This is all bullshit.
Who fucking cares about these definitions? All y’all have the same damn enemy. Worry about the enemy first. Iron out disagreements over terminology once the fascists are gone.
It’s so weird that people spend so much time debating this pointless garbage.
Oh, the problem is much deeper than definitions. One group is socially progressive but economically right. Then, the other group is both progressive on social and economic issues. The economic policies is where the rift is.
Edit: wording
And the economic right have had all the power for the last god knows how many election cycles… They’ve been chasing the unicorn moderate that would somehow vote Democrat, which doesn’t exist, but in doing so they lose the “left” vote.
Those “centrists” and “moderates” are conservatives that are disgusted by the GOP, but would never vote for Democrats because they don’t agree with their policies. They have no party but the economic right liberals keep trying to attract them… Hopefully now with the change in DNC leadership they’ll stop this losing game and actually be what their voters want them to be.
The “unicorn moderate” used to exist, and they grew from post-war up to the early 2000s. They were called the middle class. Back then when the middle class was much more prominent and bigger, they could still afford both private healthcare and keep up with the cost of living. One of the key litmus test of being “moderate” is the survey on affordable healthcare. In early 00s, socialised healthcare was deeply unpopular. However, it was from during and after the Great Recession of 2008 that the middle class shrunk and recognised that people need more public assistance. Affordable healthcare became increasingly more popular as time went on.
Rent have also become almost unaffordable since the recession. Ever since then, many proposals and plans to create affordable housing were made but have been blocked not just by corporations, but also by individual homeowners who don’t want their house prices to go down. And one of the hard to swallow pills is that many of them are liberals. One could easily search online of affordable housing being voted down in California and New York, states that are liberal strongholds.
There is a reason why Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign is more widely successful than other Democratic candidates. He is addressing the growing cost of living by wanting to cap rent prices and providing government run grocery stores, which made him popular among the poor. Because the middle class shrunk and people had been shoved into fringes of poverty. The “moderate” voters that the Democrats are chasing is no longer there. At this day and age, “moderate” for centrists and neoliberals means the wealthy, while pretending that the word means the middle class voters from 2000s.
Leftists feel powerless and most are too insecure to go out and actually debate in right-wing spaces, so all they have is bickering internally about other leftists and complaining about liberals to satisfy their need for intellectual debate and drama.
You simply can’t have an argument with a conservative, so I get how frustrating it is. But guys, there are other ways you can make progress, but I’m sorry to say it still involves leaving behind your discord polycule.
Debating in right wing spaces is futile. Those morons don’t know the first thing about sourcing material or the truth
The problem is we don’t have the same enemies, there are people who claim to be left but oppose Liberals, such as Tankies. Tankies aren’t the enemy of the GOP, they want the GOP to win over progressives like the DNC. They use words like “capitalism” to describe everything wrong with the USA because that way they can exclude the eastern dictatorships like Russia and China from the same criticisms.
Shit posts like the one above are the result of psyop campaigns.
Shit posts like the one above are the result of psyop campaigns.
It is a jab at Americans who can’t tell the difference between left and liberal and often conflate the two.
And sure look, if liberal Democrats really want to win again, they have to deal with “kitchen table issues” as Mamdani puts it. And as I mentioned to one of the commenters, who are the ones who keep voting down affordable rent and housing, even in liberal states, because it will bring their house prices down? Mamdani forwarded a solution to that by capping rent prices and he won over people for that. That alone says why American left and liberals are actually different though mainly on economic issues.
CaPitAlIST LIbrUhLS CoNFLaTe HuMAn riGHTs wiTh ProGRESS HUURRGGH DURRRR Yeah I know your whole spiel
Affordable housing, freedom from want and jobs are human rights.
Then why are you opposing them?
You should be asking yourself if you can read at all.
Is this what shitlibs tell themselves?
Any leftist will use words like capitalism to describe the issues because it’s fucking all pervasive. And China and Russia are also both capitalist despite whatever tankiefuck will tell you.
We don’t have the same enemies, because you ally with the ownership class and not your own.
Liberal means advocate of human rights, bare definition. If there is at all an ownership class then liberalism is not being administrated. And I assure you, the word “Capitalism” on Lemmy is used the vast majority of the time as a dogwhistle for “Western Nation”.
