I like this. Do you have any suggestion for alternative terms? I think I’ve struggled with finding a different word because I don’t feel comfortable calling anyone in the Democratic Party “leftist” so I fall back on “progressive” as a default
One that isn’t insulting to the liberals that exist under the “progressive” tent? I don’t know. The word is essentially a tent of social-democrats and socialists, and that tent is useful as an alliance but damaging in that it erases socialists from discourse as they get consumed into “progressive liberals”. This erasure results in fewer people learning the difference between socialists and liberals, in fact it makes people think socialists are liberals.
Socialists should call themselves socialists and any big-tent collaboration should be clearly labelled as a Socialist-LeftLiberal collaboration/alliance.
The benefit of calling someone like Bernie or AOC LeftLiberal instead of Progressive is it educates less political people that LeftLiberal and RightLiberal exists. This pushes the vast majority of the Democrats to the right in people’s minds and it will open up space for a “left” to exist. While doing this it also clearly educates people that Socialists and LeftLiberals are not the same thing.
You get me? If LeftLiberal becomes a thing in people’s minds then everything that is not LeftLiberal becomes right wing in people’s minds, pushing the entirety of the democrat party into the right and opening up control of what “left” exists to Socialists and Social Democrats. The benefit of this is that everyone who currently associates “left” with being good will fall into this camp over time, they will reject RightLiberals when they become associated with being right wing in their minds. So much american thinking can be boiled down to “left good, right bad” or “right good, left bad”. This can be weaponised linguistically.
It is possible to convince LeftLiberals to start doing this because they will realise how much it benefits them to make the distinction. And it is possible to convince Socialists to start doing this because it stops erasing Socialists.
Yeah that makes sense! I generally tell people “Liberals are right wing because they still support capitalism and empire” but some of the edge cases make that harder to sell. Left-liberal is a term that can fill that niche.
Exactly, and if they start to build their understanding of the world as these people being “Left-Liberal” then they will automatically start to interpret everyone outside of that as being right wing.
I know the whole political window shit is hated here but this genuinely pushes the window leftwards by doing it.
Call yourself and communist. Radlibs have really weakens the term socialist, they’ll assume Bernie Sanders at best. Call yourself a communist cause as I’ve been stating in this thread already, that leads to follow up questions. If you say youre a socialist to a co-worker or other normal person they’ll say ‘oh, okay’. If you say youre a communist you’ll have to answer the quiz everyone gives someone who says theyre a communist so learn to dispel that nonsense and then you hage a productive conversation where you get yonrxplain why you’re a communist. Being a cool and reasonable person while people around you know you’re a commie is a wee bit of praxis
Yeah I agree with you there but I don’t think any communists really ever say they’re progressives outside of electoralism. What I want to do is get the liberal-left to stop using progressive too, or at least to label themselves as liberal-left in order to put it into people’s minds that the existing shit bags are the right and open up the field to the left of them more.
There is no way of stopping that from happening and those terms will therefore feel more and more meaningless as time goes by. We don’t need to reclaim these terms. We can just let them be taken by the libs to die in the dust of history. If liberals are claiming a radical term that means its a great to claim the more radical term. If ‘progressive’ becomes a meaningless liberal buzzword, let it be one. Take advantage of it.
I like this. Do you have any suggestion for alternative terms? I think I’ve struggled with finding a different word because I don’t feel comfortable calling anyone in the Democratic Party “leftist” so I fall back on “progressive” as a default
I call them left-liberals, and depending on the specifics you can call them socdems
One that isn’t insulting to the liberals that exist under the “progressive” tent? I don’t know. The word is essentially a tent of social-democrats and socialists, and that tent is useful as an alliance but damaging in that it erases socialists from discourse as they get consumed into “progressive liberals”. This erasure results in fewer people learning the difference between socialists and liberals, in fact it makes people think socialists are liberals.
Socialists should call themselves socialists and any big-tent collaboration should be clearly labelled as a Socialist-LeftLiberal collaboration/alliance.
The benefit of calling someone like Bernie or AOC LeftLiberal instead of Progressive is it educates less political people that LeftLiberal and RightLiberal exists. This pushes the vast majority of the Democrats to the right in people’s minds and it will open up space for a “left” to exist. While doing this it also clearly educates people that Socialists and LeftLiberals are not the same thing.
You get me? If LeftLiberal becomes a thing in people’s minds then everything that is not LeftLiberal becomes right wing in people’s minds, pushing the entirety of the democrat party into the right and opening up control of what “left” exists to Socialists and Social Democrats. The benefit of this is that everyone who currently associates “left” with being good will fall into this camp over time, they will reject RightLiberals when they become associated with being right wing in their minds. So much american thinking can be boiled down to “left good, right bad” or “right good, left bad”. This can be weaponised linguistically.
It is possible to convince LeftLiberals to start doing this because they will realise how much it benefits them to make the distinction. And it is possible to convince Socialists to start doing this because it stops erasing Socialists.
Yeah that makes sense! I generally tell people “Liberals are right wing because they still support capitalism and empire” but some of the edge cases make that harder to sell. Left-liberal is a term that can fill that niche.
Exactly, and if they start to build their understanding of the world as these people being “Left-Liberal” then they will automatically start to interpret everyone outside of that as being right wing.
I know the whole political window shit is hated here but this genuinely pushes the window leftwards by doing it.
Call yourself and communist. Radlibs have really weakens the term socialist, they’ll assume Bernie Sanders at best. Call yourself a communist cause as I’ve been stating in this thread already, that leads to follow up questions. If you say youre a socialist to a co-worker or other normal person they’ll say ‘oh, okay’. If you say youre a communist you’ll have to answer the quiz everyone gives someone who says theyre a communist so learn to dispel that nonsense and then you hage a productive conversation where you get yonrxplain why you’re a communist. Being a cool and reasonable person while people around you know you’re a commie is a wee bit of praxis
Yeah I agree with you there but I don’t think any communists really ever say they’re progressives outside of electoralism. What I want to do is get the liberal-left to stop using progressive too, or at least to label themselves as liberal-left in order to put it into people’s minds that the existing shit bags are the right and open up the field to the left of them more.
There is no way of stopping that from happening and those terms will therefore feel more and more meaningless as time goes by. We don’t need to reclaim these terms. We can just let them be taken by the libs to die in the dust of history. If liberals are claiming a radical term that means its a great to claim the more radical term. If ‘progressive’ becomes a meaningless liberal buzzword, let it be one. Take advantage of it.