It’s tough to be critical of “liberalism” when everyone has a different idea of what it means. It might help to specify “economic liberalism”.
Along with it’s deep flaws, Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, LGBT+ rights, etc. Conservatives also muddy the waters by blaming these things for economic hardship.
Yeah you’re the one being pedantic here. Liberalism has exactly two definitions that get used 99% of the time. Someone might say liberal to mean “socially liberal,” which means open-mindedness in regards to progressive movements such as feminism, promotion of gay rights, acceptance of trans people, and all that stuff. This is usually the only definition used in the USA.
Or they mean liberalism as the broad ideological foundation of capitalism, with a belief in the promotion of free enterprise, distribution, public-private separation, and the primacy of individual rights. This definition is almost never used in the USA except by socialists, but outside of the USA this is understood as the primary definition of the term whereas “socially liberal” is regarded as a secondary definition.
And it’s very easy to determine which one a person is talking about if you look at the context clues. The only other context I can think of where liberal is used is the academic term “liberal arts,” but that refers to scholarly topics that would have been taught to people who weren’t slaves.
Liberalism has always been right wing, and Orwell is the lowest garbage anyone can reference in political analysis. You didn’t even do it correctly, assuming that “newspeak” just means a new euphemistic way of referring to something, and this is the way it’s commonly used by people who didn’t actually read 1984 (not to say that they should), but really it’s a language based around contractions, abbreviations, and simplifications meant to make communication more efficient, and also (somehow) make people lose the ability to think independently.
Liberalism has a definition, which Marxists have never forgotten, though thanks to two red scares and a cold war, others have forgotten. Now in Orwellian fashion, “liberalism” and “socialism” are floating signifiers, so we have liberals like Sanders calling themselves socialists despite never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.
It’s basically just “classical liberalism and neoliberalism”, and whether politically illiterate Americans use that word that way doesn’t matter very much from an analytical standpoint, because in political science, history, philosophy, and even just popular discourse in most other countries, the term “liberal” mainly has that meaning.
willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas.
relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
Similar:
tolerant,
unprejudiced,
unbigoted,
broad-minded,
open-minded,
enlightened,
forbearing,
permissive,
free,
free and easy,
easygoing,
laissez-faire,
libertarian,
latitudinarian,
unbiased,
impartial,
nonpartisan,
indulgent,
lenient,
lax,
soft
noun
a supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare.
“she dissented from the decision, joined by the court’s liberals”
a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
Opposite:
narrow-minded,
bigoted,
You are free to argue with dictionaries, but if your enemy is liberalism as defined by civil rights, democracy, and welfare then you are the enemy of all people, in my eyes.
If one is trying to define liberalism against feudalism, that definition is fine, but it’s just redditor sophomorism to act like a dictionary is a replacement for an actual historical or academic definition of a political tendency.
Take it up with oxford, Words mean what the majority believes they currently mean. Anything else is just some shit somebody made up. This discussion is about the current meaning of Liberalism in today’s political context.
Philosophy absolutely has the ability to examine and propose better definitions when definitions (like the ones you linked) do not capture the phenomenon. Losurdo read more books than you’ve seen by liberals in order to write his “Liberalism” book. He understood the phenomenon deeper and further than its dictionary use.
How do you capture such a thing in your world view? Because he found flaws in definitions and worked deeper, he just did nothing because it wasnt the Oxford definition?
From where I’m sitting, and I’m trying to paint a picture for you to understand the topic through my eyes, I see a small subsection of society, a bubble so to speak, attempting to shame a much larger more commonplace section of society with absurd misconstruments and twisted definitions which do not reflect reality. The bubble is shaming what would likely be their only allies to achieve reforms in their favor, and in general one of the only sources of good in society and politics. It feels like I watched somebody train an AI on r/the_donald and then asked the AI to write communism pamphlets. My views are only further cemented when those “who understood the phenomenon further than its dictionary use” resort to petty namecalling when I bring up the dictionary definition of the terms they are misusing. It is further cemented when they have to provide their group’s own private dictionary separate from society’s use of language.