In what way does exchanging money for goods cause outlawing gay marriage or banning books? In what way does it cause not taxing the rich? Makes no goddamn sense. Authoritarianism and Conservatives cause those things.
Liberal means advocate of human rights
Not unless you’re creating your own personal definition. At best, liberalism means advocating for individual rights, and where you or I might disagree with the application of that idea is where individual rights are in tension with communal or collective rights more broadly
In what way does exchanging money for goods cause outlawing gay marriage or banning books?
Markets are not the same as capitalism. It’s a description of a system that enshrines abstract ownership over systems of production. If you dont take issue with the coercive mechanisms within capital relations, then im not really sure where to put you ‘on the left’.
Mandated, unconditional individual rights ARE collective rights and also human rights.
You also appear to no know the definition of Capitalism because if Capitalism is not a regulated Market System then the USA is also not a capitalism. Not surprising since you people use it as a dog whistle to mean “western nation” that you lack understanding of what it actually means.
Mandated, unconditional individual rights ARE collective rights and also human rights
Not when those rights are in conflict with another individual’s. The classic example is the individual right to private property, but there are many others. American liberals do recognize these limits and contradictions, but accept as granted the right to private property. It’s the center tenet of leftist critique, so it makes a lot of sense why there’s a lot of cynicism about liberals claiming to occupy the same space. Sure, they have some overlap, but the main contention is left unaddressed by American liberals and so leave themselves open to derision.
if Capitalism is not a regulated Market System then the USA is also not a capitalism
It’s a type of regulated market system, but it’s defined by its mode of production being capitalist in nature. Socialist and communist systems still employ regulated markets, but collectivize ownership over productive capital instead. Abolishing capitalism isn’t a way of saying we should abolish markets, but to remove capital as the mode of production
If rights to one person contradict the rights of another, resulting in loss and harm then guess what? Individual rights aren’t being mandated and upheld and that’s not Liberalism.
Socialist and communist systems still employ regulated markets, but collectivize ownership over productive capital instead.
No, they don’t, because that has never existed and will never if you keep bending over backwards to dictators.
No,
I think we’ve decided this. The left (rightfully) hates the Democrats.
Yes, but I hate Trump more.
An inch of gained ground is better than a mile of lost ground.What gained ground?
Gay marriage rights, the railroad unions got their sick leave, the rich were being audited created serious revenue gains and if the DNC were in charge then the TCJA wouldn’t have been renewed meaning even more taxing of the rich.
The railroad unions thing is patently false (they wanted a lot more sick leave and a lot more than sick leave), but also: I’m asking what would’ve improved, not what would’ve not deteriorated or what improved in the past.
Okay I’m sorry that decades of evidence of improvements aren’t enough to convince you that things would have improved again, but then my statement about the TCJA expiring in 2026 and not becoming permanent still qualifies as an answer. We would be taxing the fucking rich. How can you even pretend that’s not what we should be doing?
Leftists hate democrats so much they helped vote in Trump instead of a very decent woman twice.
The only thing leftists hate more then democrats are other leftists.
Two things:
Leftists did vote for Clinton. (You’ll recall she got more votes.) That is despite the fact that she was a piece-of-shit candidate that we didn’t want, and didn’t win the primary.
Harris was just plain stupidity. You can’t look poor people in the eye for three months and tell them you won’t change anything and still claim to be decent, much less a legitimate presidential candidate.
Respectfully, you’re being very unreasonable. You don’t get to punch the voters in the face and then whine that you broke your hand.
Kamala wasn’t a great candidate. But there were 2 options, and the other is deploying the military against civilians, ignoring due process.and court orders, and ordering states to imprison the homeless while ensuring an economic collapse that will create more homeless people.
Ignoring the problems with Bidens’ and then Harris’ campaign, which were disastrous and failed to earn the votes of many working class Americans, is precisely how the Democrats will continue to lose even in the face of unpopular fascist opposition.
Zohran Mamdani has been a microcosm of this paradigm shift. Progressive policies are incredibly popular because they address the material harms people face. Anti-israel policies are incredibly popular and only getting more so as Israel and the US continue to facilitate this genocide.
