cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/71300076
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No. Liberalism is firmly a center-right ideology.
So in the US, why do the right-wingers go on about "owning the libs" as if libs (by which I read "liberals") are on the opposite end to the far-right?
Because the American far-right is even further to the right and more insular than the Liberals. Just because both are politically right-wing ideologies doesn't mean they are friendly with each other. Same thing happened in Nazi Germany, the fascists hated the liberals then too but the liberals still played the concession game thinking they could keep the monster tamed.
Then there is the decades of political manipulation through the shifting of the Overton Window and the Liberal establishment co-opting leftist movements by claiming they are "the left" in order to hamstring any discussion from challenging capitalist interests making things even more confusing for those who do not have enough understanding of political science to know the differences.
Here in the UK, we have the Liberal Democrats party, who are kind of centre-left. I know that in Australia, for example, their "Liberal" party is basically the equivalent of our Conservatives, i.e. centre-right to full-right. I guess I just grew up with "liberal" meaning "leftish".
This is the problem with words having both an academic definition and a colloquial one, which oftentimes have no correlation to each other beyond being the same word.
The ideology known as "Liberalism", from which the political moniker "liberal" originates, is by definition a center-right ideology. It has no bearing on what different political parties want to dub themselves. Those names are arbitrary and not bound by the political definition of terms.
Liberalism in the classical sense isn't what's meant by the modern use of the term. "Leftists" today demonstrate their values by helping Republicans control the government while pretending their more moral than the rest of us.