Spindel said:
Liberal = right leaning Conservative = right leaning Social democratic/socialist = left leaning Left leaning != (as in not equal to) liberal So my question to the other side (of the atlantic) why do you call people that want social reforms ”liberals”?
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This is a very unnuanced way to frame things. Not all liberals are right-leaning. In fact, I'd argue that the average liberal is further left than the average social democrat (whose politics were inherited by a German monarchist and aristocrat.) Rawlsian liberals and liberal-egalitarians/luck egalitarians are much more committed to what we call "left" as defined by the French Assembly in the late 18th century, than most state socialists who don't give a crap about liberty or hierarchies at all, and really just want to use the same institutions for their own hierarchy of state-controlling bureaucrats/intelligentsia.
I say all this as somebody on the faaaaaar left, an anarchist. Most state socialists aren't left-wing, they are merely anti-capitalist and don't care about any other hierarchies or power differentials besides capitalism. Social democrats are even worse. A Rawlsian liberal on the otherhand, is actually committed to ending all hierarchies due to their difference principle. Now I personally think the difference principle is somewhat weak in how it treats inequality (at least how Rawls applied it), but it at least tries to create a general principle of how to treat all inequalities and especially hierarchical ones. State socialists on the otherhand, don't care about the hierarchy they just care about who controls it.
American culture is not predisposed to state socialism, the vast majority of Americans are against the central state consolidating power, are strong positive egalitarians, and this has been the case since before there was a United States. Consequently, the left-wing activism has been mostly anti-centralizing: Jeffersonian Agrarianism, Georgism, Anarchism, other various left-liberalisms and left-libertarianisms, etc.
When social democracy was tried in the United States (progressive era) it was incompatible to American cultural sentiments to just let other people, some enlightened few, make their decisions for them. That is anti-egalitarian, and therefore anti-left.
Just wanted to say how annoyed I am with state socialists thinking they are the only left-wing politics, when most of them aren't even all that left-wing.