I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
Prime for conversion. We just have to teach them what a liberal is so that they stop calling themselves that.
I absolutely agree. I also think the irritating environment created by the current digital red scare trend will eventually subside once they move onto some new scare words because the existing ones are losing their edge.
I hope you’re right. I’m trying my best to do my part.
Can you define a liberal for me? I usually call myself a progressive, but from my limited understanding I know liberals are generally pro-capitalists that usually posture morality to uphold capitalism.
And then does ‘neo-’ in front of lib or con just mean they colonize developing countries with banks instead of armies?
lol, ya basically, if you want to cut through the bullshit and get to straight to the point.
I have a lot of conversations about ecological collapse. Now that conservatives are slowly starting to acknowledge climate change and propose eco-fascist solutions, I see a lot of people complaining about the emissions from China and the population in Africa.
A lot of people will point out that Europe and the US off-shored manufacturing and the related emissions to China, and then we go ahead and consume the final product without needing to claim the emissions. So the simple numbers paint a misleading picture.
What I don’t see pointed out nearly as often, is that Africa’s population problems began with private American and European ‘investment’ into poor African countries. These fat cats built factories and dorms. They can pay but a pittance in the factories, and charge enough in the dorms to make their employees go into debt and become trapped. They can grow the same crops an American does, and walk away with a fraction of the share of revenue that an American farmer would. Why does this matter? These investors are the ones who created the systems that demand poor African families have more kids in order to work more jobs and keep a roof over their head. The population boom is entirely explained by the new extractive economic systems that were imposed upon these regions. And who is benefiting from this population boom and the increased productivity it has led to? It’s not the poor African families with 10 kids working the fields, it’s the Americans and Europeans who get access to an unsustainably cheap market and its products. And it’s not the African workers, but the foreign consumers who have any power to make the exploitative businesses change their ways. And yet most of them don’t even realize that any of this has any connection to climate change or other issues facing our world - they are alienated from the harm (for now).
That is neoliberalism not relegated to abstract theory, but put into actual practice.
That’s just exporting the sharecropping/company town era economics beyond the media horizon.
The IMF/World Bank vs Private Capital (vs China ) to fund infrastructure is the other angle.
Liberal can refer to social beliefs or economic beliefs.
In terms of social beliefs, liberals promote equal rights and oppose discrimination based on identity. As I understand it, this definition arose from the economic definition based on a comparison of the laissez-faire market approach to the laissez-faire identity approach. (Note: Social liberalism does not refer to liberal social beliefs as commonly expressed in the US, it’s an actual political platform which includes economic aspects.)
In terms of economic beliefs, liberals support free markets as well as the right of the individual to private property including that of the means of production. They oppose government intervention and unions, and support low taxes, privatization, and deregulation. This is the basis of liberal political platforms in the US.
Progressives are not radically economic liberals because they support a greater amount of government intervention. Additionally, economic liberals consider the ability to accumulate private property as the basis of liberty, whereas progressives tend to believe that liberty is created when there is a lack of oppression. They support strong social safety nets in order to prevent the disadvantaged from being entirely exploited. This aspect of progressivism is where it differentiates itself from the more liberal part of the party.
So progressives are less liberal than Third Way Democrats, not more. What they are more of, is libertarian. Liberals believe the right to oppress is freedom, libertarians are the ones who believe the right to not be oppressed is freedom. (Classical libertarianism == Anarchy.)
Most progressives do not provide an alternative to liberal economics. They want to make the game more fair with less downside, but they are still capitalists and the point of capitalism is the accumulation of resources held by increasingly few hands so as to enable increasingly more capital intensive ventures. Traditionally this inequality is considered a form of hierarchy and oppression by libertarians, which is the basis for their opposition to private property and capitalism. So progressive politicians have libertarian elements but the capitalist basis of their platform puts them further into liberal territory.
Neoliberalism is essentially an extension of market theory and commodification into parts of life and society that which previously did not have markets / were not commodified. Things like social relations, love, happiness, right to travel, and atmospheric carbon can be quantified, and so a market can be made for them in order to commercialize and extract profit from them.
Liberal economics has a strange history. Adam Smith is often credited as the founder, but he was a philosopher who wrote a critique of capitalism. Later on, economists realized that he had laid out the blueprints for how to make money from the economy. So instead of viewing it as a critique, they saw it as a playbook. Adam Smith was actually supportive of intervention in order to limit the harms of capitalism. Some liberal economists hang onto the concept of limits and regulation, while another area that differentiates neoliberals is that they tend to be even stronger / more radical proponents of deregulation, austerity, and minimized government spending.