If you have a political stance directly opposing certain choices and beliefs, then use words to define that which people will understand and agree with, do not simply try to rewrite words and history as you see fit. Do you oppose Democracy? Do you oppose Civil Rights? Do you oppose equality and guaranteed standards of living? If you answered no to those questions then you are a Liberal. If you’re opposed to unchecked power of political entities or parties, if you’re opposed to the abolition of term limits, and if you’re opposed to economic disparity and inequality, then what you oppose is not Liberalism, what you oppose is fascism, authoritarianism, plutocracy, and capitalism.
My point is that you are misusing the dictionary as a replacement for actually knowing about a subject. People still call John Locke a liberal, and they do it because fields have definitions that aren’t colloquial.
This discussion is about the current meaning of Liberalism in today’s political context.
Look anywhere outside of America and it readily refers to sniveling market-fetishists. In America it only implicitly does because everyone is a market fetishist.
All successful labor movements and mass organizations in the past have included teaching others how things work, handing out pamphlets, etc.
And so we can choose to act towards restoring definitions to words with important meanings, so that we become capable of discussing the things they signify again.
If we don’t use words as they mean, but instead use unorthodox terminology, then we allow the significance of such words to be lost, with no standardized alternatives in common use - i.e., no alternatives that are any more clear than the original word.
There is a war on language. It’s primarily a subset of the class war. We can surrender, or fight what is probably the simplest fight of our life: We can use words as they were meant to be used.
Yeah, I’m glad you’re slowly starting to comprehend the conversation. I’m informing you that making up definitions for words is wrong and is the source of confusion when you try and fail to converse with others.
Almost nobody knows the academic definitions of most political ideologies, they’re just all cable news buzzwords now. If you took a sample of the population I’d be surprised if even 5% could give you the correct academic definitions for the vast majority of political ideology terms.
I don’t think it is fair to say that there was ever 100% agreement over what some of those terms meant.
Like or hate it, language means what the people think it means, and as GP suggests, choosing terms that disambiguate differences is a far better approach that allows people to find common ground rather than have a knee-jerk reaction to a policy because they associate with one ambiguous label and are told that the policy is associated with another.
Adding more dimensions to the policy spectrum help. One dimension (left/right) covering all manner of social and economic policy leads to confusing outcomes.
A two dimensional view - economic left-right on one axis, and libertarian/authoritarian - is one view that is popular now, so giving four quadrants, left lib, right lib, left auth, right auth - and that is already a lot more granular. With any quadrant view of course, the dispute is always going to be where the centre is… it is something of an Overton window, where extremists try to push in one direction to shift the Overton window and make positions that were firmly in one quadrant seem like the centre.
However, there are other dimensions as well that could make sense to evaluate policy (and political viewpoints) on even within these axes. One is short-term / long-term: at one extreme, does the position discount the future for the benefit of people right now, and at the other extreme, focusing far into the future with minimal concerns for people now. Another could be nationalist / globalist - does the position embody ‘think global, act local’, or does it aim to serve the local population to the detriment of global populations?
That is already a four-dimensional scheme (there could be more), and I believe that while real-world political parties often correlate some of those axes and extremes on one are often found together with extremes on another, they are actually near-orthogonal and it would be theoretically possible to be at each of the 16 possible points near the edges of that scheme.
That said, even though they are almost orthogonal, an extreme on one might prevent an extreme on another axis in some cases. For example, I’d consider myself fairly economically left, fairly socially libertarian, fairly far towards favouring the long term over the short term, and fairly far towards globalist (think global, act local) thinking. But some would say that an extreme left position requires no private ownership of the means of production. In the modern world, a computer is a means of production. I would not support a world in which there is no private ownership of computers, because that counters my the social libertarian position. So, I draw the line at wanting public ownership of natural monopolies and large-scale production - I would still want to live in a pluralistic society where people can try to create new means of production (providing it doesn’t interfere with others or the future, e.g. through pollution, safety risks, not paying a living wage, etc…), rather than one where someone like Trofim Lysenko has the ear of the leader and no one can disagree no matter how stupid their beliefs are. But I’d want to see the ability for the state to take over those new means of production in the public interest eventually if they pan out and become large scale (and for research to happen in parallel by the state).