The corporate neoliberalism of the Democratic Party establishment is a critical part of the problem that got us to fascism. We need progressive candidates at all levels to dramatically reform the party and represent the working class constituency it’s supposed to represent.
Progressive policies that a majority of Americans support
Here Are 34 Polls That Show A Ceasefire & Weapons Embargo Help Kamala Win
Kamala Would Have Won With A Weapons Embargo
Democrats’ Working-Class Failures, Analysis Finds, Are ‘Why Trump Beat Harris’
2024 Post-Election Report: A retrospective and longitudinal data analysis on why Trump beat Harris
How Trump and Harris Voters See America’s Role in the World
Majority of Americans support progressive policies such as higher minimum wage, free college
Democrats should run on the popular progressive ideas, but not the unpopular ones
Here Are 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind
Finding common ground: 109 national policy proposals with bipartisan support
Progressive Policies Are Popular Policies
Tim Walz’s Progressive Policies Popular With Republicans in Swing States
Yeah, true progressives are great.
But that doesn’t mean you should hand power to treasonous, fascist rapists when your favorite candidate doesn’t get the nomination.
The Democratic Party did hand over power to treasonous fascist rapists, and they did so by running such a bad campaign, despite the consistent polling and public sentiment that showed exactly what needed to change. That’s precisely the issue I’m getting at. The Democratic Party establishment clearly prefers losing to fascists over representing everyday americans
Biden still got the most votes of any presidential candidates.
I’m rubbing the non-voter’s noses in the mess they made and hope they’ll do better in the midterms.
Without COVID Biden would have lost too.
Though, it was important to see Democrats demonstrate, publicly, that brain damage and genocide are not disqualifiers for the presidency in their view.
Biden’s ass cancer would have been a better president than the one we ended up with.
How’s the genocide working out, I think Trump is about to give away Ukraine and Israel is about to take over Gaza City, no?
Right…here we go with the purity tests again. If you don’t believe exactly what I believe, you dont deserve my vote. Its this attitude that got us a second Trump presidency, and how’s that working out for us?
Purity test = genocide good or bad.
If you fail this test, you deserve everything that happens to you.
If there is anything worthwhile for being a purity test, it’s being pro or anti genocide.
How can people expect any party who doesn’t care about genocide, to care about democracy?
Your profile is interesting. It’s almost like you believe a minority can do everything because you’re “right.” Are you in the burn it all down camp?
Artist, musical performer, and former derby skater from the Midwest.
I’m single, childless, and married to freedom and adventure.
ACAB, Anti-War, and I hate Democrats, Republicans, and billionaires.
Leftists aren’t numerous enough to have had much an effect on the election.
But I will confirm your second statement.
We can be friends until the fascists are out of the government, then we need a social democracy and a ban on far right parties amongst other things.
Liberals are the fascists in their baby form. Once the conditions of the capitalist state deteriorate they transform into fascists quite fast.
Liberals don’t know they’re conservatives.
The party is conservative, their constituents are being lied to. They just need to realize that electoral politics will not save us. Hopefully they do this before it’s too late.
Any “left” that doesn’t promote human rights can fuck right off back to the dictatorship it came from.
How did you figure out I was a genie?
I don’t call tankies “left”.
But they are?
Not all rightists are authoritarians, but all authoritarians are rightists. Being leftist literally means being anti-authoritarian. Tankies are classic right wing authoritarians cosplaying as leftist. Whether someone thinks their brand of authoritarianism is more benevolent is not the metric that determines their position on the political spectrum, it is whether power is evenly distributed (leftist) or consolidated (rightist).
Fuck outta here, liberals shit on the left as much as conservatives do.
Do not split.
But what is happening in Hong Kong is they come up with a slogan, which is translated as Do Not Split, which is, we know that some people are willing to be confrontational with riot police.
And when they are, that’s going to cost the state in terms of not only resources, but it’s going to cost the state in terms of political capital and support. And we know that there are some people who are not willing to do that. And we are going to abide by the protocol of Do Not Split, which means that we’re not going to criticize them openly, and they’re not going to criticize us openly.
If we’re the pacifists, we’re not going to have them criticize us for being sort of like, I don’t know, limpid or flaccid or not courageous or whatever. And we’re not going to criticize them for being more confrontational. And the thing is that the support is also tacit.
