Those of us on the left needs to be more concerned with our optics and police ourselves better.
Catch-phrases like “all cops are bastards”, “defund the police”, “math is racist”, “black lives matter”, “trans-women are women” etc., do not help to promote liberal progressive ideologies and push the people on the fence away.
For the record, I’m not saying that the ideas behind the words are bad*, but the phrases themselves act as a litmus test; If anyone questions the phrases, the divide has occurred, and they’re a fascist (another word which is used far too often).
Many of these are so easy to correct for, “Reform the Police”, “Black Lives Matter Too” are the most obvious and easy changes.
There are those who’ll say that conservatives are going to complain about it anyway, and many of them are set in stone, but there are far too many people going to the right, as a result of the left making fools of ourselves.
The strength of the right is that they’ll accept anyone who isn’t left. Proud Boys, Neo-Nazi’s, and KKK are tolerated by the right because their strength is in numbers, not ideas.
*I support the ideas behind all of them, but how they are perceived by conservatives is not how they were intended to be understood.
EDIT: The conversations about liberal and liberalism have been draining. There is one definition which is practically synonymous with progressivism - this is what I meant, not Liberalism.
Not a single person on the left has ever said math is raciat. That was something Tucker Carlson wholesale made up after we started asking why black kids did worse in school. As for “black lives matter” I’d say that’s pretty self-evident, and the only possible rebuttal (“don’t white lives matter too?”) has a one sentence counter (“obviously. but white lives aren’t under threat right now.”)
More to the point, respectability politics in general is a trap. We could have better slogans, that’s true, especially in the “getting people on our side” phase, but compromising what we believe in to be more palatable to moderates, even in the slightest, is unacceptable. “Sure, I’m cool with trans people (maybe I’m even trans myself), but neopronouns are where I draw the line” is their in. Once conservatives see that we admit some point is too far to our side, once they see the bubble of people we protect can shrink, they won’t stop until it’s shrunk all the way.
I wouldn’t go so far as calling those people leftists (same as tankies aren’t leftists) but “math is racist” is definitely a thing that happens. People were suing in Canada that the tests to become accredited as teacher includes maths tests, and because some statistic somewhere showed that black folks score statistically lower on maths, they claimed that the requirement to pass it is racist. That completely ignored that they could re-take the test as often as they pleased and that plenty of education was given to prospective teachers that enabled them to pass those tests. A lower court agreed with the claim of racial discrimination, the constitutional court then struck it down pretty much saying “lulwut” in legalese.
No, maths is not racist. The people claiming it is racist were the racists here, thinking that being black makes you somehow inherently incapable of passing those tests, so much that you can’t even pass them with studying. Also I bet the disparity in maths scores by skin colour vanishes if you control for socio-economic status but the complainants would’ve needed maths to understand that so they didn’t.
OTOH, optically those kinds of fucks are associated with leftism and I’d say it’s important to openly respond to that kind of silliness with “lulwut” before the courts get around to doing it.
As to black lives matter: I think it was a strategic mistake to oppose “all lives matter”. The slogan, that is, not the racist fucks. Instead, it should’ve immediately been appropriated by the movement precisely to define it and to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that you don’t mean “non-black lives don’t matter”, which is understandably a reading lots of people had because they’re projecting their own racism, or just racist realism.
“Sure, I’m cool with trans people (maybe I’m even trans myself), but neopronouns are where I draw the line”
Neopronouns are an enby thing, not trans and yes I’m completely fine with calling you they/them and have no issues with your ingroup using as many different pronouns as there are members, but I’m not going to fucking remember all of them. I very much draw a hard, red, line at “difficult on purpose” as that would validate people’s vulnerable narcissism, “prove that you don’t hate me by jumping over random hoops I come up with”. Leftism is not the defence of maladaptive personality traits.
Just to shoot myself in the foot, the meaning behind “math is racist” is a nuanced discussion, but it wasn’t the left who distilled the idea down to “math is racist”, it was Fucker.
My problem is with phrases which fail to capture the meaning behind the words, phrases which are vague or easy to strawman, and phrases which are needlessly imflammatory.
There are many more which bother me but I’m drawing a blank. Thanks metacognition
Liberal != leftist. Also, the right wing could not care less about optics, because they are the ones who dictate what is acceptable. Why would we play by their rules, especially since they always change them?
Oops, my bad, I forgot liberal means something different in America. I meant it as a synonym for left.
Why would we play by their rules when they always change them?
Common misunderstanding is we’re playing the same game. The game they’re playing is “own the lib-tards”. At the moment, we are scoring own-goals and it’s fucking embarrassing.
And as aforementioned, it’s the own-goals which are causing people to switch sides.
The game the left is playing is “who has the best idea”, which doesn’t matter to the right, because they’re either deliberately taking us out of context, or believing on face value what is being said by those who are consciously misunderstanding.
The only way to win both games is to stop giving them ammo and present our ideas with a modicum of sanity.
Well then you shouldn’t use them as synonims because they are fundamentally different ideologies.
Again, why would we care about their game and scoring goals in it or not when we know they can move the goalposts at any time? The whole optics game is rigged in their favour, so don’t play. Leftist ideas are sane, they are the ones misrepresenting them as insane, no matter how logical they are. They have massive funding and a giant media machine to push it. Fuck them.
Yes, the game is rigged in their favour, absolutely. The problem is that their ideas will not change, they are conservative, they conserve their ideas.
It’s the responsibility of the ones who can change, to be smarter about it. If we sink to their level, we are no better than them.
Progressives are smarter, but we’re not acting like it. That’s why I’m saying we need to be better at policing our own, it’s all about mitigating needless stupidity.
Also, outside of America, liberal and leftist are essentially synonymous, so that’s why I used it. But it’s my fault for not remembering America makes a very different distinction.
European here. They are absolutely not synonymous. Where I grew up liberals are the right wing, with socialists on the left and religious party on the center.
You conveniently cut out the next definition in your page where it says that it is related to liberalism.
And the leftism ideologies isn’t simply being open-minded. It is actively promoting new ideas and policies that benefits the citizens. This is why we use the term progressive.
Liberal is firmly center right on the political compass and even the definition you post ad nauseum is indicative of that.
I’ve noticed that it’s generally a bad idea to discuss ideologies by label. If I talk about soviet communism, am I talking about what Lenin and Stalin practiced in the USSR, or the ideals from which they started and mixed with pragmatic realist policies, eventually allowing corruption to pervade?
Talking about liberalism or leftism as if it is a unified, monolithic ideology only confuses people. Even specific movements (say the Christian nationalist movement in the United States) there is still some ambiguity. They want the US to be a Christian nation, but don’t agree on which denominations would be privileged (say, can serve office), are legal among citizens or are criminal.
When I talk about ideological principles and want to be clear, I talk about specifics. e.g. Everyone should be equal under law. Minors should have the same civil rights that adults do. Street drugs should be decriminalized, and drug epidemics should focus on treatment and mitigation. Force should be a last resort by law enforcement, not used just because a civilian has an unknown object in their hand.
How are we not acting smart by saying “black lives matter” and “trans women are women”? These are great, simple and to the point slogans.
The only way they can be seen as controversial is of you don’t agree with these statements because you believe that black lives dont matter and that trans women aren’t “real women”. So that would make you a right-winger.
Black Lives Matter invoked a response which was “All Lives Matter” - it drowned out the sound of the cause to those who aren’t initiated.
“Trans-women are women” naturally begs the question of what a real woman is and implies trans-women are real-women. Those on the left don’t have a problem with this, but those on the right smell something deceptive happening.