I think putting one’s viewpoint on multiple dimensions makes it far clearer what someone believes, and where there is common ground, compared to picking labels with contested meaning and attacking the other labels.
It doesn’t have to be sexier terminology, or even different terminology. Just don’t drop the word “liberalism” into a conversation and expect the average person to understand what your talking about.
You could use “corporatism” which has kind of taken over that definition in common language. I know it’s technically incorrect, but language also isn’t static outside of academic disciplines. But ultimately you can use whatever language you want, just don’t assume a particular definition will be understood without explanation.
nOOooOOOoooooo you can’t blame capitalism! We have to make up a word that means “capitalism” but isn’t capitalism and fix that (through reform! because we shouldn’t try to abolish capitalism).
The only people I know of who don’t know what the word “liberal” means, especially in the context the person above was using it, are very ignorant Americans. To be clear, even though I don’t like most Americans, I’m not blaming them for being ignorant in this particular case because they have been subjected to decades of mostly uncontested propaganda deliberately obfuscating the term. But most of the rest of the world knows what everyone is talking about when saying “liberal” and knows it’s a right wing ideology. And everyone shouldn’t have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don’t already know. People are generally expected to pick up the gist of a sentence or point via the context of what’s being said. The context was perfectly clear and it just sounds like concern trolling to go on about needing to hand-hold and dumb down the terminology being used for “the average person.”
And everyone shouldn’t have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don’t already know
Well, if you know that the person doesn’t know, giving definitions can be a helpful way of setting up your argument, but obviously these lemmitor assholes are just wasting your time.
You could use “corporatism” which has kind of taken over that definition
“Neoliberalism” rather. Though that’s more like mask-off imperialism. And “corporatism” is just capitalism but when you don’t want to admit that the problem is capitalism.
Either way liberalism is the same idealist, individualist culture/ideology that emerges under capitalism to maintain that capitalist mode of production, and must be destroyed along with the mode of production it sustains.
Overthrowing liberalism/capitalism and stopping fascism requires mass organization and class consciousness, part of which is often understanding these basic concepts. And people did. They have to again.
These weren’t egghead concepts back when we had a labor movement large enough to support a labor press.
All I’m saying is that if you don’t take your audience into consideration, your message will be misunderstood. If you want to use the “correct” (more debatable than you think) terminology when that terminology isn’t well understood in the culture, then take the time to explain the language. Or keep scratching your head about why your getting downvotes and convincing nobody.
I’m getting downvotes because I’m telling a bunch of bubble communists that actual communication is more important than in-group signalling. No head scratches required. It’s why the left has been hopelessly ineffective for at least half a century.
The lgbt liberation movement would wave the flag of the legitimate vietnamese government during the US invasion. Marsha Johnson, Leslie fienberg, communists.
It’s tough to be critical of “liberalism” when everyone has a different idea of what it means. It might help to specify “economic liberalism”.
Along with it’s deep flaws, Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, LGBT+ rights, etc. Conservatives also muddy the waters by blaming these things for economic hardship.
Yeah you’re the one being pedantic here. Liberalism has exactly two definitions that get used 99% of the time. Someone might say liberal to mean “socially liberal,” which means open-mindedness in regards to progressive movements such as feminism, promotion of gay rights, acceptance of trans people, and all that stuff. This is usually the only definition used in the USA.