Your quote contains exactly zero material applicable to the American left. The disagreement between leftists and liberals is a lot deeper than what tactic they prefer to reach the same goal, and liberals have repeatedly and incessantly attacked and sabotaged the left for their own ends. I mean hell, “and they’re not going to criticize us openly”? Have you seen how liberals talk about the left?
^ example of splitting
It’s not, at least not as described in the parent comment.
^
Yes please.
Remove the American part. The right has found a nice way to divide the left and they’re using it everywhere. If you find yourself hating everyone, using vitriole toward people on your side, stop and reflect that you’re the problem.
The right has found a nice way to divide the left and they’re using it everywhere.
Someone mentioned it that the problem is that NIMBYs happened to also be liberals. What do you think of building affordable housing and raising the minimum wage? These two issues are happening across the world, and they happened since mainstream parties have been in charge for thirty years.
I’m in favor of both. I live in one of the most expensive states in the US, and I’m actually doing okay, but I’m very much in favor of affordable housing. People who work need places to live.
And people should make a living wage. But I also think that shit is too expensive, and increasing wages doesn’t help. We’re seeing the middle class absolutely disappear. We need to eat rich people, but that goes without saying.
I think the country is full of ladder pullers. They made their way up and don’t want others to have an escalator. These people worked their way up (or had their generational wealth raise them) so it feels like oppression to have others easily get something they have.
I understand the sentiment. Where I live, they have liquor licenses based on population, so they’re limited, and in turn they become massively expensive. You’ll see people pay six or seven figures for one.
Anytime folks talk about adjusting the laws to allow more establishments to serve, the same argument comes up, that someone paid a fortune, and now you’re just giving them away. Doesn’t make them right, but I get it.
I always imagine that if I win the lottery, I’d buy land in my town and build parks, but who knows what happens when that’s a reality, you know? I like to think I’d be philanthropic af, but money has been corrupting people since literally the dawn of time. Advanced society is when we do away with money.
It’s not nimbys, it’s corporations buying up all of the housing, building only “luxury” apartments and price fixing the fuck out of the rent. Then they spout “Trickle Down Housing” where the “luxury” apartments will be available in 30 years.
NIMBYs and corporations are results of both problem, excessive individualism.
I don’t think the right did that to the left. We did it to ourselves. In contrast, the right is somehow really good at putting aside differences to work toward a common goal. I want to know how we can copy that.
I don’t think the right did that to the left.
Cambridge Analytica would disagree.
Can you elaborate? How did Cambridge Analytica affect the left’s/liberal’s perspectives on each other?
I hate liberals more than conservatives because at least with conservatives they don’t go around pretending to be on my side while doing heinous shit. Conservatives just do the heinous shit without the pretense.
This reminds me of that meme (article?) someone posted a couple days ago about some dude who loves metal gives up trying to explain to his family that he’s not goth, cuz it’s easier to just lets his family ogle at his ‘goth phase’.
So… same energy - whether or not “left” and “democrat” are synonymous depends entirely on the person I’m talking to… they either already know, or I don’t have the energy to try to teach them.
Agreed. But also, you can just ignore those terms entirely and focus on actual issues…
100%
This is pointless identitarian bullshit that does nothing to stop the fascists currently in charge of the United States.
It all makes me a bit suspicious.
That’s sort of the point of my post. It’s trying to poke fun on people not knowing the difference and depending on how the person define the terms. Instead, they called this post a “psyops” and I guess I also inadvertently caused another leftist/liberal (in-)fighting depending how you look at it.
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It doesn’t matter who you vote for.
Democrats rig their primaries.
far right liberal capitalists or literally figurative nazis.
if you’re on the wrong side of us ‘foreign policy’ both of these groups will exterminate you all the same.
the bipartisan consensus between them is that capitalist exploitation continues
True, but maybe with small changes in the sociopolitical fabric of the US, eventually, in some decades, US foreign policy can change also. Western European powers are STILL up to no good in Africa and West Asia and they have been at it for hundreds of years… Small steps, right? 😔
No it doesn’t.
If Ken Martin fixes primaries, one look at Minnesota tells you he’s so bad at keeping progressives out of office he might as well not be trying.