The whole point of what I’m getting at is that there are moderate right-wingers who have been convinced by those more malicious right-wingers that the left is stupid because they say stupid things.
This is a war of optics, it’s why the right is parroting the same crimes to Biden, what Trump was accused of.
I really don’t think there’s anything controversial about saying the progressives need to continue to make progress.
Liberalism is a pro-free market Capitalist idea centered on the ideas of individual liberty. This is right wing. It isn’t fascism, but it’s also not leftist.
The divide between left and right is who you think should own and control the Means of Production: the Workers, or Capitalists.
I’m honestly shocked at how many times I’ve needed to explain this, it’s quite a bother.
In America, liberal = Liberalism. I get it.
I never said Liberalism*, I said liberal. Outside of America, liberal colloquially means those pertaining to the liberal ideology (not the liberalism ideology). Refer to the dictionary definition above for what the liberal ideology is.
*(Nevermind I did say liberalism in a parallel post. Again, I’m not from America, but in context with the screenshot of the definition it’s pretty clear I’m referring to liberal ideology)
those pertaining to the liberal ideology (not the liberalism ideology)
This is confusing, you seem to be using colloquial definitions of liberal with political ones interchangeably, but in the context of the political right denouncing liberal political projects as “woke” suggests you mean political liberals in the US.
When I see liberal parties in other countries, namely Europe, they are classed as center-right. Here in Canada they’re a little more spread out but economic right for sure. For just a quick example, I support strong affirmative action, but for political liberals that has become watered down to “equality of opportunity” and disparity frameworks.
It is very confusing for sure, I’ve been chasing my own tail all night lol.
The way I’ve been using liberal is how it is defined in that definition. I don’t mean it as “a lot”.
In a parallel post I mentioned how the context it was used within my university classes meant as the definition as posted in my screenshot, and not as liberalism, which is naturally incompatible with the definition above.
When I referred to right-wing denouncing poltical liberals, I didn’t mean Liberalists, I meant those who hold the beliefs of the left/progressive.
To clarify, when I say liberal, I mean those who hold the values based on the definition I provided (leftists/progressives).
Well, the said liberals have defunded schools, hospitals, trains, retirement and anyknd of welfare here in the name of “being opened to new ideas”, so it’s a bit more than semantics. Sorry, I don’t want to be associated with liberalism.
Liberal bourgeois are a significant political force since the French revolution - and always opposed people. It is and always was about the freedom of industry barrons and nothing else.
For someone who’s chief complaint is “leftists are really bad at communicating our ideas”, you might want to sit back and really think about what you’re doing right now.
It’s my fault for not understanding that using that term online is not going to be understood how I intended it, based on how it has been defined for me (Even when I showed the dictionary definition)
Though it is even more funny that so many people cannot accept that a word has more than one term, and based on how I used it in context, it actually does mean how I intended it.
In any case, I really don’t want to discuss the definition further. Hopefully people can understand what I meant in context, even if the definition they are familiar with, is different.
Liberal ≠ liberalism. I’ve had to explain this so many damn times in this thread it’s beginning to make me nutty.
It’s because you’re using liberal as in, “wow that was a really liberal amount of gravy,” synonymously with liberal as in, “a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.”
That’s liberal as an adjective, not liberalism in its political definition. As a socialist I don’t have a liberal party in my country that I can support. They think capitalism will be fixed if there are no disparities in how people are distributed within it. It’s like thinking equal black and white slave owners in the Antebellum south would have fixed the economic arrangement of slavery.
I don’t think liberal approaches are just unfavorable, I see how they perpetuate the problems they’re invoked to address. We’ve seen nothing but wealth inequality rise as the latest liberal economic consensus came in to effect in the 70s. That economic stratification is what creates these problems, because you have ascriptive taxonomical hierarchies like race that develop out of economic relations like that.
From the definition I provided, how do you think those ideas have contributed to perpetuating inequality?
On paper, I don’t see anything wrong with reform, tolerance and open-mindedness (obviously the paradox of tolerance is inferred, I don’t mean tolerance of intolerance)
On paper I don’t know what those things really mean, “reform, tolerance, open-mindedness.” They sound like good things but are contingent, open-mindedness to what, tolerance to what, reform to what? They function as euphemisms for something I’m supposed to imply on my own. I don’t really have a use for this kind of thing.
I don’t know why people are assuming that I’m in disagreement with them about most aspects of what I said.
I am not implying that cops should not be reformed, or have their funds recalculated (on this point I have no opinion because I don’t live in America).
I’m confused to what I missed in responding to the post above. What did I misunderstand?
You implied that “defund the police” is some kind of bad "catch-phrase’ and it’s exactly what needs to happen. It’s literally the function of “Dystopian” overpayind them while defunding schools and everything else is DYSTOPIAN & TYRRANY.
Nothing is insane about our ideas, it’s the fact that the conservatives do not want to take the time to unpack provocative phrases, immediately misunderstand them, and then strawman us.
It puts us on the back foot as we stumble to make sense of ourselves, instead of structuring our arguments in a way which children could understand.
Once they start with the presupposition that we’ve lost it, it’s too late.
Evidence: “defund the police” the right immediately started replying with “if we defund them, then there will be no police, what the left is advocating for is anarchy”
Evidence: “trans women are women” the right immediately started replying with “yeah but they arent ‘real women’”
Evidence: “black lives matter” the right immediately started replying with “all lives matter” and were trying to accuse blacks of being racist to other ethnicities for not including them, which lead to “blue lives matter”.
The left isn’t your favourite sports team. We need to accept that there are faults within our collective and try to fix them.
Nothing is insane about our ideas, it’s the fact that the conservatives do not want to take the time to unpack provocative phrases, immediately misunderstand them, and then strawman us.
I don’t think the solution to that is “don’t use provocative phrases”, though. The left should provoke. Sure there are better and worse ways to do that, but giving up on provocation is giving up the battle, I think.
Evidence: “defund the police” the right immediately started replying with “if we defund them, then there will be no police, what the left is advocating for is anarchy”
Like I said, we tried to really around “reform”, and if didn’t work. Defunding the police frees up that funding to put it into police alternatives.
Evidence: “trans women are women” the right immediately started replying with “yeah but they arent ‘real women’”
But…they’re wrong. Like, obviously wrong. How could you make the statement “trans women are women” more obvious? That’s as straightforward as it gets.
Evidence: “black lives matter” the right immediately started replying with “all lives matter” and were trying to accuse blacks of being racist to other ethnicities for not including them, which lead to “blue lives matter”.
I really don’t think this convinces anybody who isn’t already racist. We have so much video evidence of police killing unarmed black men. You just have to be willfully ignorant at this point.
The left gets massacred for prosaic slogans like “Black lives matter” and “Trans rights are human rights” while the right straight up chants “Jews will not replace us” and nobody bats an eye. So I don’t think the left’s tone is the problem here.
And yes, for the record, black lives matter and trans women (note, no hyphen) are women.
The Left are the adults in the room. We need to speak clearly so the children do not think we are taking them to the dentist (we totally are but there’s no need to trigger them).
The Right cannot change, it’s in their nature. It’s practically pointless to try. The best we can do is be tactical, and avoid scaring them.
And how well has being the adults in the room worked for us? In the US, it’s done nothing but marginalize the left time after time. Our choices for leadership boil down to a contest between center-right and fascist, and fascist is winning.
