More and more I’m convinced most Americans have no idea what a liberal, leftist, or other terms actually are. They’re just parroting the words they hear from their feeds.
‘Liberal’ is the funniest because both red and blue accuse each other of being them. My guess is blues think liberalism is laissez-faire and the reds think it’s woke social freedoms. They’re both slightly on the right track, but not at all.
And in the rest of the free world…
Liberals: No one should live in poverty regardless of their ability to perform labour.
Leftists: Yoooo, 40 hrs is fucked. What is this, the 1300s?
Liberals: Actually, yeah that is kind of fucked. An employer shouldn’t be ble to encroach on an employee’s life that much. This is an imbalance of liberties.
Leftist: Great! So what are we going to do bout it?
Liberals: Fuck all. We can’t be sure employees don’t want this too. Besides, someone will sort it out soon, they always do.
Leftists: I’ll donate a union $5 so I can tell my friend I’m left.
And in the next five years, some prolific young gun politician swoops in the 35 hour work week. But due to cultural reasons, everyone keeps working 40 hours and gets plenty of overtime for it. This having the employer pay more and the employee see little benefit because the state haven’t adjusted their now dated tax brackets. But along with very good minimum wage standards and an unemployment rate < 5%, both the leftist and the liberal never found the true source of the poverty and so continued using foreign corporations and large franchise to fulfill almost all of their needs. And everyone but their local infrastructures and communities lived happily ever after until the next global recession hit. The leftist and liberal “really meant it this time” when they said they’d support local and try to live more independently, but the inconvenience of it meant they silently did not.
Let me introduce you to the Swedish political party, The Liberals. Their ideologies are things like
Muslims bad
Immigrants bad
We should collaborate with the Nazi party
We should monitor citizens private communication
Criminals should receive harsher punishments
They’re socially very conservative, and historically have been economically liberal. There are weird outliers however, like the other year when they almost tore themselves apart debating the legal nuances around incest.
Hear me out here, maybe, the words mean slightly different things based on the cultural associations with those words?
I don’t disagree that they are used differently in Europe and the rest of the world, but those terms have regionally unique meanings in the US.
Liberal here means more pro-business/capitalism. It doesn’t inherently mean pro-unregulated capitalism though, nor pro-big corporations/billionaires.
Leftist here means supports left leaning policies. That can range quite a bit, and likely is more left-of-center.
I think your breakdown is an accurate representation of politics regardless. Lots of people saying they want this or that, but not a ton of action actually going forward to change things. Yet alone there even being big incentives for those in power to actually implement those changes.
To me, it feels like positive change has to happen locally and at a state level, since people don’t necessarily care to want what they are unfamiliar with.
The difference is liberals believe in a system of laws that can be tweaked and perfected for the greatest good but never fundamentally changed, leftists believe in change
Of course you’re over there arguing over less hours or not, we’re over here arguing if we should still have science
My experience has more been along the lines of. 5 people are voting:
1 votes to make things better
2 don’t vote
2 vote to make things worse even for themselves
I tried watching some right wing stuff and some interviews with right wing voters to see if there was a perspective I’m missing but often it was literally ‘I know there’s no evidence for this but I believe it anyway’.
From my understanding, they would love those helpful things, but as soon as they hear the person they dislike might be helped or benefit it makes their blood boil because they hate that guy. I believe this is the crux of some of the issues.
This is what makes even the first part of this post happen where liberals try to negotiate, they offer a “okay what about if the person works 40 hours” and the answer they get back is still a “NO”.
I do think it’s possible to convince these people, but you really have to sell it as “there is the billionaires and then the rest of us who are hard working people”. Senator Bernie Sanders has had success in West Virginia doing this, so maybe if we can get some progressive campaigns going to these small towns, listening to the concerns of the locals, and uniting these people under this common concern it can help build some bridges.
More and more I’m convinced most Americans have no idea what a liberal, leftist, or other terms actually are. They’re just parroting the words they hear from their feeds.
‘Liberal’ is the funniest because both red and blue accuse each other of being them. My guess is blues think liberalism is laissez-faire and the reds think it’s woke social freedoms. They’re both slightly on the right track, but not at all.
And in the rest of the free world…
Liberals: No one should live in poverty regardless of their ability to perform labour.
Leftists: Yoooo, 40 hrs is fucked. What is this, the 1300s?
Liberals: Actually, yeah that is kind of fucked. An employer shouldn’t be ble to encroach on an employee’s life that much. This is an imbalance of liberties.
Leftist: Great! So what are we going to do bout it?
Liberals: Fuck all. We can’t be sure employees don’t want this too. Besides, someone will sort it out soon, they always do.
Leftists: I’ll donate a union $5 so I can tell my friend I’m left.
And in the next five years, some prolific young gun politician swoops in the 35 hour work week. But due to cultural reasons, everyone keeps working 40 hours and gets plenty of overtime for it. This having the employer pay more and the employee see little benefit because the state haven’t adjusted their now dated tax brackets. But along with very good minimum wage standards and an unemployment rate < 5%, both the leftist and the liberal never found the true source of the poverty and so continued using foreign corporations and large franchise to fulfill almost all of their needs. And everyone but their local infrastructures and communities lived happily ever after until the next global recession hit. The leftist and liberal “really meant it this time” when they said they’d support local and try to live more independently, but the inconvenience of it meant they silently did not.
“Rest of the world.”
Let me introduce you to the Swedish political party, The Liberals. Their ideologies are things like
They’re socially very conservative, and historically have been economically liberal. There are weird outliers however, like the other year when they almost tore themselves apart debating the legal nuances around incest.
In america, the words are essentially synonomous to the general public.
Hear me out here, maybe, the words mean slightly different things based on the cultural associations with those words?
I don’t disagree that they are used differently in Europe and the rest of the world, but those terms have regionally unique meanings in the US.
Liberal here means more pro-business/capitalism. It doesn’t inherently mean pro-unregulated capitalism though, nor pro-big corporations/billionaires.
Leftist here means supports left leaning policies. That can range quite a bit, and likely is more left-of-center.
I think your breakdown is an accurate representation of politics regardless. Lots of people saying they want this or that, but not a ton of action actually going forward to change things. Yet alone there even being big incentives for those in power to actually implement those changes.
To me, it feels like positive change has to happen locally and at a state level, since people don’t necessarily care to want what they are unfamiliar with.
The difference is liberals believe in a system of laws that can be tweaked and perfected for the greatest good but never fundamentally changed, leftists believe in change
Of course you’re over there arguing over less hours or not, we’re over here arguing if we should still have science
We don’t have a functioning system to tweak
The most real understanding of our political world tbh.
My experience has more been along the lines of. 5 people are voting:
1 votes to make things better
2 don’t vote
2 vote to make things worse even for themselves
I tried watching some right wing stuff and some interviews with right wing voters to see if there was a perspective I’m missing but often it was literally ‘I know there’s no evidence for this but I believe it anyway’.
From my understanding, they would love those helpful things, but as soon as they hear the person they dislike might be helped or benefit it makes their blood boil because they hate that guy. I believe this is the crux of some of the issues.
This is what makes even the first part of this post happen where liberals try to negotiate, they offer a “okay what about if the person works 40 hours” and the answer they get back is still a “NO”.
I do think it’s possible to convince these people, but you really have to sell it as “there is the billionaires and then the rest of us who are hard working people”. Senator Bernie Sanders has had success in West Virginia doing this, so maybe if we can get some progressive campaigns going to these small towns, listening to the concerns of the locals, and uniting these people under this common concern it can help build some bridges.