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#liberalism — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #liberalism, aggregated by home.social.

  1. Eva von Redecker: Fascism Is #Liberalism Broken Off to the Right

    Political philosopher Eva von Redecker on how fantasies of possession and loss fuel #fascism. This is part one of an in-depth interview.

    via Hanno Hauenstein @hahauenstein

    hannohauenstein.substack.com/p

  2. It's interesting to watch the American Democratic party fall into the same bitter recriminations that have consumed Canada's NDP - it's not us that's wrong, it's the voters.

    Canada also shows the remedy - Liberalism still has legs. Canada simply takes the world as it is, fights hard for its own beliefs and interests, doesn't confuse bold action for populism, and makes no apologies for doing what it must in the face of adversary near and afar.

    #canada #liberalism #centrism #politics #uspol

  3. Growing up, I was always told to mock #socialism as a form of utopianism, as if that was a bad thing. #Utopianism was never a belief that something would happen, or that anything would be perfect. It was a thought experiment to consider what a perfect outcome would look like, so we could implement the ideas and get as close as possible. Meanwhile, #capitalism , #conservatism , #liberalism , and #libertarianism are just as #utopian in their dreams. Capitalism and libertarianism believe that if we JUST get government out of the way, we could have the #freemarkets work the way they are supposed to and lead to prosperity for all, never mind that corporations only exist because of #bankruptcy laws and standards created by Congress. Modern conservatism believes that if we just went back to a specific, unspecified time point when religion ruled, we would have prosperity again, never mind that America was never like that, even when we were at our most religious. #Liberals believe that if freedom, equality, and equity are guaranteed, but with a true free market that does require governments to regulate it, we would have true prosperity. The only difference is that #Marx , using arguments by #AdamSmith himself, poked holes in all of these ideas at their core. That the structure itself needed an overhaul of who holds power, or at least patched with a strong welfare state, and to work toward that utopian dream where the people held the power instead of the lords or #oligarchs and everyone was a lawmaker with direct democracy, there was a return of #thecommons that was just the norm for most of human history, and #personalproperty was something you physically used, erned and worked instead of from trading, hoarding and wasting while people starved aka #privateproperty . The day the lords stole the commons from the people was the day that socialism started to exist, with the Diggers and the Levelers attempting to take on the power of the lords and realizing they already ran their own villages, or communes and affairs in their areas, and the lords were just a middleman that contributed little to nothing. Hence the term #communism , which is a return to the natural commons people like #John Locke and #Voltaire and other #Enlightenment thinkers idealized, but capitalism has brainwashed people to ignore, forget, or never know in the first place they believed this while we were told to look up to them. Utopianism gives us the power to dream, to coalesce our ideas and our ideals. When we were told not to dream of our ideal world but were told to dream of their ideal, that's when the dream died and we just all became doomers.
  4. Given the choice, Centrists always side with fascists or the right. #LifeLesson You can't trust centrists. Example:
    "the leader of the ailing Liberals, Simona Mohamsson, shocked her party last month by abruptly switching positions on SD, announcing that her party would accept being in government with a far-right force she had previously denounced as racist. She also held a press conference alongside Åkesson in which they hugged."
    theguardian.com/world/2026/apr
    #liberals #Centrists #Centrism #liberalism

  5. "Many liberals, after the double shock of Trump and Brexit in 2016, confessed their supposed mistakes and performed contrition, along the lines of: we failed to pay attention to the “left-behind”; we must book political safaris in Appalachia; we must closely study Hillbilly Elegy to demonstrate compassion for the heartland. Of course, self-criticism and checking one’s priors is a good thing. But behind the ostentatious displays of “we failed to listen” was also a profound narcissism: if only we acted (or at least talked) differently, all would be well. Only liberals, or so the assumption goes again, have agency; performing contrition reinforced that flattering image.

    Even worse, this narcissism keeps shoring up the right’s claim that there is a “real America” and that only they speak for it. As any viewer of Sunday-morning shows has noticed, Republicans can malign city dwellers without anyone batting an eyelid; Obama saying something about guns and religion in rural areas triggers a multiyear scandal. It would not even occur to anyone to demand an apology from GOP members for insulting all urban dwellers. The asymmetry is taken for granted; liberals just accept it. This is what victory in a culture war looks like: Democrats accept the cultural framings enforced by the other side, even though polls would suggest that the liberals’ positions are often more popular (or, dare one say, reflect more about “real America” than the far-right fantasies pushed by Fox and its far-right friends)."

    theguardian.com/commentisfree/

    #Liberalism #Liberals #Centrism #ReactionaryCentrism #Fascism #Woke #AntiWoke

  6. @SmithsonianRoulette

    A fascinating and deeply problematic figure whose antebellum militant abolitionism was coupled with his postbellum support for a pro-business social darwinism.

    The links and tensions between these two currents in Beecher's life are of continuing relevance to US progressives today.

    #USPolitics #HenryWardBeecher #Liberalism