The fact is, people want anger. People understand anger. People are angry, and for good reason. Our society is completely, utterly fucked, and everyone knows it, even if they don’t quite know how or why. And it’s precisely that sentiment that fascists like the MAGA movement prey upon. They give people something to blame for everything being fucked, while what laughingly passes for the left continues pretending everything is fine. And so people go to the right, over and over and over again, because at least the right acknowledges their anger.
There’s a reason that the last time the left had a real moment in this country was when there were massive protests all over the nation, screaming at the top of their lungs, “BLACK LIVES MATTER!” and “DEFUND THE POLICE!” We finally let our anger show, and guess what? This country stood with us, over and over, and mobilized like hell to get Trump out of office. And then the Biden administration abandoned us and called for “civility” and “reaching across the aisle” like we all knew they would, and now the fascists are back.
We are not going to get anywhere as long as we keep trying to be the “adults in the room” and try to be “civil”. We need to get fucking mad, and stay fucking mad, and do the work to make real change whether the other guys want it or not.
We can offer hope instead of fear. The right is steeped in fear, it fuels their entire ideology. If we are able to offer hope, hope is more powerful than fear.
But being the adults in the room we must remember who we are speaking to. We have to converse with them, not at them. If you converse at them, they will simply retreat into the fear bubble because it is familiar, comfortable, and makes them feel safe.
I’m not saying we don’t offer hope. But hope and anger are not incompatible.
You can’t offer hope for a better tomorrow unless you are willing to point out and fix the problems of today. And as long as we are avoiding scaring the right, we cannot do this.
.Those of us on the left needs to be more concerned with our optics and police ourselves better.
I think we already police each other far too much. We need to police the right better.
What puts you on the left, by the way?
Catch-phrases like “all cops are bastards”, “defund the police”, “math is racist”, “black lives matter”, “trans-women are women” etc., do not help to promote liberal progressive ideologies and push the people on the fence away
They’re meant to get a reaction and spark conversation.
Many of these are so easy to correct for, “Reform the Police”, “Black Lives Matter Too” are the most obvious and easy changes.
“Reform” and “defund” are not the same things. People tried “reform the police”. That didn’t work. It isn’t a good rallying cry.
Defunding the police also makes more sense when you realize that the police are over-funded in the first place.
*I support the ideas behind all of them, but how they are perceived by conservatives is not how they were intended to be understood.
What do you think that the ideas behind them are? Because I have a feeling that you don’t understand the meanings behind some of these slogans.
There’s a lot to unpack behind something like “trans women are women”, but that’s supposed to be the start of the conversation, not the end.
I don’t know how much the left can police the right, if at all.
I don’t think the left need to police ourselves more, I think we need to police less, but with more patience, respect and insight (better).
I see the left eating its own all the time. A lot of it is the No True Leftist fallacy. Let’s say you’re a gay vegan communist hippie who just so happens to think trans women shouldn’t use the womens bathroom, then you’re not reasoned with, you’re immediately a bigot. This is the wrong kind of policing and causes people to seek validation from people who think the same.
I’m leftist for sure, communism is the end-goal. I’m vegan, I hate animal exploitation and suffering. We need to save the planet and ourselves. Discrimination sucks. Rehabilitation is more important than punishment. I’m atheist, religion is harmful. What am I missing?
The phrases are meant to get a reaction and spark a conversation sure. That happens on the left, but the right take it at face value and run with it.
The meanings behind the slogans.
“All cops are bastards” systemic issues inherently make the duty of the police, not a community hero, but a revenue generating, fear mongering enforcer of dumb laws.
There are good police officers though who do want to help. That’s why I don’t like it.
“Black Lives Matter” yeah, they do. End of story.
“Trans women are women” the word woman used to exclusively mean “female at birth”. Now it means “those who identify as a woman”. Therefore, identifying as a woman makes you a woman.
How’d I do doc? Did I pass? Or am I literally Hitler?
This is what the right cannot hear, this is the optics I’m talking about. We can’t say the quiet part out loud.
I am not convinced that literally all cops are bastards, there are some who are trying to change the system from within, we need to hold these people up as exemplars.
The phrase acab does not imply that literally every single police officer out there is corrupt, a bad cop, whatever, but rather that the police as an institution in general corrupt to the core, acts on impulse, aggression, racism. The goal is to point to the wrongdoings of the police as a whole, as a system.
It’s the same thing when people say that, as a whole, all men are pigs or something similar. Yes, of course there are men that aren’t but the vast majority of them is. The phrase is pointing to patriarchy, rich white men ruling the world, essentially, toxic masculinity and many other things.
That’s not my understanding. “All cops are bastards” because even the “good” cops are complicit in a corrupt system. A cop who is actually a good person can’t remain a cop for long, because they would have to fight the very system that they’re a part of. In order to remain a cop, you have to remain silent to the injustices that you’re aware of.
It’s time to take a good hard look at how we approach wrongdoing and injustice, as very little of what happens falls into the realm of petty crime (a category that includes premeditated homicide).
Our current system focuses on detecting and seizing solvent assets and filling prison cells with warm bodies. It has a not-insignificant body count of its own, and completely ignores the elite deviance that costs society more lives, more suffering, more cost and more destruction than petty crime by orders of magnitude. (Such as the opioid crisis, PFOA throughout our water supplies and preventable industrial greenhouse emissions.)
Conservatives would not change their minds. They listen to whatever their talking heads tell them, and they would turn that around and make a counter protest. That’s all conservativism is.
There are no “sensible” right-wingers, they’ve had their values thoroughly corrupted by a media-machine designed to split the worming class against itself. Changing optics would do nothing, so instead the left should focus on continuing grassroots efforts.
Also, liberals are not leftists, liberalism is pro-capitalism.
I’m feeling like you’re deliberately misunderstanding me.
The people I’m appealing to are centrists. The last thing we need are more votes for Trump. It was too close last time, and it’ll be too close this time too.
Liberals are centrists, and they voted for Biden. Fascists are voting for Trump, not moderate right-wingers. What democrats need to appeal to is leftists, who they have largely scorned.
American Liberals are a different thing from those who subscribe to (non-American) liberal ideology.
Democrats have a really low bar to score. “Not Trump” is shockingly low. Leftists are in agreement, “not Trump” is better than “Trump”.
I really don’t think the democrats need to do much at all to convince the left, besides remind everyone how fucked it was four years ago.
I think it’s more important to prevent people migrating to the right (as we see with GenZ Andrew Tate fans), and pull in as many moderate right-wingers as possible.
It seems impossible at first glace, but I’ve seen viseos of republicans openly trying to convince their peers that Trump deceived them. It gives me a sliver of hope.
Liberals are liberals, no matter the country. Liberalism refers to a Capitalist ideology centered around individual freedom and private property rights, and it originated in the Enlightenment.
Gen Z is more leftist than it is fascist. There’s a reactionary rise in fascism as fascism is really just a response to the decay of Capitalism and the rise in Socialism, as the bourgeoisie protects itself violently.
I’m just tired of discussing semantics at this point so I just don’t care enough to argue about what Liberal means.
I learned my lesson, I cannot use that word online to express what the definition of Liberal means to me based on the contexts of how it was used academically/philosophically.
GenZ is generally more progressive, but there has been a worrying rise in anti-feminism within GenZ men. The amount may be small in relation, but the fact that it is rising at all is concerning.
Liberal, as it was and always has been used academically and philosophically, refers to Liberalism, an ideology centered around private property rights and individual liberty as core values.
