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Originally Posted by FlyWf
Liberals are the people who are triggered, man, this might have flown if you had said *the left* enjoys triggering the liberals but you couldn't even get that right.
Nah, "triggering the libs" is a rightwing phrase and as is typical for rightwingers, doesn't really distinguish between leftwing progressives and liberals more broadly.
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Or hell, can you just explain in your own words what distinguishes "the left" from "liberals"? Like which do you think I consider myself, and why?
In my own terminology, I usually use "liberal" in the way it is used in
political philosophy, to refer to people who place liberty as the most basic political value, typically understood as the guarantee of basic human rights. There are leftwing liberals - broadly this refers to people who think consistent with this emphasis on freedom that the government should also try to alleviate poverty and inequality. There are rightwing liberals - broadly referring to people who think consistent with liberty the government should focus on upholding the rule of law and property rights.
In the US, because of our own tradition of liberalism running through Dewey and others in the early 20th century progressive movement and the postwar conservative movement, "liberalism" has come to refer almost exclusively to leftwing liberals, although some people on the right are trying to revive the rightwing liberal label by calling themselves "classical liberals."
The "left" as I understand it refers to people who favor an egalitarian society. There are socialists, who are focused on breaking down dominance and hierarchy structures based on economic class and economic inequality. There are feminists, who are focused on gender and sex-based based hierarchies. Various anti-racist groups and people are concerned with race-based hierarchies, etc. Obviously these are overlapping categories as well.
Liberalism and the left can be enemies as well - most obviously by Marxists who view the liberal emphasis on rights and liberty as a way of entrenching status quo hierarchies through property rights or so on, or by liberals who view Marxism as disregarding the basic distinction between the private and the public and so leading to a totalitarian control of people's lives by the state.
I don't know what you consider yourself, although I have a vague memory of you referring to yourself as a liberal under this kind of framework a few years ago.