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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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I see. The difference here is mostly that I consider liberals to be fully aware, or at least semi conscious, of the atrocities happening under capitalism. Liberalism, in my opinion, is directly equal to social-darwinism. The lesser evil they keep bringing up is them or a group that represents them. The motto for the liberals should be "Better you than me. And better dead than red." That is to say, liberals don't even believe in the possibility of equality. But the opposite, they believe in eternal inequality.
Probably varies some based on the liberal you're talking to. But in my experience with working class grade liberals, it's not so much that they believe in eternal inequality as much as they believe that a perfect world isn't possible (which is reasonable on its own) and then use that to excuse the status quo by saying that the status quo is doing its best but it can't fix everything (which is based in a faulty understanding of what the status quo is for and how it works). In the abstract, this is not dramatically different from how MLs talk about AES states: perfect isn't possible, a better world takes time. The key difference being that liberals are defending a system that is not even designed to address inequality in the first place and is in fact there to enforce it. Whereas MLs are defending a system that is explicitly there to address inequality and is using a diligently scientific framework (dialectical materialism) to work out how to achieve those aims as efficiently and effectively as can be done.
Liberals will point at reforms as evidence of the capitalist system's ability to become more fair and equitable, but either ignore or fail to recognize the people who died or were imprisoned in order to make that possible at all and what that implies about how inflexible the system is to reform. They refuse to recognize the significance of what Lenin points out so well in State and Revolution, about who has a monopoly on violence, who owns the means of production, and how power flows from these things.
If liberals think that equality of material wealth is impossible, it follows that they also believe in material inequality in a biological sense. So most liberals, in my opinion, do insist on eternal inequality. How would liberals explain that some people grow up to be scientists while others have jobs considered less noble? To think that a majority of people are born inferior is integral to liberalism.
I would say, believing that some are more deserving and some are less deserving is integral to elitism in general, which includes liberalism but is not limited to it. Liberals appear to take on a more paternal view of those who society deems less deserving, which is still a validation of elitism, but less sneering than the more overt forms. As seen in the mindset of charity*. This enables liberalism to sanitize itself as an ideology that cares, without supporting systemic changes in the power structure that would guarantee assistance and largely eliminate the need for voluntary charity.
*Not to say that the practice of voluntarily helping out someone in need is inherently elitist (far from it), but that elitist power structures co-opt this otherwise communal mindset to pass off social responsibility to the individual and the voluntary; thereby further entrenching the idea that the powerful don't owe anyone anything.