You are using it as a synonym for open-minded and forward thinking, which are certainly good traits, but not exclusive to nor expressive of leftism. Leftism is about worker ownership of the Means of Production, plain and simple.
As for Gen Z, yes, there is a rising reactionary movement just as there is a rising Leftist movement. Socialism is more popular than ever among Gen Z. The fact that fascism is also rising, albeit at a slower pace, among Gen Z is just a symptom of the rising Socialist sympathies. Fascism has always been expressed as a defense against rising Socialist sympathies as the bourgeoisie violently protects itself. People don’t just decide to become fascist, nor do they just decide to become Socialist.
History is driven by material conditions, not by people and ideals. Look for root causes.
Do you think that is in a similar vein as a reactionary fascism?
Personally, I think it’s a symptom of the new generations being less connected as a result of our social condition fueled by overuse of technology and social media.
I see the rise of misogyny is how young men are failing to understand that it isn’t just them being isolated, the young women are feeling isolated too. It’s not that feminism has made women too critical of masculine traits, but rather, young men just don’t realise being masculine isn’t going to make you a superstar.
Then it comes back to social media. The perception about what it takes to be loved and successful.
Liberalism doesn’t start with capitalism. This is just bad political science people on the Internet love to repeat. Liberalism revolves around the idea of individual liberty, from which the idea of property rights commonly emerges. Capitalism is arguably a corruption of some subset of these ideals, but is in no way a necessary outcome of individual liberty.
I would add that when the ideas were first conceived, property ownership was a progressive measure, as opposed to the ruling party owning all the lands.
If you take the intent behind the outcome, you get the definition I posted.
Capitalism is not a necessary outcome of individual liberty, correct! However, liberalism itself was focused on many things, such as private property rights and Capitalism itself. Liberalism is not just individual liberty.
No, Capitalism was not a central tenant of, or unique to liberalism. This is widely cited by people on the Internet but it is simply wrong. Big-C Capitalism is something which has emerged independently in the post feudal world several different times, in several different forms. The central tenant of liberalism was, in fact, the notion that individual liberty is foundational to self determination and participatory government.
The people who push the “liberalism is capitalism” trope are poorly informed leftists who naively conflate all of the evils of modernity with the dominant political mode of the era. While there is definitely a link between two, this messaging is done in an intentionally misleading way.
At this point I abandoned any hope to convince people that talking and talking about Trump, when he’s actually got no power right now, is going to serve the presidency to him on a silver plate.
I see constant whining about the right on these “leftist” spaces. How can they not understand that this is meaningless?
You actually kind of have liberalism wrong as well though. It’s the idea that individual liberty creates political agency. From that we get the ideas around inclusive society being critical to a functioning democracy, because democratic participation is the intersection of inclusion, liberty and individual actualization.
Or rather, people must first be free to engage with political questions out in the open (liberty). Then they must feel like they have a stake in society (inclusion). Then they must have the time and resources to participate (actualization). This is the foundation of liberal democracy.
What you are describing is commonly considered a form of liberalism, but is more aptly described as progressive liberalism. You are definitely correct though, that many forms of leftism and liberalism are compatible, despite people on Lemmy insisting otherwise.
I’ve also heard what I’m describing as liberal as “classic liberal”.
It’s not worth getting into tbh. I’ve been down this road so many times today, if you really want to engage in paragraphs of texts debating semantics you are welcome to check out all the parallel replies lol.
That’s the entire Right. You cannot win them on the grounds of good-faith, truthfulness, or humanity because their politics is solely about power. Conservative politics are the politics of abusers—litterally everything they wish to “conserve” within society includimg “tradition” is their freedom and ability to abuse. That’s it:
Family values is not about creating healthy families, it is about patriarchy and the right of the parents to abuse their children.
Defending the sanctity of marriage is about defining LGBTQ people out of legal rights and entitlements.
School choice is about controlling what ideas not just their children are exposed to but their neighbors as well.
Etc. Etc.
Every conservative position is a bad faith push to further their ability to control the lives others and their ideas deserve neither respect nor a platform.
You don’t have to say anything like it, no replacement needed.
The phrases like “black lives matter” and “trans women are women” imply their opposite. That is, the only reason they are being said is because they aren’t true. They are said in an attempt to make them true.
When people hold a sign saying black lives matter they aren’t celebrating the great respect that is given to black people. They are protesting that black lives do not in fact matter to some people. They are trying to make it so that black lives matter.
I think the downside of this approach is that it creates a kind of backlash when you make a kind of generalization about a lot of people saying they care less about black lives than other lives. Whether it is true or not, they will feel falsely accused and become defensive, dig in, and look for reasons why they are actually fine.
Similarly with proclaiming that “trans women are women”. It points the finger at anyone who disagrees, saying they are wrong about women. Maybe they grew up with an idea of what the word women means. Now you are telling them they have been using the word incorrectly for a long time, maybe decades. You might even accuse them of transphobia or bigotry based on a disagreement over semantics. If they feel this is unfair they will not be won over to your cause.
You might say indignantly “what how can you say the it is not true that trans women are women?”. Well, let’s think for a minute about what it takes for that statement to be true. For that statement to be true, it would have to be the case that most of the time you see, hear, or read the word “women” it refers to cis and trans women using the recent idea of self-identification of gender rather than the prior one.
If we had reached that point, then the statement would be true, but also it would be totally uninteresting to make the statement. It would be like saying “women are also human” or something (hopefully) uncontroversial.
As for how to get there, I’m not sure.
Maybe more inclusive language like “get to know a trans person before you judge” would push people to take a step that is known to reduce transphobia. Or “treat trans women with dignity” as a way to evoke a person’s gentler nature? Or “if she looks like a woman and talks like a woman, don’t be rude, treat her like a woman”? Kind of random ideas there, though.
I don’t know the right answer, but the nasty rhetoric and accusations people glibly throw around online to degrade and vilify people who aren’t happily jumping on board the trans movement train…I personally think it’s divisive and unproductive. It’s going to lose potential allies rather than recruit them.
You’re advocating for respectability politics. We have to be nice to the people who hate us to try to convince them to be nice to us. If that’s the game you want to play, you can. But it certainly hasn’t achieved victory for anyone yet. You know what has achieved change? Protesting. Being loud. Telling people when they’re wrong. Not putting up with the bullshit.
You’re advocating for assimilation, while what we want is liberation.
I feel like you’re making some assumptions here about what I’m “advocating” for. You don’t know me and I don’t think it helps your cause to think you know people well that you actually don’t know at all.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:
Those of us on the left needs to be more concerned with our optics and police ourselves better.
Catch-phrases like “all cops are bastards”, “defund the police”, “
math is racist”, “black lives matter”, “trans-women are women” etc., do not help to promoteliberalprogressive ideologies and push the people on the fence away.For the record, I’m not saying that the ideas behind the words are bad*, but the phrases themselves act as a litmus test; If anyone questions the phrases, the divide has occurred, and they’re a fascist (another word which is used far too often).
Many of these are so easy to correct for, “Reform the Police”, “Black Lives Matter Too” are the most obvious and easy changes.
There are those who’ll say that conservatives are going to complain about it anyway, and many of them are set in stone, but there are far too many people going to the right, as a result of the left making fools of ourselves.
The strength of the right is that they’ll accept anyone who isn’t left. Proud Boys, Neo-Nazi’s, and KKK are tolerated by the right because their strength is in numbers, not ideas.
*I support the ideas behind all of them, but how they are perceived by conservatives is not how they were intended to be understood.
