American "left" and "liberal" can't decide if they're in the same nutshell.

I would just like to state that most Americans have no idea what the difference between a liberal and leftist is. When you say you're a liberal, they think you're a leftist. When you say you're a leftist, they think you're a leftist. The conflation will always be there, given the history of the US and decades of the usage of the conflation in everyday American language.

Edit Addendum: it doesn't help that liberals/democratic establishment are somewhat more """"""""""left"""""""""" of the conservatives/Republicans, which is why liberals are grouped with the "left" in the US. It also doesn't help that the "left", who would be more accurately known as that grouping of socialists, communists, anarchists, and every other small or large anti-capitalist and or progressive political identity group, just call themselves "the left" or "leftist", playing into the idea that one's politics can be quickly understood by pointing to the linear spectrum of "right" and "left", as if these broad and false dichotomies fit reality to a tee or some shit.

PSL exists belive it or not

You don’t have to have a party for an ideology to exist.

Left is Progressive. DNC create progress everytime we put them in, even without having more than 50 senate seats in over a decade. DNC are your dudes.

.ml leading the charge on this.

I see a lot of other really suspicious shit around Lemmy. I have a suspicion it's trying to be used like r/the_donald was.

Lol. Yeah im sure that it's China and Russians who are causing leftist to not trust liberals. The last 300 years of human history in which liberals gleefully murdered leftists has nothing to do with it.

The left has always been infighting. The two great memes of the left are walls of text and hating other leftists.

But liberals are not leftists. And we’ve disliked you for decades and globally.

I'm not saying that this isn't happening, but at the same time it also seems to get heavily implied in threads like these that the solution is for leftists to just get onboard with two-party neoliberalist capitalism just for this next one election, just this once, we promise.

Calling on the Democratic Party to adopt left-wing policies keeps getting branded "divisive", but calling on Leftists to adopt the center-right is treated like an attempt at unification.

The people calling for party unity don't want any of the political aspects of a united Left, they just want to carry on the same policies they had before but with more people being scared into holding their noses and voting for them.

KGB handbook: play up the loudest voices on both sides of every social issue, make every tiny issue seem so overblown and saturated with lies and nonsense that average people stay out of it and stop trusting anyone involved.

This leaves people with no activism or outside opinion they can trust so they go along with whatever state media reports because what else is there.

This has worked wonders in other countries, it is working wonders in America. It is going to work in your country next, reader. What are you going to do about it?

What're you talking about, the whole system is working fine. The far right isn't riding to popularity throughout Europe, and clearly hasn't taken hold in the US.

Listen, if you can't do everything I like, then you're a fascist. And I mean everything. I'd pluck an example out of the air, but there's no point, because someone else will. And yeah, it's probably a good example, but I'm willing to bet the farm on it.

The post is a jab about American folks who conflate the terms. I wasn't expecting people to take this as seriously as others have!

Although now that you mentioned it, I kinda sense that there could be something going on sometimes, especially on comments looking down on the working class supporting the Republicans, while refusing to acknowledge that they used to vote Democrats. Plenty of people worth their salt would tell anyone that it is because the working class felt abandoned after the outsourcing of jobs without offering alternatives. Unfortunately, a lot on the left, but more so on liberals, don't see this and keep calling the working class as dumb hicks. There are definitely folks who are too far gone and support fascists, but to caricaturise everyone in the demographic while a more plausible explanation is available seems tone deaf. It made me think that there could be an intentional wedge to create in-fighting for such deliberate nosing down.

Divide and conquer. If the left can't see that then they doom us all. Liberals want freedom and justice and that is NOT being represented by most democrats

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

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.

Right? Do you want to get way more in terms of life quality? Then you are opposed to the hyper capitalist government. Do you want to get more money or do you want to give it to the oligarchs. It's not polarized anywhere

It gets trickier when you look at other countries where liberal means "(mostly) unfettered capitalism".

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.

Yes, but I hate Trump more.
An inch of gained ground is better than a mile of lost ground.

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.

Liberals are the fascists in their baby form. Once the conditions of the capitalist state deteriorate they transform into fascists quite fast.

I'm sure there's an actual Left in the USA, but it's not covered by any of the big parties.

We have two viable political parties.

Fascist extremists and their enablers. Vote blue no matter who, so maybe the fascists won't come for you.

We have leftists with no one to vote for, shut out of politics by liberal NIMBYs who want good things to happen, they just don't want to see them. More concerned about the value of their house than the value of human life. We have extreme leftists, they're just not allowed to participate. And as of yet, none of them exist in enough numbers in the same place to start throwing Molotovs

There is no far left political party but there are plenty of people who are far left. Yes, even by the European standards of the left.

Are you from one of the countries where the far right was just named most popular? If not, I'll throw a "yet" in, because you talk like someone who lets perfection get in the way of not sees.

American.

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.

there are conservatives and there are maga conservatives.

Euros don't know liberal means different things in different places. I've only seen lemmy draw a huge distinction between left & liberal. I think it's the Euro influence.

In North America, they call leftists liberals & don't split hairs like Europe & Latin America.

In Europe and Latin America, liberalism means a moderate form of classical liberalism and includes both conservative liberalism (centre-right liberalism) and social liberalism (centre-left liberalism). In North America, liberalism almost exclusively refers to social liberalism.

People in the US get seriously confused that the Liberal party in other countries (eg, Australia) isn't liberal.

liberals leftists shit on the left

FTFY

They're not that unified & don't set aside their differences to work toward a common goal.

Case in point: trying to divide left liberals from the left.

Yes please.

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?

Most European countries have an (actually) liberal party; the one in Germany used to have its place between social democrats and conservatives, but has moved way to the right in recent years.

It was kinda done intentionally to muddy the terms to prevent people from thinking of alternatives to the status quo.

That's because the definition of the word means promoter of human rights, meaning anybody using it otherwise are the ones misusing the word.

I don't call tankies "left".

Your wish is your command.

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.

That sounds convincing but, when establishment Democrats fight the left ten times harder than they fight the right, I don't think it's right wing propaganda dividing us.

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.

Agreed. But also, you can just ignore those terms entirely and focus on actual issues..

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.

only tankies on lemmy call people here libs, and they are honestly no better than right wingers, both sides of the same coin.

Of course not. In fact if there is anything I associate with leftist ideologies it's anti-authoritarianism.

Yes, we need things to get cleaned out of the Barney Horror Picutre Show, but if we give up ground about twice more, it'll just be full-on Right vs Right. The next person that goes in has to be left of Biden at the very least or no margins will be made. We couldn't even get we'll stop funding the atrocities in Gaza out of the "left" candidate last time.

Should it have been K? F yeah in comparison, but give us something to drag people out of the house to vote for.

What does this even mean?

thats why the right wins most of the time, they are unified by hate, while having too many different concessions is means the party is in disarray.

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 base my labels on the seating arrangements of the revolutionary French parliament from over 200 years ago. What's wrong with that?

I think both sides of the National Assembly would have had you guillotined if you said they're a parliament.

PS: Guillotines didn't exist at that point so this is technically inaccurate.