Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

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"Liberal" means different things in different contexts.

In the US, in popular usage, it means someone who supports extensive public programs (education, welfare, research, etc.), even if it means that taxes are higher. It also means someone who is against the government infringing on social freedoms, like equality for people with different sexualities, genders, or races.

The classical usage of "liberal" means someone who supports individual freedom in every sense: lower taxes, fewer government programs, less government spending, and social freedom.

To make it even more confusing, the hard-right of the Republican Party claims to be "liberal" in the classical sense (sometimes also called "libertarian"), but many of them aren't actually libertarian.

And, to make it even more confusing, there are actual libertarians in the US who don't know to describe themselves that way[1][2].

1. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/25/in-search-of...

2. http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/there-are-few-libertarian...

Even in Europe there are quite a few varieties. Some European liberals are more along the lines of American libertarians, but most are considerably more open to some degree of social safety net, and would be positioned to the left of more of a Reagan/Thatcher approach. Especially some kind of welfare system, universal public education, and universal provision of healthcare are common viewpoints. Some of this is the influence of left-Hayekians and German "social market economy" theorists within the European liberal movement, but some of those positions also have quite old roots in liberalism (e.g. Thomas Jefferson was a well-known American classical liberal favoring universal public education).

The UK Liberal Democrats and the Danish Social Liberal Party are two examples of liberal parties fairly solidly taking that viewpoint. The German FDP also used to in earlier years, but since the '80s is more Thatcher-influenced. The UK Economist newsmagazine also has views that could be put in this category.

These kinds of HN threads have completely ruined me on ever using the term "liberal" in any context. It doesn't reliably scale to broadcast a consistent concept to a sizable group of people.

That goes for most labels used in some context. Left-wing, right wing, liberal, conservative, democracy, freedom, prosperity and so on. All those mean different things to different people.

In continental Europe it's somewhat clarified by dividing them into "liberal-conservatives", who politically side with conservative parties and may also be open to some elements of traditional conservatism (patriotism/nationalism, anti-immigration, etc.), and "social liberals", who tend to position themselves as politically centrist or center-left, support at least some kinds of social programs, and are typically hostile to traditional conservatism. Individuals may or may not fit cleanly into one of those categories, but the parties usually do.

Though that runs into another naming collision, because "social liberal" in the U.S. means a liberal who is focused mostly on social issues (gay marriage, abortion, free speech), rather than a liberal who is supportive of social programs.

I thought that Republicans were bitterly divided, until I started learning about Libertarians.

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