EDIT: The conversations about liberal and liberalism have been draining. There is one definition which is practically synonymous with progressivism - this is what I meant, not Liberalism.
Not a single person on the left has ever said math is raciat. That was something Tucker Carlson wholesale made up after we started asking why black kids did worse in school. As for “black lives matter” I’d say that’s pretty self-evident, and the only possible rebuttal (“don’t white lives matter too?”) has a one sentence counter (“obviously. but white lives aren’t under threat right now.”)
More to the point, respectability politics in general is a trap. We could have better slogans, that’s true, especially in the “getting people on our side” phase, but compromising what we believe in to be more palatable to moderates, even in the slightest, is unacceptable. “Sure, I’m cool with trans people (maybe I’m even trans myself), but neopronouns are where I draw the line” is their in. Once conservatives see that we admit some point is too far to our side, once they see the bubble of people we protect can shrink, they won’t stop until it’s shrunk all the way.
I wouldn’t go so far as calling those people leftists (same as tankies aren’t leftists) but “math is racist” is definitely a thing that happens. People were suing in Canada that the tests to become accredited as teacher includes maths tests, and because some statistic somewhere showed that black folks score statistically lower on maths, they claimed that the requirement to pass it is racist. That completely ignored that they could re-take the test as often as they pleased and that plenty of education was given to prospective teachers that enabled them to pass those tests. A lower court agreed with the claim of racial discrimination, the constitutional court then struck it down pretty much saying “lulwut” in legalese.
No, maths is not racist. The people claiming it is racist were the racists here, thinking that being black makes you somehow inherently incapable of passing those tests, so much that you can’t even pass them with studying. Also I bet the disparity in maths scores by skin colour vanishes if you control for socio-economic status but the complainants would’ve needed maths to understand that so they didn’t.
OTOH, optically those kinds of fucks are associated with leftism and I’d say it’s important to openly respond to that kind of silliness with “lulwut” before the courts get around to doing it.
As to black lives matter: I think it was a strategic mistake to oppose “all lives matter”. The slogan, that is, not the racist fucks. Instead, it should’ve immediately been appropriated by the movement precisely to define it and to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that you don’t mean “non-black lives don’t matter”, which is understandably a reading lots of people had because they’re projecting their own racism, or just racist realism.
Neopronouns are an enby thing, not trans and yes I’m completely fine with calling you they/them and have no issues with your ingroup using as many different pronouns as there are members, but I’m not going to fucking remember all of them. I very much draw a hard, red, line at “difficult on purpose” as that would validate people’s vulnerable narcissism, “prove that you don’t hate me by jumping over random hoops I come up with”. Leftism is not the defence of maladaptive personality traits.
Just to shoot myself in the foot, the meaning behind “math is racist” is a nuanced discussion, but it wasn’t the left who distilled the idea down to “math is racist”, it was Fucker.
My problem is with phrases which fail to capture the meaning behind the words, phrases which are vague or easy to strawman, and phrases which are needlessly imflammatory.
There are many more which bother me but I’m drawing a blank. Thanks metacognition
I stand corrected, though it says a lot that I believed that there would be a group from the left making that claim.
Yes, says a lot about where you source your information and that you don’t fact check enough.
Nobody fact checks enough. I’m sure you’re wrong about things every day. There’s no shame in admitting I was wrong, so cool your jets.
Case and point: your claim liberal ≠ leftist.
You’re wrong about that. I’m not going to hang shit on you for being wrong, but it is hypocritical.
Case in point.
Neat.
I always figured it as “this is my case, and my point”
Thanks!
Liberal != leftist. Also, the right wing could not care less about optics, because they are the ones who dictate what is acceptable. Why would we play by their rules, especially since they always change them?
Oops, my bad, I forgot liberal means something different in America. I meant it as a synonym for left.
Common misunderstanding is we’re playing the same game. The game they’re playing is “own the lib-tards”. At the moment, we are scoring own-goals and it’s fucking embarrassing.
And as aforementioned, it’s the own-goals which are causing people to switch sides.
The game the left is playing is “who has the best idea”, which doesn’t matter to the right, because they’re either deliberately taking us out of context, or believing on face value what is being said by those who are consciously misunderstanding.
The only way to win both games is to stop giving them ammo and present our ideas with a modicum of sanity.
Well then you shouldn’t use them as synonims because they are fundamentally different ideologies.
Again, why would we care about their game and scoring goals in it or not when we know they can move the goalposts at any time? The whole optics game is rigged in their favour, so don’t play. Leftist ideas are sane, they are the ones misrepresenting them as insane, no matter how logical they are. They have massive funding and a giant media machine to push it. Fuck them.
Do what is right. Simple.
Yes, the game is rigged in their favour, absolutely. The problem is that their ideas will not change, they are conservative, they conserve their ideas.
It’s the responsibility of the ones who can change, to be smarter about it. If we sink to their level, we are no better than them.
Progressives are smarter, but we’re not acting like it. That’s why I’m saying we need to be better at policing our own, it’s all about mitigating needless stupidity.
Also, outside of America, liberal and leftist are essentially synonymous, so that’s why I used it. But it’s my fault for not remembering America makes a very different distinction.
European here. They are absolutely not synonymous. Where I grew up liberals are the right wing, with socialists on the left and religious party on the center.
That’s the liberal party, same in Australia.
However, when I say liberal I mean it as an ideology, which is very much leftist:
You conveniently cut out the next definition in your page where it says that it is related to liberalism.
And the leftism ideologies isn’t simply being open-minded. It is actively promoting new ideas and policies that benefits the citizens. This is why we use the term progressive.
Liberal is firmly center right on the political compass and even the definition you post ad nauseum is indicative of that.
I’m not trying to deceive anyone. As I mentioned a dozen or more times before, Liberal does have a different definition in America.
The definition says “promoting new ideas and policies” when it says “favouring reform”.
The definition I’m referring to is inherently progressive. There are no mutually exclusive terms, they are in fact the same thing by this definition.
Liberal (adjective): given, used, or occurring in generous amounts.
I’ve noticed that it’s generally a bad idea to discuss ideologies by label. If I talk about soviet communism, am I talking about what Lenin and Stalin practiced in the USSR, or the ideals from which they started and mixed with pragmatic realist policies, eventually allowing corruption to pervade?
Talking about liberalism or leftism as if it is a unified, monolithic ideology only confuses people. Even specific movements (say the Christian nationalist movement in the United States) there is still some ambiguity. They want the US to be a Christian nation, but don’t agree on which denominations would be privileged (say, can serve office), are legal among citizens or are criminal.
When I talk about ideological principles and want to be clear, I talk about specifics. e.g. Everyone should be equal under law. Minors should have the same civil rights that adults do. Street drugs should be decriminalized, and drug epidemics should focus on treatment and mitigation. Force should be a last resort by law enforcement, not used just because a civilian has an unknown object in their hand.
How are we not acting smart by saying “black lives matter” and “trans women are women”? These are great, simple and to the point slogans.
The only way they can be seen as controversial is of you don’t agree with these statements because you believe that black lives dont matter and that trans women aren’t “real women”. So that would make you a right-winger.
You hit the nail on the head.
Black Lives Matter invoked a response which was “All Lives Matter” - it drowned out the sound of the cause to those who aren’t initiated.
“Trans-women are women” naturally begs the question of what a real woman is and implies trans-women are real-women. Those on the left don’t have a problem with this, but those on the right smell something deceptive happening.
The whole point of what I’m getting at is that there are moderate right-wingers who have been convinced by those more malicious right-wingers that the left is stupid because they say stupid things.
