Damn, well if that sentiment is so common then you should have been able to find a post where your reply was actually relevant instead of coming onto this post and inventing an argument to have with yourself.
The meme is so off base and bizarre that I’m not sure what you think we should be discussing. US liberals have fought for broad nuclear disarmament. Maybe you confused them with conservatives?
Ah, I see why you’re confused. You’re using the US politics definition of liberal and not the more widely accepted geopolitical definition of liberal.
Republicans and Dems are both fairly standard liberal capitalist parties when placed in the context of political alignments around the world. Liberalism doesn’t mean “pays lip service to social justice,” even though that’s usually all that’s required to be classified as a liberal in the context of US politics. Rather, liberalism is the governing philosophy that capitalism grew out of. Liberalism gets its ideological roots from the works of enlightenment era philosophers such as John Locke, who conceptualized human rights primarily in terms of property rights and property relations. The right to subsistence was the right to work your property and earn a living from it, freedom was the freedom to do what you wanted with your property and to have final say over voluntary agreements involving your property, and so on. This way of conceptualizing human rights as property relations was the inspiration for the liberal revolutions that supplanted feudal monarchies and replaced them with liberal governments. These revolutions were led by the property owning classes who garnered the support of the public with the promises of governments that were based on inalienable human rights and freedoms. Those promises were satisfied using the liberal definition of human rights and freedoms which conceptualized those things primarily in terms of property rights, which in effect created governing institutions by and for the property owning classes with very little if any representation for those who own insignificant amounts of property and who had to get by through selling their labor instead of working their property.
That definition of liberal, which identifies liberalism as the governing philosophy that capitalism relies on to function, is the definition that is still used in most of the world. Conservatism and progressivism are two strains of thought that attempt to resolve the contradictions of liberalism in different ways, but they are still both solidly liberal philosophies. Progressivism see the failures of liberalism to live up to ideals such as all men being created equal, and tries to rationalize the staggering inequality that capitalism produces as simply being a failure to live up to the promise of equal opportunity. So the progressive will attempt to remedy this by fighting for things like affirmative action and equal treatment under the law, but will never touch the core principles that capitalism rest on to address these problems. Similarly the conservative will notice this failure to live up to the ideals of liberalism and ascribe those as personal failings. They will deny discrimination or other social and political factors for inequality, and claim that it is the individual that is failing to live up to those ideals. That those who are successful did so through merit and deserve their place. The conservative staunchly defends the core tenants of liberalism, and attempts to block, hinder, or roll back the progressive’s attempts to achieve the ideals of liberalism through legislation. In both cases the rights enshrined through property ownership are beyond the acceptable bounds of political debate. The authority and rule of property ownership is absolute to both of these flavors of liberal.
The US is a liberal capitalist state. It is arguably the liberal capitalist state of the modern day, maintaining a gargantuan and globe spanning military empire and foreign policy apparatus which it uses to enforce liberal capitalist relations around the globe. Throughout the Cold War (and even earlier to a lesser extent through policies like the Monroe Doctrine) the US has used that military empire to topple governments and force through liberalization policies, equating “Freedom and Democracy” with free markets that are opened up to international trade so that the business interests of the property owning classes could be protected and international corporations could enter into and dominate those markets, stripping the natural resources out of those countries for dirt cheap prices and shipping them back to the imperial core countries to be processed into consumer products. This foreign policy agenda, this protection and expansion of property rights and the rights of property owners at any and all expense, has continued more or less unchanged for generations at this point regardless of whether a Dem or a Republican is in office. There might be some Dems who pay lip service to anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiments, but their actions speak far louder.
Ohhhhhh. Okay we are dealing with a misunderstanding of what liberals are.
Liberalism is a broad ideology, most US politicians are liberal in both parties, although there are some Republicans who are not. It’s the ideology of ‘free market’ states usually. You can not be a liberal by virtue of being a fascist, or by being to the left of liberals like an anarchists or a communist.
