Liberals are somewhere between center left and center right. In the US, the alternative to republicanism is the “liberal party” and because they often encompass people further left than the party line, they are seen as left wing. Generally, I associate people who are always in favor of slow electoral measures, a strong state, strong individualistic rights that are positively defined (the right to do rather than not having the right to do) and the view that capitalism is the only method that had worked so far and is therefore best with liberalism. But thats far from an academic definition.

When you add in the fact that people usually end up seeing another person’s politics in relative to their own, things get unintelligible for someone trying to pinpoint an ideology.

An anarchist like myself will probably point towards someone like Biden or Obama and say they are a liberal or neoliberal, which is probably accurate enough (if I do say so myself), but I’ll also call conservatives like Romney, Bush, and Raegan, liberals or neoliberal even though those are people most self titled liberals would hate. A staunch authoritarian communist might call AOC or Sanders a liberal because they aren’t revolutionary communists, even though I’d personally consider them somewhat socialist progressives. Heck, I’ve ben called a liberal by hardcore communists even though my views are more similar to their definition of communism than theirs, and I’ve been called a liberal by some alt right people even though their views are closer to liberalism than mine.

Fox news, on the other hand, would call a pink haired person on a college campus a liberal for the pink hair alone. They might label a gay trump supporter who has a pride flag a liberal because of their homophobia combined with the association pride has with liberals to them. They might call someone who is genuinely far left a liberal because they either can’t comprehend their beliefs or because they don’t catch some of the indicators that they are looking at a communist, anarchist, etc.

My thoughts exactly! Every real-life human I've ever spoken to uses it to mean open-minded and every definition I look up agrees, yet for some reason half the people posting here think it exclusively means economically-neo-liberal capitalist.

'Liberal' is one of those words that has so many definitions that it can have contradictory meanings. It can mean 'open to / tolerant of'. It can denote a style of education that tries to be broad rather than deep. It can describe various political positions - the 'Liberal Party' is left-wing in Chile, centrist in the UK and Canada, and right-wing in Russia, Japan and Australia. This is also what OP is memeing about. At this point, to avoid confusion, I would just avoid using the word except in the purely academic / technical sense.

Some authoritarians strongly believe that they're far left. But an authoritarian regime cannot be left. If you're not liberal, you're an authoritarian, not left, and it doesn't matter what type of authoritarian bull shit you're subscribing to.

I used to think it just was synonymous with the left, but I’ve recently been seeing a lot of comments on Lemmy saying liberals aren’t leftist so now I am not sure if it means anything or if those Lemmings are just dumb.

@Cowbee@lemmy.ml

I've been fucking telling you, insisting on a Eurocentric definition confuses people, and that confusion is exploited by fascists.

American definition of liberal: socially liberal

European definition of liberal: economically liberal