This is a war of optics, it’s why the right is parroting the same crimes to Biden, what Trump was accused of.
I really don’t think there’s anything controversial about saying the progressives need to continue to make progress.
Liberals are right-wingers all around the world, not only in america.
I know you probably mean well, but guess what? I do not care about how right-winger feels and I will not water down my opinions to please them.
I don’t want to get into an argument about semantics, but liberal does not mean right wing.
It isn’t about pleasing them or playing by their rules. It’s about not giving them ammo to shoot your comrades.
Liberalism is a pro-free market Capitalist idea centered on the ideas of individual liberty. This is right wing. It isn’t fascism, but it’s also not leftist.
The divide between left and right is who you think should own and control the Means of Production: the Workers, or Capitalists.
I’m honestly shocked at how many times I’ve needed to explain this, it’s quite a bother.
In America, liberal = Liberalism. I get it.
I never said Liberalism*, I said liberal. Outside of America, liberal colloquially means those pertaining to the liberal ideology (not the liberalism ideology). Refer to the dictionary definition above for what the liberal ideology is.
*(Nevermind I did say liberalism in a parallel post. Again, I’m not from America, but in context with the screenshot of the definition it’s pretty clear I’m referring to liberal ideology)
No, liberalism means liberal, even outside America.
It doesn’t
There is really no need to be this stubborn. Look it up yourself.
This is confusing, you seem to be using colloquial definitions of liberal with political ones interchangeably, but in the context of the political right denouncing liberal political projects as “woke” suggests you mean political liberals in the US.
When I see liberal parties in other countries, namely Europe, they are classed as center-right. Here in Canada they’re a little more spread out but economic right for sure. For just a quick example, I support strong affirmative action, but for political liberals that has become watered down to “equality of opportunity” and disparity frameworks.
It is very confusing for sure, I’ve been chasing my own tail all night lol.
The way I’ve been using liberal is how it is defined in that definition. I don’t mean it as “a lot”.
In a parallel post I mentioned how the context it was used within my university classes meant as the definition as posted in my screenshot, and not as liberalism, which is naturally incompatible with the definition above.
When I referred to right-wing denouncing poltical liberals, I didn’t mean Liberalists, I meant those who hold the beliefs of the left/progressive.
To clarify, when I say liberal, I mean those who hold the values based on the definition I provided (leftists/progressives).
Well, the said liberals have defunded schools, hospitals, trains, retirement and anyknd of welfare here in the name of “being opened to new ideas”, so it’s a bit more than semantics. Sorry, I don’t want to be associated with liberalism.
Liberal bourgeois are a significant political force since the French revolution - and always opposed people. It is and always was about the freedom of industry barrons and nothing else.
Liberal ≠ liberalism. I’ve had to explain this so many damn times in this thread it’s beginning to make me nutty.
Look at the definition above. Those are leftist ideals, very different from those who are American Liberalism fanatics.
For someone who’s chief complaint is “leftists are really bad at communicating our ideas”, you might want to sit back and really think about what you’re doing right now.
The irony is palpable lol.
It’s my fault for not understanding that using that term online is not going to be understood how I intended it, based on how it has been defined for me (Even when I showed the dictionary definition)
Though it is even more funny that so many people cannot accept that a word has more than one term, and based on how I used it in context, it actually does mean how I intended it.
In any case, I really don’t want to discuss the definition further. Hopefully people can understand what I meant in context, even if the definition they are familiar with, is different.
It’s because you’re using liberal as in, “wow that was a really liberal amount of gravy,” synonymously with liberal as in, “a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.”
Hey man, I don’t fuck with gravy, I’m vegan. That’s how leftist and liberal I am.
That’s liberal as an adjective, not liberalism in its political definition. As a socialist I don’t have a liberal party in my country that I can support. They think capitalism will be fixed if there are no disparities in how people are distributed within it. It’s like thinking equal black and white slave owners in the Antebellum south would have fixed the economic arrangement of slavery.
I don’t think liberal approaches are just unfavorable, I see how they perpetuate the problems they’re invoked to address. We’ve seen nothing but wealth inequality rise as the latest liberal economic consensus came in to effect in the 70s. That economic stratification is what creates these problems, because you have ascriptive taxonomical hierarchies like race that develop out of economic relations like that.
From the definition I provided, how do you think those ideas have contributed to perpetuating inequality?
On paper, I don’t see anything wrong with reform, tolerance and open-mindedness (obviously the paradox of tolerance is inferred, I don’t mean tolerance of intolerance)
On paper I don’t know what those things really mean, “reform, tolerance, open-mindedness.” They sound like good things but are contingent, open-mindedness to what, tolerance to what, reform to what? They function as euphemisms for something I’m supposed to imply on my own. I don’t really have a use for this kind of thing.
It’s just another way of saying progressive.
That’s not at all what they said. Also, FY. We pay cops WAY too fucking much.
I don’t know why people are assuming that I’m in disagreement with them about most aspects of what I said.
I am not implying that cops should not be reformed, or have their funds recalculated (on this point I have no opinion because I don’t live in America).
I’m confused to what I missed in responding to the post above. What did I misunderstand?
You implied that “defund the police” is some kind of bad "catch-phrase’ and it’s exactly what needs to happen. It’s literally the function of “Dystopian” overpayind them while defunding schools and everything else is DYSTOPIAN & TYRRANY.
What the right are hearing is “completely defund the police so only people who want the job will volunteer”
The neoliberal movement in the US is totally right wing, more so than the US or EU populations generally.
Evidence?
What’s insane about our ideas?
Nothing is insane about our ideas, it’s the fact that the conservatives do not want to take the time to unpack provocative phrases, immediately misunderstand them, and then strawman us.
It puts us on the back foot as we stumble to make sense of ourselves, instead of structuring our arguments in a way which children could understand.
Once they start with the presupposition that we’ve lost it, it’s too late.
Evidence: “defund the police” the right immediately started replying with “if we defund them, then there will be no police, what the left is advocating for is anarchy”
Evidence: “trans women are women” the right immediately started replying with “yeah but they arent ‘real women’”
Evidence: “black lives matter” the right immediately started replying with “all lives matter” and were trying to accuse blacks of being racist to other ethnicities for not including them, which lead to “blue lives matter”.
The left isn’t your favourite sports team. We need to accept that there are faults within our collective and try to fix them.
I don’t think the solution to that is “don’t use provocative phrases”, though. The left should provoke. Sure there are better and worse ways to do that, but giving up on provocation is giving up the battle, I think.
Like I said, we tried to really around “reform”, and if didn’t work. Defunding the police frees up that funding to put it into police alternatives.
But…they’re wrong. Like, obviously wrong. How could you make the statement “trans women are women” more obvious? That’s as straightforward as it gets.
I really don’t think this convinces anybody who isn’t already racist. We have so much video evidence of police killing unarmed black men. You just have to be willfully ignorant at this point.
The left gets massacred for prosaic slogans like “Black lives matter” and “Trans rights are human rights” while the right straight up chants “Jews will not replace us” and nobody bats an eye. So I don’t think the left’s tone is the problem here.
And yes, for the record, black lives matter and trans women (note, no hyphen) are women.
The Left are the adults in the room. We need to speak clearly so the children do not think we are taking them to the dentist (we totally are but there’s no need to trigger them).
The Right cannot change, it’s in their nature. It’s practically pointless to try. The best we can do is be tactical, and avoid scaring them.