Or they mean liberalism as the broad ideological foundation of capitalism, with a belief in the promotion of free enterprise, distribution, public-private separation, and the primacy of individual rights. This definition is almost never used in the USA except by socialists, but outside of the USA this is understood as the primary definition of the term whereas “socially liberal” is regarded as a secondary definition.
And it’s very easy to determine which one a person is talking about if you look at the context clues. The only other context I can think of where liberal is used is the academic term “liberal arts,” but that refers to scholarly topics that would have been taught to people who weren’t slaves.
Huh… we’re seeing anglocentric capitalists trying to rebrand liberalism somehow compatible with right wing. Always some liberty-hindering agenda gets newspeak marketing campaigns, “economic liberalism”, “neoliberalism”, “classic liberalism”
“war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength”…
Liberalism has always been right wing, and Orwell is the lowest garbage anyone can reference in political analysis. You didn’t even do it correctly, assuming that “newspeak” just means a new euphemistic way of referring to something, and this is the way it’s commonly used by people who didn’t actually read 1984 (not to say that they should), but really it’s a language based around contractions, abbreviations, and simplifications meant to make communication more efficient, and also (somehow) make people lose the ability to think independently.
Liberalism has a definition, which Marxists have never forgotten, though thanks to two red scares and a cold war, others have forgotten. Now in Orwellian fashion, “liberalism” and “socialism” are floating signifiers, so we have liberals like Sanders calling themselves socialists despite never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.
Slavery did end under liberalism, but then again liberalism started it.
Yes, but have you considered that Anglosphere liberals are stupid assholes? Who don’t know how the rest of the world uses words?
I thought not. Checkmate, tankie.
hexbear content
i wanted to find the higher res version, but instead i found a prophet and the people who rejected his message
Lol I’m sure Prolewiki is an unbiased source that the majority of people would agree with on the definitions of words. /s
It’s basically just “classical liberalism and neoliberalism”, and whether politically illiterate Americans use that word that way doesn’t matter very much from an analytical standpoint, because in political science, history, philosophy, and even just popular discourse in most other countries, the term “liberal” mainly has that meaning.
Oxford Dictionary:
lib·er·al
/ˈlib(ə)rəl/
adjective
willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas.
relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise. Similar: tolerant, unprejudiced, unbigoted, broad-minded, open-minded, enlightened, forbearing, permissive, free, free and easy, easygoing, laissez-faire, libertarian, latitudinarian, unbiased, impartial, nonpartisan, indulgent, lenient, lax, soft
noun
a supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare. “she dissented from the decision, joined by the court’s liberals”
a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
Opposite: narrow-minded, bigoted,
You are free to argue with dictionaries, but if your enemy is liberalism as defined by civil rights, democracy, and welfare then you are the enemy of all people, in my eyes.
If one is trying to define liberalism against feudalism, that definition is fine, but it’s just redditor sophomorism to act like a dictionary is a replacement for an actual historical or academic definition of a political tendency.
Take it up with oxford, Words mean what the majority believes they currently mean. Anything else is just some shit somebody made up. This discussion is about the current meaning of Liberalism in today’s political context.
Philosophy absolutely has the ability to examine and propose better definitions when definitions (like the ones you linked) do not capture the phenomenon. Losurdo read more books than you’ve seen by liberals in order to write his “Liberalism” book. He understood the phenomenon deeper and further than its dictionary use.
How do you capture such a thing in your world view? Because he found flaws in definitions and worked deeper, he just did nothing because it wasnt the Oxford definition?
From where I’m sitting, and I’m trying to paint a picture for you to understand the topic through my eyes, I see a small subsection of society, a bubble so to speak, attempting to shame a much larger more commonplace section of society with absurd misconstruments and twisted definitions which do not reflect reality. The bubble is shaming what would likely be their only allies to achieve reforms in their favor, and in general one of the only sources of good in society and politics. It feels like I watched somebody train an AI on r/the_donald and then asked the AI to write communism pamphlets. My views are only further cemented when those “who understood the phenomenon further than its dictionary use” resort to petty namecalling when I bring up the dictionary definition of the terms they are misusing. It is further cemented when they have to provide their group’s own private dictionary separate from society’s use of language.
