this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Is this American liberal or real liberal?
It’s Burgerland liberal, which is center-left to right. Burgerland conservative is right to fash.
Or American conservative or real conservative
It’s relative to the nationstate’s domestic policies in question. And just a heads up, I know when people make statements like this it just reveals a lack of understanding regarding foreign countries’ domestic politics. However, it’s also important to point out that the meme itself is incredibly ethnocentric and is fundamentally based on a dismissal of the validity of political discourse outside Western Europe and North America. You don’t mean to be racist, right?
This “meme” is not ethnocentric. Liberalism has a definition. The meaning became lost to Americans thanks to two red scares and a cold war. So now you have centrists like Bernie Sanders calling themselves socialist, which is absolutely not true.
Bernie believes in the eradication of capitalism, he's a socialist working in a fucked over Overton window that means the best policies he can argue for would fall under social democracy at best.
Which, to be very clear, makes him a raging commie by American political standards.
The only people who argue he's a capitalist are people that think socialism is when poor.
No, he believes in the eradication of “über” capitalism, as his new book states: It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. He is a There Is No Alternative, Nordic model welfare capitalist. He never has and never will call for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.
He specifically describes himself as a democratic socialist instead of a social democrat but I also haven't read the book so feel free to quote an excerpt from it saying he thinks the capitalist model is the only viable one.
During Sander’s 2020 presidential campaign he called for corporate accountability reform which would have given workers the ability to elect a portion of the board of directors for the corporation they work for.
That is a feature of the Nordic model—as I said above—and is still capitalism: Worker representation on corporate boards of directors
I’m about as far-left as they come. I want to understand.
What would it mean in terms of policy to “call for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production”? Would you prefer something closer to the Meidner Plan? Because that’s further left than Bernie’s plan but could also be considered part of the “Nordic Model”.
As far as I can tell, this kind of rhetoric stems from a lack of understanding of the economic similarities between the “Nordic Model” and Chinese-style communism.
Socialism can develop differently in different countries. As such I believe that it's better to engage in international solidarity, rather than nit pick differences.
But, I’m open to being wrong.
One might argue that they are both “mixed economies,” but they are very different.
The Nordic countries are imperial core countries that benefit from neocolonialism. They are bourgeois democracies, meaning that the state enforces the dominance of the capitalist class over the working class. Because of this, something like a Meidner Plan, which proposes slowly eliminating the capitalist class, will never be allowed to happen in these states.
In China, the capitalist class is not in control of the state, though some limited capitalism is being allowed in the short term, with a plan to eventually eliminate it altogether. And China is not an imperialist state (despite NATOpedia’s false claims of “debt trap diplomacy”).
Gabriel Rockhill - How The Left Should Analyze the Rise of a Multipolar World, China, Russia & BRICS
This is true, though they can’t develop in any old way they’d like. All of the Western European attempts at socialism in the 20th century failed. All anarchist attempts have failed. The only successful ones so far have rested on a Marxist–Leninist foundation.
Liberalism actually has a lot of definitions. It is a classical philosophical concept, a modern political philosophical concept, a term to describe a lower value of risk aversion, a term to mean supplied in abundance, and (here) a political science term used to describe an entire half of a relative political spectrum whose center point is determined by the specific body politic being measured. So, big shooter, no you are mistaken at a very basic level. All nations have both a liberal and conservative spectrum within their own political system. And, just to raise your level of education on the subject, you know what? Even within those subgroups, there is a liberal and conservative divide based on the relative ideology of the subgroup. And fun fact, you can yet still divide those subgroups of subgroups — this is a large part of how the phenomenon of group polarization happens.
See, here we have an Overton window that only allows for liberalism, as if socialism doesn’t exist. As if the political spectrum only goes from center-left to right, erasing the left altogether. The left is erased because Burgerland purged them.
"American" is hardly an ethnicity (except maybe if you are referring to native Americans of course), so this has nothing to do with racism. Secondly I assume the author of the comment is refering to the simple fact that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have drastically different connotations in Europe and the US.
They also have drastically different connotations in America depending on whether the user can read a book.
I think it's a higher bar of actually reading one. Only around 20% of Americans read a book, any book, within the ages 18-29.