And how well has being the adults in the room worked for us? In the US, it’s done nothing but marginalize the left time after time. Our choices for leadership boil down to a contest between center-right and fascist, and fascist is winning.
The fact is, people want anger. People understand anger. People are angry, and for good reason. Our society is completely, utterly fucked, and everyone knows it, even if they don’t quite know how or why. And it’s precisely that sentiment that fascists like the MAGA movement prey upon. They give people something to blame for everything being fucked, while what laughingly passes for the left continues pretending everything is fine. And so people go to the right, over and over and over again, because at least the right acknowledges their anger.
There’s a reason that the last time the left had a real moment in this country was when there were massive protests all over the nation, screaming at the top of their lungs, “BLACK LIVES MATTER!” and “DEFUND THE POLICE!” We finally let our anger show, and guess what? This country stood with us, over and over, and mobilized like hell to get Trump out of office. And then the Biden administration abandoned us and called for “civility” and “reaching across the aisle” like we all knew they would, and now the fascists are back.
We are not going to get anywhere as long as we keep trying to be the “adults in the room” and try to be “civil”. We need to get fucking mad, and stay fucking mad, and do the work to make real change whether the other guys want it or not.
We can offer hope instead of fear. The right is steeped in fear, it fuels their entire ideology. If we are able to offer hope, hope is more powerful than fear.
But being the adults in the room we must remember who we are speaking to. We have to converse with them, not at them. If you converse at them, they will simply retreat into the fear bubble because it is familiar, comfortable, and makes them feel safe.
I’m not saying we don’t offer hope. But hope and anger are not incompatible.
You can’t offer hope for a better tomorrow unless you are willing to point out and fix the problems of today. And as long as we are avoiding scaring the right, we cannot do this.
The Right cannot change, it’s in their nature.
The right will change, and we’ll figure out how. That or their immutability will figure into the great filter of the human species.
I think we already police each other far too much. We need to police the right better.
What puts you on the left, by the way?
They’re meant to get a reaction and spark conversation.
“Reform” and “defund” are not the same things. People tried “reform the police”. That didn’t work. It isn’t a good rallying cry.
Defunding the police also makes more sense when you realize that the police are over-funded in the first place.
What do you think that the ideas behind them are? Because I have a feeling that you don’t understand the meanings behind some of these slogans.
There’s a lot to unpack behind something like “trans women are women”, but that’s supposed to be the start of the conversation, not the end.
I don’t know how much the left can police the right, if at all.
I don’t think the left need to police ourselves more, I think we need to police less, but with more patience, respect and insight (better).
I see the left eating its own all the time. A lot of it is the No True Leftist fallacy. Let’s say you’re a gay vegan communist hippie who just so happens to think trans women shouldn’t use the womens bathroom, then you’re not reasoned with, you’re immediately a bigot. This is the wrong kind of policing and causes people to seek validation from people who think the same.
I’m leftist for sure, communism is the end-goal. I’m vegan, I hate animal exploitation and suffering. We need to save the planet and ourselves. Discrimination sucks. Rehabilitation is more important than punishment. I’m atheist, religion is harmful. What am I missing?
The phrases are meant to get a reaction and spark a conversation sure. That happens on the left, but the right take it at face value and run with it.
The meanings behind the slogans.
“All cops are bastards” systemic issues inherently make the duty of the police, not a community hero, but a revenue generating, fear mongering enforcer of dumb laws.
There are good police officers though who do want to help. That’s why I don’t like it.
“Black Lives Matter” yeah, they do. End of story.
“Trans women are women” the word woman used to exclusively mean “female at birth”. Now it means “those who identify as a woman”. Therefore, identifying as a woman makes you a woman.
How’d I do doc? Did I pass? Or am I literally Hitler?
There are good police officers though who do want to help.
Not in the current system. Down to the local precinct they are required to cover for their less kind / more brutal brethren in blue.
If you are in law enforcement in the US in the 2020s, you need to get out. The system really is that comprehensively corrupt.
This is what the right cannot hear, this is the optics I’m talking about. We can’t say the quiet part out loud.
I am not convinced that literally all cops are bastards, there are some who are trying to change the system from within, we need to hold these people up as exemplars.
The phrase acab does not imply that literally every single police officer out there is corrupt, a bad cop, whatever, but rather that the police as an institution in general corrupt to the core, acts on impulse, aggression, racism. The goal is to point to the wrongdoings of the police as a whole, as a system.
It’s the same thing when people say that, as a whole, all men are pigs or something similar. Yes, of course there are men that aren’t but the vast majority of them is. The phrase is pointing to patriarchy, rich white men ruling the world, essentially, toxic masculinity and many other things.
vegan btw
That’s not my understanding. “All cops are bastards” because even the “good” cops are complicit in a corrupt system. A cop who is actually a good person can’t remain a cop for long, because they would have to fight the very system that they’re a part of. In order to remain a cop, you have to remain silent to the injustices that you’re aware of.
You missed the point entirely.
『rant』
Abolish the police.
It’s time to take a good hard look at how we approach wrongdoing and injustice, as very little of what happens falls into the realm of petty crime (a category that includes premeditated homicide).
Our current system focuses on detecting and seizing solvent assets and filling prison cells with warm bodies. It has a not-insignificant body count of its own, and completely ignores the elite deviance that costs society more lives, more suffering, more cost and more destruction than petty crime by orders of magnitude. (Such as the opioid crisis, PFOA throughout our water supplies and preventable industrial greenhouse emissions.)
『/rant』
The only point I agree on is that “defund the police” is a dumb slogan. “Defund” means “remove all funding,” which is not the solution.
Conservatives would not change their minds. They listen to whatever their talking heads tell them, and they would turn that around and make a counter protest. That’s all conservativism is.
There are no “sensible” right-wingers, they’ve had their values thoroughly corrupted by a media-machine designed to split the worming class against itself. Changing optics would do nothing, so instead the left should focus on continuing grassroots efforts.
Also, liberals are not leftists, liberalism is pro-capitalism.
I’m feeling like you’re deliberately misunderstanding me.
The people I’m appealing to are centrists. The last thing we need are more votes for Trump. It was too close last time, and it’ll be too close this time too.
What do you consider “centrism”, though? The US has moved so far to the right, we’ve lost track of the center.
Unfortunately the 2 party system in America essentially means there is no centre.
For intent and purpose, the centre is the group who doesn’t vote because they think both options are equally shit.
Yea there’s still a center in America even if political parties and new stations don’t demonstrate that
Liberals are centrists, and they voted for Biden. Fascists are voting for Trump, not moderate right-wingers. What democrats need to appeal to is leftists, who they have largely scorned.
American Liberals are a different thing from those who subscribe to (non-American) liberal ideology.
Democrats have a really low bar to score. “Not Trump” is shockingly low. Leftists are in agreement, “not Trump” is better than “Trump”.
I really don’t think the democrats need to do much at all to convince the left, besides remind everyone how fucked it was four years ago.
I think it’s more important to prevent people migrating to the right (as we see with GenZ Andrew Tate fans), and pull in as many moderate right-wingers as possible.
It seems impossible at first glace, but I’ve seen viseos of republicans openly trying to convince their peers that Trump deceived them. It gives me a sliver of hope.
Liberals are liberals, no matter the country. Liberalism refers to a Capitalist ideology centered around individual freedom and private property rights, and it originated in the Enlightenment.
Gen Z is more leftist than it is fascist. There’s a reactionary rise in fascism as fascism is really just a response to the decay of Capitalism and the rise in Socialism, as the bourgeoisie protects itself violently.
