I feel like this all ignored the complete bastardization of any sense of language or definition in American politics. None of these words mean anything and engaging in it is playing party to the fucked up games people have invented to delay any sort of growth or action.

"Neoliberal conservativeism" was a thing. They're all nazis now. 'Liberals' is a slur against anyone who isn't left enough. 'Liberalism' is the blood-shy self-blind median our parents and grandparents wanted for us so we didn't have to watch our friends die in imperialists wars in Asia. Libertarianism was supposed to be a rejection of any of this and got coopelted by some of the most evil freaks in the system. The Left represents the most meaningful and poplist messaging we can mannage and is still consumed by bickering from people who can't walj and chew gum or breathe at the same time.

Stop trying to argue the labels.

I get that these terms get tossed around without people knowing what they mean, and I'm not against language evolving. But liberalism was never really intended to describe wherever you are on a progressive-conservative spectrum.

Pulling from Wikipedia, but it's a similar definition in most texts.

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.

Classical liberals just tended to look progressive compared to people who weren't liberals, because, well, read the definition. The countervailing force to liberalism is authoritarianism. It's more of a government legitimacy and structure philosophy.

Neoliberals are right wing

The liberalism that is practiced in the US is neoliberalism, the same thing practiced throughout the developed world, and we don't see ideological movements in power specifically because business interests have historically intervened to overthrow those governments in order to install friendlier regimes that let them plunder natural resources.

But then neoliberalism ultimately favors property rights over human rights, and as Marx observes in Das Kapital the owner class will influence the courts to favor property and business over the public good. It'll also hack law to gain influence over the government to deregulate and protect the power of the wealthiest plutocrats and companies.

Democracies and leninist economies have existed. They just get put down before they have much of a chance to flourish. Even Wilson favored monarchists over communists.

In the US, we can't imagine anything other than capitalism because of over a century of propaganda inserted into our primary schooling. That campaign has only gotten more and more conservative and now MAGA ideology is taught in class. This was deliberate, as the US education system was always regarded as an instrument of control and worker indoctrination.

It's 2026 and any talk of political labels outside an academic setting is useless.

Hitler wasn't a Socialist; North Korea isn't a Democratic Republic; the Chinese Communist Party has numerous billionaires.

Pick actual candidates and vote for them without tying yourself in knots over what they call themselves.

Second, stop pretending there's some giant 'Left' majority in the US. Mamdani won NYC with 51% of the vote; Harris got 65%. She got more total votes and a higher percentage than the guy who called himself a Socialist.

I like Mamdani, and I voted for him, but if he gets re-elected it'll be because he's a savvy pol, not because of some Left wave.

Liberals share one central feature with fascists; they both support private property rights. So if liberals have to choose between socialism and fascism they will always choose the latter.

Thinking of the world as two directions is literal one dimensional thinking. The real problem is a society willing to operate with just one neural weight.