What Does the Word “Liberal” Mean?

It gets even better in Canada: "neoliberal" and "neoconservative" are used more or less interchangeably, and mean roughly the same thing as "classical liberal", which is of course the exact opposite of the current Liberal party.

I think that the nation states.net 3-axis model is sufficient for plotting and exploring political ideas for now [0]. It’s still better than the one-dimensional left-right spectrum or the two-dimensional Nolan chart [1]. However, given the rate at which language changes, it seems completely feasible that people might on day need a more granular political coordinate system.

[0] https://www.nationstates.net/page=create_nation

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart

"When most Europeans hear the word “liberal” they think of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan."

No. NO WE DO NOT. Irrespective of your views on Maggie - nobody considers her a liberal..

I think a lot of it is the extremes and secondary views adopted at either end. I also think part of the problem is not recognizing the Statist/Individualist part of the political spectrum. It isn't a slide rule, it's a map.

In the end, you have some very statist identitarian communists on the far "left" and you have some statis nationalist racists on the far "right" ... Most of the republicans are just right of center, 92% of democrats the same (excluding the fringe 8%). The fringe right is a fraction of a percent. Anyone who is outside of the left-most 20-30% is often called alt-right adjacent... it's no wonder Trump is in office, and even more left leaning people think they're right wing now.

Liberal means the near opposite of leftism. In the US, and abroad, I think that we are seeing a clear shift of the right wing factions towards liberalism, away from conservatism and religion. Likewise, there is a corresponding left wing shift towards Marxism. I personally think that is how the political factions will be characterized over the next century.

I would characterize liberalism's tenets as:

1.) Universality under the law (not contextualized by identity)

2.) Focus on maximizing individual liberty and minimizing centralized authority

3.) Laissez-faire focus on accountability. You reap what you sow

I would only differentiate a liberal from a libertarian in that a liberal is just more likely to accept certain market failures as being better served by the state. A liberal is more likely than a libertarian, for example, to support anti-monopoly clauses, or heavy taxation or regulation of negative third-party-externalities. But a liberal and libertarian are of the same ilk; and value liberty as the primary virtue.

Anything to the left of me is liberal, anything to the right of me is conservative.

I've always been curious if the internationalization of political discussion was behind the changing definitions of the word "liberal" in US politics.

In the 1990s, "liberal" was used as a synonym of "leftist"; a "liberal" politician would support expanding the welfare state, for example. My understanding is that the European definition of "liberal" is different, and implied a light touch in business affairs; the Economist is a "liberal" publication.

In 2019, this definition has spread to the United States as well; members of the Democratic Socialists of America don't identify as liberal. The European definition is only used in some circles: conservatives tend to stick to the old definition, and would describe somebody like Bernie Sanders as "liberal". I was always curious if this was because US political activists were talking to European ones on sites like Twitter, or Internet forums before it.

This has already been flagged, but a few points for those who may stumble upon it: the author is a professor at a wingnut, for-profit Christian college that primarily grants online, non-accredited certificates. So when he writes,

> The substantive problem is the bias Rosenblatt brings to her story of liberalism.

we need to look at the other possibility: Rosenblatt is dismantling the tradition, central to the author's personal mythology, of liberalism in the Anglo world being the primary thread of that idea. The book he quotes to claim that it is not so is another piece by a professor at Hillsdale College.

When you go look at the work they have produced, it becomes pretty clear. Rosenblatt has been working on this issue for a long time, and has a paper trail to show it. If you look at Schleuter's CV, you a minor PhD dissertation on Martin Luther King and...that's about it.

Both Liberal and Conservative are really loaded words. Not necessarily loaded in the emotional sense (although they are often that), but just in terms of being used with very different definitions in very different places. I listened to an audiobook or a lecture series a few years ago that discussed the idea of Liberalism that I found very interesting. Rather than dealing with any of the modern senses of the terms Conservative or Liberal, it dealt with the sea change in types of governance that occurred at the end of the Enlightenment with the rise of the United States and the French Revolution.

It takes a bit of doing for modern people to even conceive of what the actual argument was at the time. To really understand that both the rulers and the citizenry viewed rulers as fundamentally Better People in some way (often granted by God) is a mindset that modern people just aren't accustomed to. They read 'all men are created equal' and they don't realize what it's even talking about. The idea that citizens who are being ruled should have some say in how they are ruled was the essence of Liberalism in that time. It was a revolutionary idea and seen as stupid by many. Thomas Payne's 'Common Sense' was published at a time when the phrase 'common sense' was a perjorative. It referred to the 'sense' of commoners, implying that it was worthless and senseless. Commoners simply weren't built to be able to understand notions of governance or to be able to wield power without self destruction.

Just as racism and sexism proposed that there were "different kinds" of people who inherently bore different capabilities, setting one group or another apart and making them unsuited to certain pursuits, Conservatism held that the divide between ruler and ruled was of this nature as well. A natural fact, emerging either from direct divine edict or carried in bloodlines, that made it ludicrous to even suggest that perhaps the peasant should have something like a 'vote.'

Liberalism won quite conclusively. After the American Revolution and French Revolution, revolutions flourished all over the world. While Ancient Greece debuted democracy, it had died out for a long while and at the time every single nation on the planet was ruled by a Conservative government built around the idea of inherent superiority of the rulers. I can't imagine what it must have been like to live in those time periods, growing up knowing to your bones that you're simply a follower and a subject, liable to be called upon to have your concerns or life spent by the crown for their own purposes, and knowing that you simply weren't capable of questioning their motives or techniques. And then, that some people emerged who made arguments about the philosophical basis of government which was able to persuade this population to rise up and kill their own country so that they might build one of their own based upon this utterly heretical notion that there really aren't any Special People born to rule... it's dizzying to consider.

Those that remain dedicated to an idea of a return to this sort of Conservatism, and there are some, walk in step with eugenicists and should be feared.