American liberals are not a different thing.
I’m just tired of discussing semantics at this point so I just don’t care enough to argue about what Liberal means.
I learned my lesson, I cannot use that word online to express what the definition of Liberal means to me based on the contexts of how it was used academically/philosophically.
GenZ is generally more progressive, but there has been a worrying rise in anti-feminism within GenZ men. The amount may be small in relation, but the fact that it is rising at all is concerning.
Liberal, as it was and always has been used academically and philosophically, refers to Liberalism, an ideology centered around private property rights and individual liberty as core values.
You are using it as a synonym for open-minded and forward thinking, which are certainly good traits, but not exclusive to nor expressive of leftism. Leftism is about worker ownership of the Means of Production, plain and simple.
As for Gen Z, yes, there is a rising reactionary movement just as there is a rising Leftist movement. Socialism is more popular than ever among Gen Z. The fact that fascism is also rising, albeit at a slower pace, among Gen Z is just a symptom of the rising Socialist sympathies. Fascism has always been expressed as a defense against rising Socialist sympathies as the bourgeoisie violently protects itself. People don’t just decide to become fascist, nor do they just decide to become Socialist.
History is driven by material conditions, not by people and ideals. Look for root causes.
What’s your take on the Andrew Tate bullshit?
Do you think that is in a similar vein as a reactionary fascism?
Personally, I think it’s a symptom of the new generations being less connected as a result of our social condition fueled by overuse of technology and social media.
I see the rise of misogyny is how young men are failing to understand that it isn’t just them being isolated, the young women are feeling isolated too. It’s not that feminism has made women too critical of masculine traits, but rather, young men just don’t realise being masculine isn’t going to make you a superstar.
Then it comes back to social media. The perception about what it takes to be loved and successful.
Liberalism doesn’t start with capitalism. This is just bad political science people on the Internet love to repeat. Liberalism revolves around the idea of individual liberty, from which the idea of property rights commonly emerges. Capitalism is arguably a corruption of some subset of these ideals, but is in no way a necessary outcome of individual liberty.
I would add that when the ideas were first conceived, property ownership was a progressive measure, as opposed to the ruling party owning all the lands.
If you take the intent behind the outcome, you get the definition I posted.
You’re confusing a few of my points here.
Capitalism is not a necessary outcome of individual liberty, correct! However, liberalism itself was focused on many things, such as private property rights and Capitalism itself. Liberalism is not just individual liberty.
No, Capitalism was not a central tenant of, or unique to liberalism. This is widely cited by people on the Internet but it is simply wrong. Big-C Capitalism is something which has emerged independently in the post feudal world several different times, in several different forms. The central tenant of liberalism was, in fact, the notion that individual liberty is foundational to self determination and participatory government.
The people who push the “liberalism is capitalism” trope are poorly informed leftists who naively conflate all of the evils of modernity with the dominant political mode of the era. While there is definitely a link between two, this messaging is done in an intentionally misleading way.
At this point I abandoned any hope to convince people that talking and talking about Trump, when he’s actually got no power right now, is going to serve the presidency to him on a silver plate.
I see constant whining about the right on these “leftist” spaces. How can they not understand that this is meaningless?
You actually kind of have liberalism wrong as well though. It’s the idea that individual liberty creates political agency. From that we get the ideas around inclusive society being critical to a functioning democracy, because democratic participation is the intersection of inclusion, liberty and individual actualization.
Or rather, people must first be free to engage with political questions out in the open (liberty). Then they must feel like they have a stake in society (inclusion). Then they must have the time and resources to participate (actualization). This is the foundation of liberal democracy.
What you are describing is commonly considered a form of liberalism, but is more aptly described as progressive liberalism. You are definitely correct though, that many forms of leftism and liberalism are compatible, despite people on Lemmy insisting otherwise.
I’ve also heard what I’m describing as liberal as “classic liberal”.
It’s not worth getting into tbh. I’ve been down this road so many times today, if you really want to engage in paragraphs of texts debating semantics you are welcome to check out all the parallel replies lol.
Appreciate your response though.
Yeah I see that now. I am not surprised the internet leftists jumped on you tbh. Their knowledge of political science is marginal at best.
Only someone operating in bad faith would claim this isn’t what “Black Lives Matter” means.
That’s the entire Right. You cannot win them on the grounds of good-faith, truthfulness, or humanity because their politics is solely about power. Conservative politics are the politics of abusers—litterally everything they wish to “conserve” within society includimg “tradition” is their freedom and ability to abuse. That’s it:
Family values is not about creating healthy families, it is about patriarchy and the right of the parents to abuse their children.
Defending the sanctity of marriage is about defining LGBTQ people out of legal rights and entitlements.
School choice is about controlling what ideas not just their children are exposed to but their neighbors as well.
Etc. Etc.
Every conservative position is a bad faith push to further their ability to control the lives others and their ideas deserve neither respect nor a platform.
Please tell me, as a trans nonbinary person, what the respectable version of “trans women are women” is?
You don’t have to say anything like it, no replacement needed.
The phrases like “black lives matter” and “trans women are women” imply their opposite. That is, the only reason they are being said is because they aren’t true. They are said in an attempt to make them true.
When people hold a sign saying black lives matter they aren’t celebrating the great respect that is given to black people. They are protesting that black lives do not in fact matter to some people. They are trying to make it so that black lives matter.
I think the downside of this approach is that it creates a kind of backlash when you make a kind of generalization about a lot of people saying they care less about black lives than other lives. Whether it is true or not, they will feel falsely accused and become defensive, dig in, and look for reasons why they are actually fine.
Similarly with proclaiming that “trans women are women”. It points the finger at anyone who disagrees, saying they are wrong about women. Maybe they grew up with an idea of what the word women means. Now you are telling them they have been using the word incorrectly for a long time, maybe decades. You might even accuse them of transphobia or bigotry based on a disagreement over semantics. If they feel this is unfair they will not be won over to your cause.
You might say indignantly “what how can you say the it is not true that trans women are women?”. Well, let’s think for a minute about what it takes for that statement to be true. For that statement to be true, it would have to be the case that most of the time you see, hear, or read the word “women” it refers to cis and trans women using the recent idea of self-identification of gender rather than the prior one.
If we had reached that point, then the statement would be true, but also it would be totally uninteresting to make the statement. It would be like saying “women are also human” or something (hopefully) uncontroversial.
As for how to get there, I’m not sure.
Maybe more inclusive language like “get to know a trans person before you judge” would push people to take a step that is known to reduce transphobia. Or “treat trans women with dignity” as a way to evoke a person’s gentler nature? Or “if she looks like a woman and talks like a woman, don’t be rude, treat her like a woman”? Kind of random ideas there, though.
I don’t know the right answer, but the nasty rhetoric and accusations people glibly throw around online to degrade and vilify people who aren’t happily jumping on board the trans movement train…I personally think it’s divisive and unproductive. It’s going to lose potential allies rather than recruit them.
You’re advocating for respectability politics. We have to be nice to the people who hate us to try to convince them to be nice to us. If that’s the game you want to play, you can. But it certainly hasn’t achieved victory for anyone yet. You know what has achieved change? Protesting. Being loud. Telling people when they’re wrong. Not putting up with the bullshit.
You’re advocating for assimilation, while what we want is liberation.
I feel like you’re making some assumptions here about what I’m “advocating” for. You don’t know me and I don’t think it helps your cause to think you know people well that you actually don’t know at all.