You know the craziest part about all this is that I’ve been given about three contradictory definitions on what a liberal is, and not one person has claimed to be one.
I’d consider that “Lemmy 101” if the subject was conservatives. They’d never know to come here to begin with, but liberals?
Shouldn’t this thread be full of infighting and opinions?
…where are they? Is this something no one wants to be?
I mean this is a leftist meme community, so I’d expect mostly leftists to be the ones responding. Just like if on a conservative meme platform you asked what leftists are, you’d mostly get conservatives answering.
But I feel like the replies to your question don’t really contradict each other. One was describing them as the Democrats in the US, which is basically accurate. It’s gotten turned into a word meaning leftist by the Republicans, but it’s basically just people who think the current system is pretty much good, and only needs small tweaks.
This amounts to effectively a support of capitalism and the free market, with some regulations being added on top of what we have now. Communism is bad though, and at most we should have some more safety nets. The civil rights movement is good now, but go back to then and liberals were the “white moderates” MLK talked about. Stuff like that disrupts the status quo too much. Since what constitutes the current system changes over time, what liberals support also will, just like any ideology evolves.
Obviously everyone here (me included) will probably be a bit biased against liberals, but also a lot of anarchists or communists or other left wing folk will have probably identified as a liberal at some point in time, and statistically still know and/or be family with a lot of them.
You know the craziest part about all this is that I’ve been given about three contradictory definitions on what a liberal is, and not one person has claimed to be one.
I’d consider that “Lemmy 101” if the subject was conservatives. They’d never know to come here to begin with, but liberals?
Shouldn’t this thread be full of infighting and opinions?
…where are they? Is this something no one wants to be?
I mean this is a leftist meme community, so I’d expect mostly leftists to be the ones responding. Just like if on a conservative meme platform you asked what leftists are, you’d mostly get conservatives answering.
But I feel like the replies to your question don’t really contradict each other. One was describing them as the Democrats in the US, which is basically accurate. It’s gotten turned into a word meaning leftist by the Republicans, but it’s basically just people who think the current system is pretty much good, and only needs small tweaks.
This amounts to effectively a support of capitalism and the free market, with some regulations being added on top of what we have now. Communism is bad though, and at most we should have some more safety nets. The civil rights movement is good now, but go back to then and liberals were the “white moderates” MLK talked about. Stuff like that disrupts the status quo too much. Since what constitutes the current system changes over time, what liberals support also will, just like any ideology evolves.
Obviously everyone here (me included) will probably be a bit biased against liberals, but also a lot of anarchists or communists or other left wing folk will have probably identified as a liberal at some point in time, and statistically still know and/or be family with a lot of them.