Damn, well if that sentiment is so common then you should have been able to find a post where your reply was actually relevant instead of coming onto this post and inventing an argument to have with yourself.
The meme is so off base and bizarre that I’m not sure what you think we should be discussing. US liberals have fought for broad nuclear disarmament. Maybe you confused them with conservatives?
Ah, I see why you’re confused. You’re using the US politics definition of liberal and not the more widely accepted geopolitical definition of liberal.
Republicans and Dems are both fairly standard liberal capitalist parties when placed in the context of political alignments around the world. Liberalism doesn’t mean “pays lip service to social justice,” even though that’s usually all that’s required to be classified as a liberal in the context of US politics. Rather, liberalism is the governing philosophy that capitalism grew out of. Liberalism gets its ideological roots from the works of enlightenment era philosophers such as John Locke, who conceptualized human rights primarily in terms of property rights and property relations. The right to subsistence was the right to work your property and earn a living from it, freedom was the freedom to do what you wanted with your property and to have final say over voluntary agreements involving your property, and so on. This way of conceptualizing human rights as property relations was the inspiration for the liberal revolutions that supplanted feudal monarchies and replaced them with liberal governments. These revolutions were led by the property owning classes who garnered the support of the public with the promises of governments that were based on inalienable human rights and freedoms. Those promises were satisfied using the liberal definition of human rights and freedoms which conceptualized those things primarily in terms of property rights, which in effect created governing institutions by and for the property owning classes with very little if any representation for those who own insignificant amounts of property and who had to get by through selling their labor instead of working their property.
That definition of liberal, which identifies liberalism as the governing philosophy that capitalism relies on to function, is the definition that is still used in most of the world. Conservatism and progressivism are two strains of thought that attempt to resolve the contradictions of liberalism in different ways, but they are still both solidly liberal philosophies. Progressivism see the failures of liberalism to live up to ideals such as all men being created equal, and tries to rationalize the staggering inequality that capitalism produces as simply being a failure to live up to the promise of equal opportunity. So the progressive will attempt to remedy this by fighting for things like affirmative action and equal treatment under the law, but will never touch the core principles that capitalism rest on to address these problems. Similarly the conservative will notice this failure to live up to the ideals of liberalism and ascribe those as personal failings. They will deny discrimination or other social and political factors for inequality, and claim that it is the individual that is failing to live up to those ideals. That those who are successful did so through merit and deserve their place. The conservative staunchly defends the core tenants of liberalism, and attempts to block, hinder, or roll back the progressive’s attempts to achieve the ideals of liberalism through legislation. In both cases the rights enshrined through property ownership are beyond the acceptable bounds of political debate. The authority and rule of property ownership is absolute to both of these flavors of liberal.
The US is a liberal capitalist state. It is arguably the liberal capitalist state of the modern day, maintaining a gargantuan and globe spanning military empire and foreign policy apparatus which it uses to enforce liberal capitalist relations around the globe. Throughout the Cold War (and even earlier to a lesser extent through policies like the Monroe Doctrine) the US has used that military empire to topple governments and force through liberalization policies, equating “Freedom and Democracy” with free markets that are opened up to international trade so that the business interests of the property owning classes could be protected and international corporations could enter into and dominate those markets, stripping the natural resources out of those countries for dirt cheap prices and shipping them back to the imperial core countries to be processed into consumer products. This foreign policy agenda, this protection and expansion of property rights and the rights of property owners at any and all expense, has continued more or less unchanged for generations at this point regardless of whether a Dem or a Republican is in office. There might be some Dems who pay lip service to anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiments, but their actions speak far louder.
Ohhhhhh. Okay we are dealing with a misunderstanding of what liberals are.
Liberalism is a broad ideology, most US politicians are liberal in both parties, although there are some Republicans who are not. It’s the ideology of ‘free market’ states usually. You can not be a liberal by virtue of being a fascist, or by being to the left of liberals like an anarchists or a communist.