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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> now that liberals have abandoned the working class and become the party of the establishment elite,

Liberals are not a political party. You're talking about the Democrats, which as a party isn't really all that liberal.

That's an interesting point. Maybe I'm missing the idea that no party cares much about the poor / working class.

There are differences between the two parties in terms of how (and how much) they care about the poor and the working class. But both parties have priorities they hold more dear.

Neither the Democrats nor Republicans are champions of the poor and working class, but they are also not equally neglectful of them.

The Democratic Party is neoliberal by every imaginable definition of the term, and so-called "classical liberalism" was abandoned with the onset of WW2. Which liberalism are you referring to?

People seem to falsely equate liberal with leftwing. They are very different. In fact no one hates liberals quite like left wingers. Democrats are liberal, not leftist (though they have adopted some leftist bits)

Liberals (and neoliberals) want everything controlled by markets. The government should butt out and collect no more taxes than is reasonably needed to set and enforce the market rules. Everything else should be private. Not too different from libertarians except that they have more common sense.

Leftists want the government to have an opinion and directly act and spend money in order to achieve specific outcomes. If there are many homeless, don't try to influence the market to increase supply or drop price, just directly go and build houses. If we need clean energy, don't dick about with carbon credits and incentives, just go and hire some engineers and build wind turbines.

Liberals and leftists are opposites not synonyms.

I am not equating liberal with left wing.

I didn't say you were

In the conservative/liberal spectrum of the US, the Democratic party is left-leaning centrist. There is no mainstream "liberal" party in the US.

But aside from that, what I also mean is that the Democratic party has members from all across the political spectrum. There are even extremely conservative Democrats. So, however you define "liberal", it is not accurate to consider "democrat" and "liberal" as being essentially synonymous.

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