Either way, we have a solid chance of a decent dem candidate making it to the general. And if they do the general is a shoe in.
If Ken Martin fixes primaries, one look at Minnesota tells you he’s so bad at keeping progressives out of office he might as well not be trying.
I always say this, what happened to the Americans who stopped the Gilded Age and ushered in the two Roosevelts? Americans forgot how to mobilise.
No, the wealthy united against everyone else despite any differences during FDR.
This led to the Business Plot, which failed because the puppet general backed out and snitched on the wealthiest capitalists for trying to overthrow FDR …
And not a single person was punished.
They didn’t give up, they just decided buying both parties was easier than a coup, and maintained the illusion of choice.
We didn’t “forget” shit, we had our country stolen from us by the wealthiest citizens.
We didn’t “forget” shit, we had our country stolen from us by the wealthiest citizens.
I mean before FDR, during the Gilded Age. People successfully mobilised to curtail monopolists and other industry tycoons. I think Americans did forget to do that.
At this point, I just want the lesser of the two evils.
You know, like leftist vs a fucking lunatic fascist pedo rapist who is burning our country to the ground as if his addled slimy ass is going to take any of it with him when he finally cacks.
I feel like online lefties are all performative and have no genuine strategy for building power. So they resort to the usual purity testing and punching out at liberals non stop. Meanwhile, conservatives are literally ripping people off the streets and putting them in cages. But hey, did you know liberals are actually centrists?
It’s like, my dude, learn to build political power first. Then you can move on to putting liberals in concentration camps like you’ve always been wanting to do. This here is just posturing
I mean, it’s a meme not a dissertation, but also breaking away from liberals is a precondition to building any kind of real power. As long as the left is only an appendage of the liberal establishment, it’ll never appeal to the broader working class.
I don’t disagree with this sentiment. It’s also hard to entertain these types of conversations online because I never know who I’m talking to. Am I interacting with a tankie, an anarchist, or even worst - lemmy’s worst nightmare - a soc dem? Each will have a different position and mandate it’s own type of discourse. But regardless of what your political alignment, you should want to build power.
If you’re a tankie, you will completely eschew building coalitions with liberals. And there’s nothing wrong with that! But then, I don’t know, build an independent party and do something instead of bitching 24/7 about liberals.
If you’re a soc dem, you could try to rebuild the democratic party from within. It’s already undergone several waves of changes, so whose to say it couldn’t happen again? AOC and Mamdani are trying. I support them.
If you’re an anarchist, the same principle applies. You should want to build power. You don’t have align all the time with liberals, but maybe you can form coalitions around policies that highlight the goals of anarchism in a way that makes the movement visible to the general public. You know, building power.
Posting memes 24/7 about liberals is like screaming into the void where all your friends are standing next to you and clapping. Like, ok? What’s next?
I mean, I’d guess most people here don’t think posting memes is a substitute for effective political action. I share your disdain for terminally online lefties (which I guess includes myself), but someone could be dunking on liberals online and doing politics offline. OP could be an active member of their local DSA chapter for all we know. Posting and looking at memes is just entertainment; it doesn’t need to automatically come at the cost of productive work.
Right. You could totally be right about OPs offline political engagement. My critique is more directed at the entirety of the online leftist media apparatus (the twitch streamers, the youtubers, the online pundits, etc). These people are so wrapped in their own personas and audience capture, that they are essentially worthless at building any political power or anything that resembles a movement.
We have twitch streamers with insanely huge audiences like Hassan, who claims to be a socialist, but whenever he’s offered a chance to expand the message or gain some kind of momentum he shoots it down. There seems to be no will or strategy to expand this effort beyond maybe growing youtube subscribers. That’s it. So when I see the same memes posted on lemmy, day after day, I have to wonder: what is the end goal?
I get confused because the right and left both call each other the libs and as far as I can tell, US liberals don’t really align to either liberalism or libertarianism, rather an acute section of them here and there for personal benefit.
The free market, for example, which both ideologies oppose as soon as it encroaches on other freedoms, becoming anti-liberal. But US libs will strip the liberties off anyone for a buck and an entirely unregulated free market will let them do that. Adam Smith covered so much of this stuff and I’m pretty sure US libs would say he’s a commie.
That was a good episode!
