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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Yeah wow huh! It took me many years of reading HN to figure out that “liberal” means “left” in the US. In my (European) country, the word means nearly the opposite, a belief in individual freedoms, free speech, free markets, small governments and so on. It’s mostly championed by right-of-center parties. I’ve been confused many times reading comments that go like “these liberals who want to ban free speech” which, to me, reads as funky as “these nazis who want to protect minority rights” or “these republicans who want to reinstate the monarchy”.

It’s just, the word did a total 180 in the US and it’s super weird!

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Realistically the mainstream Democratic Party is liberal in the sense that you use it; the US is a fundamentally liberal place, a lot of Republicans are as well.

Even the idea of “banning free speech” that you mention is implemented in a liberal fashion in the US. There are rarely calls for the government to actually ban speech via laws. The ground where that’s fought is actually “should private companies broadcast/highlight via algorithm the speech of individuals who say things I don’t like,” it is a formulation that pits the speech rights of the corporation against the self-expression of the individuals using their services.

The framing you quoted (“these liberals who want to ban free speech”) is often used by one side to pitch the other side as falling outside the traditional free-speech consensus.

> The framing you quoted (“these liberals who want to ban free speech”) is often used by one side to pitch the other side as falling outside the traditional liberal consensus.

I disagree, at least a bit. I think "liberal" here is just used as "the bad tribe". It's not saying that they're not living up to their values, it's just saying that they're "them".

I can definitely see how what I wrote was unclear there, sorry. Inside the quotes, “liberal” was used in the sense that skrebble was using it inside their hypothetical quote, so, basically a faction of team-blue. Afterwards my intent was to continue using it in the way that he (outside his hypothetical quote) and I (everywhere) had been using it, related to the philosophy of liberalism. I’ll try to edit it for clarity, sorry…

In the US they call that right-leaning version "libertarian".

Nah the thing we call liberalism is much milder than that. It’s like the watered down, we-do-trust-the-government-but-maybe-tone-it-down-a-little version of libertarianism. I mean the same meaning as eg the Economist gives the term.

I think maybe the term changed meaning in the US because for decades pretty much everyone agreed with it (no social democrats in sight, barring the occasional Bernie). A movement that ~everyone agrees with isn't much of a movement, is it?

It's a movement that won - won so thoroughly that nobody even remembers there was a war. But that means that, since nobody's fighting that war any more, the label (which has "winning" and even "being correct" attached to it in peoples' minds) is now up for grabs for other movements that want to win.

> It's a movement that won - won so thoroughly that nobody even remembers there was a war.

I don't think so. Some things might have been taken more or less for granted, but a lot of policies are now reopening that war again. See for example, the various threads about Chat Control in the EU recently on HN.

> no social democrats in sight

The US already has social security, medicare, medicaid. It is often just plain worse/more brutal than Western European countries but the difference isn't a radical reimagination of the social order.

> barring the occasional Bernie

Western Europe has likewise not imagined any new government welfare since the 1970s.

Which is itself an ugly word because the Libertarian Party proper is mostly a bunch of kooks and cranks. So using it invites comparisons to them even if you only are proposing what the above poster was proposing.

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