Differences Between Left and Liberals

Liberalism is the system of governance based around the preservation of liberty and associated rights (which currently include capitalism.) It is basically winning across the developed world, and has spent about 25 years being uncontested except by terrorists and Asian countries slowly giving into its charms.

As such, people who identify as liberal are less likely to see a bad system, and more a system in need of fixing and cleansing. They will focus on symbolic problems, like flags or representation in the media, and try to avoid confronting the horrific fact that “everything is broken and we have no idea what to do.”

Leftists are on the surface focused more on economic and substantive matters. But the philosophy that underlies that is the belief that our economic system is completely unjust, and the source of misery in our world. Confronting symbolic problems is just fighting over minor symptoms, and in fact a capitalist tactic to make us forget our shared unity.

It’s true their goals may be more radical and so they are less interested in compromise, but often “compromise” looks like “blame all our problems on this one outgroup and attack them, while we ignore our other substantive problems” and that’s not a compromise I like.

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I am not a fan of labeling everyone other than yourself some political perjorative, like “liberal” (or the coward’s version, “neoliberal”) and thus dismissing everyone who hasn’t pledged fealty to your ideology.

But liberalism is in a somewhat unique position.

Liberalism runs shit.

The existing United States political order is based on the ethics of liberalism - delineated rights and constitutional allocation of powers. The existing international order pays fealty to these ideas of rights and limited powers. The President of the most powerful nation in the world, and the next President, are both liberals. The CEO of the richest company in the world is liberal. Pretty much everyone the aforementioned people socialize with believe in political rights, property rights, and checks and balances on power. The media they consume overwhelmingly idealizes respect for minority cultures along the road to JS Mills liberal-utilitarian paradise.

In as much as any political ideology can be said to be dominant in our world, liberalism is.

So, if things are still terrible and in dire need of change, some of that change will involve discussion of the responsiblity of liberalism for it. You can’t be that powerful an ideology and also innocent of the world’s evils.

This is the flip side of how it’s hard to take seriously any communist who does not grapple with the genocidal failure of communism in the 20th century. If they can not account for that, why would you want to hear any of their other plans? Similarly for the people who believe the same basic shit as the people who are in charge right now.