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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

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It's mostly old school moderate liberals who call themselves classical liberals. Because today's loudest self described liberals have abandoned core principles like free speech. So the moderate among us have to make this distinction.

Calling us conservative or right wing is a way to other us, to kick us out of the tribe. It's purification. See the endless torrent of hate being directed at Bill Maher lately for maintaining liberal values. I've seen it hundreds of times on Twitter, "I'm so done with him! He's not one of us."

The GOP is not Libertarian on policy. Classical liberals are. You almost definitely prefer the CL stance to the GOP stance on almost every issue, and would therefore be well-served to encourage this movement.

Your reaction to it springs from a lack of knowledge about it. Calling the difference "1 or 2 policies" is reductive and ignorant.

My apologies for having a different view than you on how it is applied? You may be technically correct, but that is not, at least in my experience, how people use it. And that is all I’m talking about. How it is used, how people wield the term. So maybe cool it with the ad hominems?

I'm not attacking you personally, but I do see how I was too harsh, please forgive me. I'm simply saying that your opinion isn't fully formed and you're slinging mud at an ideology you don't understand. Classical liberalism is a relatively mature system, and claiming that it's barely real—simply because you don't get it—is silly.

I think parent's point is that, whatever "classical liberalism" means formally and historically, the label is typically used _today_ by people thought of as run-of-the-mill Conservatives (i.e., Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Brett Weinstein, etc.).

All three of those people are genuinely classical liberals, or at least aligned with them, and the fact that they're now considered mainstream conservatives is a huge victory, showing how the mainstream right is swinging towards libertarianism and away from the Reagan cosplay.

Bingo

There's a very O'Rourke style quip in there too: the term "Classical Liberal" is an attempt to explain something with a label that is too complicated (or... often too inconveniently controversial) to do with an argument.

To wit: someone who calls themselves a classical liberal is doing the same thing other people do when they tell you their pronouns.

That’s a very interesting comparison… I’ll have to give it more thought. Thank you!

Note also: 'classical liberal' has been an attempt to clarify/brand a certain viewpoint for decades, as the US label of 'liberal' has drifted from what it previously meant.

So I suspect your observation about the "last few years" is more a reflection of the evolution of your specific info-environment, & rhetoric consumption, than a broader trend.

For example, Google books show it rising from nothing before the 1930s 'New Deal' era (of massive new government economic interventions), to a steep growth in the 1980s (Reaganism etc), starting to plateau in the 20X0s:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=classical+libe...

Search trends show interest in finding out what it is roughly stable since 2004:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

In the late 1800s, 'liberal' overwhelmingly meant in favor of free trade, less government involvement in running or regulating private enterprises, & free speech – not especially "liberal" policies in present US politics. (Though, in late 20thC, US 'liberals' were still among the strongest free-speech advocates.)

But in the UK & some very-left circles, 'liberal' still has some of those meanings – compared to more radical leftism, for sure – but is often labelled (or slurred) as 'neoliberal'.

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