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Don't make the mistake of conflating liberal with progressive, republican with conservative, nor the idea that someone who values small govt is necessarily a co

Don't make the mistake of conflating liberal with progressive, republican with conservative, nor the idea that someone who values small govt is necessarily a conservative. Those are all substantially different things, even though current majorities make them SEEM equivalent. As a thought experiment, consider that most of our nation's founders were liberal but they favored small govt. Also, there is a number of people today who believe in classical liberalism but don't identify as progressive nor conservative; they are usually called libertarian. Libertarians would generally eschew both Eisenhower, big govt programs, AND progressivism.

nostromo 11y ago
This is why I hate how we Americans have bastardized the word "liberal." Liberal used to mean something concrete. Liberalism was about liberty, including economic liberty and free markets. The most liberal party in the US today is the Libertarian party. Yet in most American's eyes, anything the Democrats do is de facto liberal -- which is not the case. I would describe someone like Elizabeth Warren not as liberal but as a moderate democratic socialist. And progressive... I don't think anyone really knows what that means in a modern context.
lukeschlather 11y ago
That's really an oversimplification. In the early history of the USA, there were two camps, the federalists and the anti-federalists. The federalists explicitly wanted a strong central government. The anti-federalists, which you might describe as the "small government" side, wanted a freedom from monopolies written into the constitution, with the understanding that the government would revoke corporate charters if any company got too powerful. Even so, the federalists didn't really want an environment where strong corporations check the power of government, they wanted an explicit oligarchy where the most wealthy men around were Senators. Neither of these camps really sound like modern libertarians to me.

nostromo 11y ago

This is why I hate how we Americans have bastardized the word "liberal." Liberal used to mean something concrete. Liberalism was about liberty, including economic liberty and free markets. The most liberal party in the US today is the Libertarian party. Yet in most American's eyes, anything the Democrats do is de facto liberal -- which is not the case. I would describe someone like Elizabeth Warren not as liberal but as a moderate democratic socialist. And progressive... I don't think anyone really knows what that means in a modern context.

lukeschlather 11y ago

That's really an oversimplification. In the early history of the USA, there were two camps, the federalists and the anti-federalists. The federalists explicitly wanted a strong central government. The anti-federalists, which you might describe as the "small government" side, wanted a freedom from monopolies written into the constitution, with the understanding that the government would revoke corporate charters if any company got too powerful. Even so, the federalists didn't really want an environment where strong corporations check the power of government, they wanted an explicit oligarchy where the most wealthy men around were Senators. Neither of these camps really sound like modern libertarians to me.