• axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Yeah you’re the one being pedantic here. Liberalism has exactly two definitions that get used 99% of the time. Someone might say liberal to mean “socially liberal,” which means open-mindedness in regards to progressive movements such as feminism, promotion of gay rights, acceptance of trans people, and all that stuff. This is usually the only definition used in the USA.

    Or they mean liberalism as the broad ideological foundation of capitalism, with a belief in the promotion of free enterprise, distribution, public-private separation, and the primacy of individual rights. This definition is almost never used in the USA except by socialists, but outside of the USA this is understood as the primary definition of the term whereas “socially liberal” is regarded as a secondary definition.

    And it’s very easy to determine which one a person is talking about if you look at the context clues. The only other context I can think of where liberal is used is the academic term “liberal arts,” but that refers to scholarly topics that would have been taught to people who weren’t slaves.

    • queermunist she/her
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      8 months ago

      And you will notice that every person who calls themselves a liberal in America still believe in the broad ideological foundation of capitalism.

    • tiredturtle
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      8 months ago

      Huh… we’re seeing anglocentric capitalists trying to rebrand liberalism somehow compatible with right wing. Always some liberty-hindering agenda gets newspeak marketing campaigns, “economic liberalism”, “neoliberalism”, “classic liberalism”

      “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength”…

      • robinn_IV@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        Liberalism has always been right wing, and Orwell is the lowest garbage anyone can reference in political analysis. You didn’t even do it correctly, assuming that “newspeak” just means a new euphemistic way of referring to something, and this is the way it’s commonly used by people who didn’t actually read 1984 (not to say that they should), but really it’s a language based around contractions, abbreviations, and simplifications meant to make communication more efficient, and also (somehow) make people lose the ability to think independently.