If you have a political stance directly opposing certain choices and beliefs, then use words to define that which people will understand and agree with, do not simply try to rewrite words and history as you see fit. Do you oppose Democracy? Do you oppose Civil Rights? Do you oppose equality and guaranteed standards of living? If you answered no to those questions then you are a Liberal. If you’re opposed to unchecked power of political entities or parties, if you’re opposed to the abolition of term limits, and if you’re opposed to economic disparity and inequality, then what you oppose is not Liberalism, what you oppose is fascism, authoritarianism, plutocracy, and capitalism.
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Neither is Oxford, chum.
My point is that you are misusing the dictionary as a replacement for actually knowing about a subject. People still call John Locke a liberal, and they do it because fields have definitions that aren’t colloquial.
Look anywhere outside of America and it readily refers to sniveling market-fetishists. In America it only implicitly does because everyone is a market fetishist.
How dare I “missuse” dictionaries to “define words” which contradict your “alternative facts.”
and FYI, Oxford is British.
Where did he say that the majority of people agree with this definition?
Well, the majority of workers in the US probably did, until the labor movements were crushed in the 60s and 70s
If the majority of people don’t agree on the proposed meaning of a word then that isn’t what the words mean. In other words, it is wrong.
It’s a materialist/Marxist definition, hence the
All successful labor movements and mass organizations in the past have included teaching others how things work, handing out pamphlets, etc.
Yeah, I’m glad you’re slowly starting to comprehend the conversation. I’m informing you that making up definitions for words is wrong and is the source of confusion when you try and fail to converse with others.
I’m sorry you don’t understand how languages work
Almost nobody knows the academic definitions of most political ideologies, they’re just all cable news buzzwords now. If you took a sample of the population I’d be surprised if even 5% could give you the correct academic definitions for the vast majority of political ideology terms.
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I don’t think it is fair to say that there was ever 100% agreement over what some of those terms meant.
Like or hate it, language means what the people think it means, and as GP suggests, choosing terms that disambiguate differences is a far better approach that allows people to find common ground rather than have a knee-jerk reaction to a policy because they associate with one ambiguous label and are told that the policy is associated with another.
Adding more dimensions to the policy spectrum help. One dimension (left/right) covering all manner of social and economic policy leads to confusing outcomes.
A two dimensional view - economic left-right on one axis, and libertarian/authoritarian - is one view that is popular now, so giving four quadrants, left lib, right lib, left auth, right auth - and that is already a lot more granular. With any quadrant view of course, the dispute is always going to be where the centre is… it is something of an Overton window, where extremists try to push in one direction to shift the Overton window and make positions that were firmly in one quadrant seem like the centre.
However, there are other dimensions as well that could make sense to evaluate policy (and political viewpoints) on even within these axes. One is short-term / long-term: at one extreme, does the position discount the future for the benefit of people right now, and at the other extreme, focusing far into the future with minimal concerns for people now. Another could be nationalist / globalist - does the position embody ‘think global, act local’, or does it aim to serve the local population to the detriment of global populations?
That is already a four-dimensional scheme (there could be more), and I believe that while real-world political parties often correlate some of those axes and extremes on one are often found together with extremes on another, they are actually near-orthogonal and it would be theoretically possible to be at each of the 16 possible points near the edges of that scheme.
