be wrong 🤷♀️
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Interesting, is it not, that liberalism was the bloody revolution against tyranny until now it threatens to kill humanity itself and all reform must then be gradual.
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Not necessarily, democracy has often come about without blood shed. I am unconvinced the practical implementations of far left ideals are going to be devoid of human nature. Committees responsible for production vs CEO managing it does not still preclude greed or popularity contests. The in fighting in left leaning groups is a distraction. First tax the rich enough so that they cannot subvert democracy, everything is secondary
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So this election was lost hard because of infighting and the resulting apathy so great thanks for adding more infighting by shitting on the inferior "liberals"
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When I hear "liberal" or "left" now, all I hear is, "infighting little bitches with 1,000 messages and no focus". I hear FAILURE.
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Do you think leftists were the reason Donald Trump got voted?
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People, who I can tell from your tone already, might've voted until reading the kind of shit you'd write and then use that as an excuse to stay home, are a large part of the reason Trump got close to the same number of votes 4 years ago but Kamala got several million less than Biden did.
The point is that I don't give a fuck what they call themselves or what various things they believe differently than me, I just needed their vote. And the purity tests damn sure did not work in favor of that.
Do you honestly think there is any chance in hell that scolding people for not being left enough got anyone to vote for Harris?
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The entire population except for fringe groups of terminally online leftists: Yes.
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