Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com/t/4518262
Inspired by this thread where at least five different libs made the same point and responded the same way when I tried to poke their bubble. Seriously CTRL+F my username or the word “voter” it’s downright surreal. The hivemindness of the affair was also pretty weird, but I’m not one to meme the same interaction twice.
This gets extra complicated when you realize that almost no party actually is what they advertise to be.
In the US, republicana are not conservative, they’re fascist. Democrats are not liberal, they’re conservative.
note, while the republican party is a monolith, the democrat party is not. Some people in the democrat party are actually liberal, or even leftist! We’re also seeing the republican monolith crack. MTG, as much as she deserves to suffocate on a silicone dildo for her actions, has demonstrayed that she really is the conservative she always claimed to be (still hate the bitch even though she’s making good points recently).
I could keep going but I want to get on with my day.
So conservative is a political philosophy defending the monarchy, aristocracy, and dynasty. Liberal is a political philosophy that says “No kings! Everything should be determined by private wealth!” Both major American parties are Liberal. And fascism is liberalism in crisis. All of the bad things fascism did to people liberals have also done to people, because the bad things of the fascists are the same bad things done to indigenous peoples around the world by European settlers, who got more violent after they broke from their respective monarchies. The non-market things done by fascism were done to protect the private wealth holders that were in power. That’s why rich free market liberals in the West funded the rise of the Third Reich.
There are no leftists in the Democrat party. The most extreme people in that party are Social Democrats. Social democracy is still liberalism, but it is liberalism with a strong sense of self-preservation - they realize that the liberal system can be overthrown by workers, so they want liberalism with more social safety net and more concessions to make the workers more comfortable.
Contrast this with traditional liberals, who believed that the government should do absolutely nothing for the people, and you find that American conservatives are actually traditional European liberals, far closer to John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Adams, etc.
Case in point, FDR. FDR was almost assassinated in a planned coup by the US business community who wanted a fascist leader at the helm, because they were angry with FDR’s plan to give the workers concessions removed unemployment insurance and jobs programs. They wanted the market to do everything and let the age of the robber barons continue. This, of course, in the context of the great depression.
FDR, however, was part of a faction that knew the workers were getting much closer to revolt and that they had to do something to prevent leftists from getting stronger in the US. So he implemented the jobs program. But he also but Asian people in concentration camps and stole their property, and he established racial red lining at the top policy levels of the US government.
So how do we reconcile the colloquial understanding of the word liberal with FDR doing things that we normally associate with fascism? We recognize that liberalism and fascism are deeply related to each other and that both are opponents of the left (the left having shifted by late 1800s/early 1900s to mean communist/anarchist).
The USA is and always has been a liberal political formation with almost exclusively liberal politicians at the national level and, having gone through 2 - 3 red scares, the communist control act, and the cold war, has filtered out and demolished leftism so thoroughly that Republican liberals accuse Democrat liberals of being communists and Democrat liberals then prove they aren’t communists by taking their most social democrat members and fighting against them.
If you’re gonna use the original definition of conservative, why not use the original definition of liberal, too?
I did. No kings, everything should be determined by private wealth. That is the original Liberalism. It was a philosophy of and by the merchant class who couldn’t convert their massive profits into power because power was centralized in a king and distributed according to long histories of relationships and tradition. Merchants could make all the money they could find but still couldn’t buy titles to land, and they were upset about it.
That’s why Liberalism is focused on private property and calling it “a right” and coming up with ridiculous framings for where that right comes from. The idea of universal rights was a sort of natural development from arguing against divine right to rule. But of course, liberals only applied “universal” rights to rich white men, so they started walking a tightrope of “we need to undermine the power of the king” on one side and “we can’t give the poor teeming masses power over us” on the other side.
This is where Liberalism because internally contradictory. Private property and universal rights are diametrically opposed at a logical and systems level. There’s lots of ways to prevent the contradiction from coming to a head though, for a time anyway, and the most obvious is territorial expansion. So long as you can steal entire continents from indigenous people, you can privatize land for centuries before the system starts to show major signs of strain.
In essence, Liberalism emerged when the potential for allocating larger amounts of resources became possible and feudalism couldn’t maximize the opportunity. Merchants accumulated these vast sums that couldn’t be properly deployed and Liberalism, with its focus on private property and eliminating any central planning or coordination function from society, emerged to solve that problem. But it needed the masses to support it, so it developed a value system that everyone could support but only benefitted the few.
And now that Liberalism’s economic system, Capitalism, has reached a crisis at the global level, the contradiction inherent in liberalism (private property on one side, universal liberation on the other) is so sharp that Liberalism is falling apart.
And when it does, we have two options: move to the lower energy state of feudalism where warlords and monarchs decide how to allocate resources based on their relationships and waste massive amounts of surplus, or move to the higher energy state of communism, where governments evolve from the current representative democracy that tried to maintain Liberalism/Capitalism into new democratic forms that adopt the responsibility of deliberate planning and cultivation towards a future state that relies less and less on the structures of hierarchy and violence to maintain the contradictions of class society.
I see, liberalism was created for the purpose of upholding an economic system which would not exist until nearly a century later.
Genius!
Oh boy. One of you people.
No, Talcosis. Liberalism was created to solve a systemic economic imbalance caused by how power was distributed in feudalism. The resulting system that Liberalism produced from its first principles (namely, people who go out and make a lot of money should be able to do whatever they want with that money) resulted in what we now call capitalism. That’s why Liberalism ascends in near lock-step with mercantilism. Because it’s a philosophy driven primarily by the aggrieved merchant class.
Oh, okay.
So why use the original definition of conservatism but not the original definition of liberalism?
Say more. I think I am using the original definition of Liberalism. What is the original definition, as you understand it, and how does it differ from what I have provided?
The right to self determination.