this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
1340 points (97.7% liked)
AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND
1347 readers
302 users here now
This is a page for anything that's amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound.
♦ ♦ ♦
RULES
❶ Each player gets six cards, except the player on the dealer's right, who gets seven.
❷ Posts, comments, and participants must be amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound.
❸ This page uses Reverse Lemmy-Points™, or 'bad karma'. Please downvote all posts and comments.
❹ Posts, comments, and participants that are not amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound will be removed.
❺ This is a non-smoking page. If you must smoke, please click away and come back later.
❻ Don't be a dick.
Please also abide by the instance rules.
♦ ♦ ♦
Can't get enough? Visit my blog.
♦ ♦ ♦
Please consider donating to Lemmy and Lemmy.World.
$5 a month is all they ask — an absurdly low price for a Lemmyverse of news, education, entertainment, and silly memes.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Here's a work going through every major liberal philosopher and what liberalism meant to them, and how they dealt with the contradictions. It's the same definition used in every serious work for the last 200 years or so.
This confuses a lot of Americans whose political understanding is largely dictated by cable news, because since 1980 or so, conservatives started using liberal to mean "far left" as a pejorative due to Reagan calling Carter's policy too liberal. Later on, the American "left", social democrats, started using it to mean the same thing, but in a positive context.
I'll read that, but not today. For the sake of responding within the current month, I had chatgpt summarize it for me. The gist I get is that "liberalism" is a lie, and it's secretly fascism (I'm paraphrasing the summary pretty hard), benefiting the in-groups and oppressing everyone else. Would you say this is an accurate, if oversimplified, description of what you want me to understand?
Not really, it's more that liberalism contains contradictions between various freedoms it supports, and even contradictions between how the same "freedom" is practiced by different groups, and when those contradictions become unsustainable, the right to property by the dominant group always takes precedence.
It's important to understand any political philosophy as not an idea floating in a vacuum but as a social tool used by a group in society; liberalism is the philosophy the bourgeoisie use to justify their power.
I mean kinda since fascism is a tool used to buttress capitalism when it's own contradictions become unsustainable, but that's not really in the book.
chatgpt's summary didn't compare liberalism to fascism, I made that comparison myself based on what I read.
I wouldn't say that's entirely wrong, fascism being a failure mode of liberalism. The phrase "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" or Trotsky's "Not every exasperated petite bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petite bourgeois" come to mind.
I may have to stop calling myself a liberal. This does not align with my opinions.
If you don't support capitalism, you aren't a liberal.
I am of the opinion that any economic model / government will decay into fascism if not appropriately maintained and protected from bad actors. Capitalism is not inherently good nor inherently bad, it's what we've got. The disaster that is the current state (and foreseeable future) of the US is a failure to maintain and protect its government and economy from bad actors. I would be willing to try another economic model if the opportunity arose.
What does this make me?
Practical.
jk though, most people are in that position; in Cuba, Vietnam, China, Russia, etc before the revolution, the masses didn't read a bunch of books, decide communism sounded like the best way to run things, then overthrow their oppressors.
Though it's important to understand the effects capitalism has had on society though are inherent to capitalism, not bad individuals doing capitalism wrong. That is the framing fascists use, since they've been privileged by the system, they need to invent reasons for its failing that don't change it structurally. So you get wild conspiracies, foreigners, or whatever else is easy to believe.
We're not "confused", we have a different variant of English and a different definition for "liberal".