How To Tell If You're A Liberal

You realise the term liberal means different things on both sides of the ocean right

If "liberal" is intended to mean "a member of the Liberal Party", then it would be helpful to make that distinction. Otherwise, it's six of one and a half dozen of the other in terms of defining one's enemy according to whatever is most convenient to dismiss them as wrong or evil.

This particular discussion has been had a million times.

Didn't think you needed to be told this, Aimless. Don't you know everything?

It's hard to have a discourse if we can't agree on what words mean.

Liberalism as an economic and political project is as coherent as any really - I mean you can also argue about the definition of fascist, communist, social democrat, etc. The reason it's become a byword for "left of center" in the US is that any kind of credible left had been very effectively marginalized and erased from the mainstream. As this changes, the US definition of liberal starts to resemble that present in Europe - and obviously a lot of US liberals feel uncomfortable with where that positions them.

it would help if people didn't pretend these isms are perfect ideal types with clear boundaries

it makes most sense to me to define liberalism as the hegemonic common sense of the societies where most of us live and because that's not always the same liberalism isn't always the same and it has the same tendencies towards faction and syncretism and opportunism as any other political tradition but that doesn't make the word any more meaningless than "christianity"

xp There still isn't much of a "credible left" in the U.S. Meanwhile, the American right has been able to characterize centrist and slightly left-of-center liberals (in the U.S. colloquial sense) as radical leftists.

Turns out the "liberal" is just a convenient label that means 'people who argue with my premises'.

lock thread, we got it sorted

Well, according to xyzzz's post quoting the "Liberal" and "Commie" positions, I qualify as a Commie, since it was clear, succinct and agrees with my perceptions of the world. By comparison, Tooze's tweet was so ambiguous that it was impossible to extract any particular position from it, which is one of the most common complaints about liberals.

jimbeaux, that is why I said "as it changes", not "now that it's changed". Nonetheless all sorts of leftist positions are now popular, though nowhere near dominant or consensus, amongst left of centre ppl in the US that would have been viewed as insane extremism 20, 30 years ago. The move away from liberal as a self-identifier comes with that, I think.

I honestly can't think of a single political position that meets that description, but that's probably a failure of imagination on my part.

Well I don't live in the US but I can say I was speaking to liberal identifying Americans online and reading liberal identified US publications since the early 00's and the idea that there hasn't been a general leftward shift amongst these demographics AT ALL since the Clinton years...that does sound like we live in paralell universes, yeah.

it's been pretty wild hearing americans saying positive things about labour organising over the last decade or so I thought it would never happen

remember when everyone told the story about getting in trouble for moving a chair like it was something that had actually happened to them

also the Trumpian rhetoric that get's widely amplified in the US is wildly inaccurate and quite barmy. Like Kamala and Biden are communists and Marxists etc. Mind you it's almost as barmy as Starmer getting derided as a "lefty lawyer" by Sunak, really.

Tooze is a very old-school liberal. Likes investment, isn't obsessed with means-testing, sees a lot of dangers with the way the right have been turning out in Europe.

The ones in the UK have totally lost the plot since Brexit and Blairism.

xp Oh, no doubt there has been a leftward shift among a, perhaps sizable, part of the U.S. electorate. This is probably mostly among the younger demographic. However, to say that the positions they are taking would have been insane extremism 20-30 years ago ignores the political history of the U.S. There really is nothing new under the sun; if anything, the political left of the Boomer generation was more radical than its successors. If there have been any shifts that would have been unthinkable 20-30 years ago, they have come mostly in the realm of the personal, e.g., same-sex marriage, which truly was a fringe idea just a couple of decades ago.

if anything, the political left of the Boomer generation was more radical than its successors.

A certain portion of it were so during their youth, sure (I hesitate to make grander pronouncements because I do think a lot of the boomer self-mythology is far from representative of the generation as a whole), but they didn't stay that way! By the time you get to the 90's for instance the economic orthodoxy of the boomer generation is pretty cemented and a lot of the ideas that came crashing down in '08 still taken as certainties.

You'll get no argument from me on that. Of course, that happens to a lot of leftist movements, at least in the so-called "developed world," as their constituents age.