That said, even though they are almost orthogonal, an extreme on one might prevent an extreme on another axis in some cases. For example, I’d consider myself fairly economically left, fairly socially libertarian, fairly far towards favouring the long term over the short term, and fairly far towards globalist (think global, act local) thinking. But some would say that an extreme left position requires no private ownership of the means of production. In the modern world, a computer is a means of production. I would not support a world in which there is no private ownership of computers, because that counters my the social libertarian position. So, I draw the line at wanting public ownership of natural monopolies and large-scale production - I would still want to live in a pluralistic society where people can try to create new means of production (providing it doesn’t interfere with others or the future, e.g. through pollution, safety risks, not paying a living wage, etc…), rather than one where someone like Trofim Lysenko has the ear of the leader and no one can disagree no matter how stupid their beliefs are. But I’d want to see the ability for the state to take over those new means of production in the public interest eventually if they pan out and become large scale (and for research to happen in parallel by the state).
I think putting one’s viewpoint on multiple dimensions makes it far clearer what someone believes, and where there is common ground, compared to picking labels with contested meaning and attacking the other labels.
So that’s the change you want to see in the world. Technical linguistic grammar takes precedence over political outreach.
I fully support your desire to spread vocabular competence. My impression from your first post was that you had other priorities.
Despite the erasure of the words’ meanings in the public consciousness, the concepts still exist.
If you have new, sexier names for the concepts which will accelerate their reintroduction into the public consciousness, I’m all ears.
It doesn’t have to be sexier terminology, or even different terminology. Just don’t drop the word “liberalism” into a conversation and expect the average person to understand what your talking about.
You could use “corporatism” which has kind of taken over that definition in common language. I know it’s technically incorrect, but language also isn’t static outside of academic disciplines. But ultimately you can use whatever language you want, just don’t assume a particular definition will be understood without explanation.
No one says “corporatism” in the real world. The better suggestion for an “alternative” is to just say “capitalism”, because that’s accurate enough.
nOOooOOOoooooo you can’t blame capitalism! We have to make up a word that means “capitalism” but isn’t capitalism and fix that (through reform! because we shouldn’t try to abolish capitalism).
The only people I know of who don’t know what the word “liberal” means, especially in the context the person above was using it, are very ignorant Americans. To be clear, even though I don’t like most Americans, I’m not blaming them for being ignorant in this particular case because they have been subjected to decades of mostly uncontested propaganda deliberately obfuscating the term. But most of the rest of the world knows what everyone is talking about when saying “liberal” and knows it’s a right wing ideology. And everyone shouldn’t have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don’t already know. People are generally expected to pick up the gist of a sentence or point via the context of what’s being said. The context was perfectly clear and it just sounds like concern trolling to go on about needing to hand-hold and dumb down the terminology being used for “the average person.”
Well, if you know that the person doesn’t know, giving definitions can be a helpful way of setting up your argument, but obviously these lemmitor assholes are just wasting your time.
“Neoliberalism” rather. Though that’s more like mask-off imperialism. And “corporatism” is just capitalism but when you don’t want to admit that the problem is capitalism.
Either way liberalism is the same idealist, individualist culture/ideology that emerges under capitalism to maintain that capitalist mode of production, and must be destroyed along with the mode of production it sustains.
Overthrowing liberalism/capitalism and stopping fascism requires mass organization and class consciousness, part of which is often understanding these basic concepts. And people did. They have to again.
All I’m saying is that if you don’t take your audience into consideration, your message will be misunderstood. If you want to use the “correct” (more debatable than you think) terminology when that terminology isn’t well understood in the culture, then take the time to explain the language. Or keep scratching your head about why your getting downvotes and convincing nobody.
Yeah you do that.
I’m getting downvotes because I’m telling a bunch of bubble communists that actual communication is more important than in-group signalling. No head scratches required. It’s why the left has been hopelessly ineffective for at least half a century.
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I know exactly why I’m getting downvotes. No head scratches required.
If you actually knew you would delete your account in shame
Communists had to pry these concessions from liberalism with organized violence, don’t pretend like liberalism did these things.
Honest question: when did communists use organized violence to abolish slavery? To win LGBT+ rights?
A lot of radical abolitionists were communists
The lgbt liberation movement would wave the flag of the legitimate vietnamese government during the US invasion. Marsha Johnson, Leslie fienberg, communists.