I believe equally strongly in personal freedoms and individual rights. I think that makes me liberal. Fascism definitely has significantly less of both compared to socialism which is also not what I think of when reading Mamdani’s policies.

“Taxation is theft” people are deranged imo, not liberal; pointing their frustration at the wrong part of the system. Are those the people everyone thinks of when the word liberal comes up?

I really hate statements like this. Not because you are right or wrong, but because your word choices obscure your true meaning when used this briefly.

In the context of this thread, which is clearly US politics, “liberal” has a somewhat different meaning to the majority of the audience than I think you are using. I almost think you are just making rage-bait, but I’ve seen it so many times that I have to respond to someone.

We have a clear dichotomy of our political parties, since we effectively only have two… some words I might use are ‘republican’, ‘conservative’, ‘democrat(ic)’, ‘liberal’, ‘progressive’, ‘socialist’, ‘fascist’, ‘leftist’, ‘right-wing’

Because of human language, these may signify different things based on context.

I identify as a “liberal” in my country. I am also a “democrat”, as well as a “socialist” and a “leftist”. I am anti-trump. I would vote for Mamdani, but I’m not in the area.

When you make absolute statements like “liberals will ALWAYS support the fascists,” you ignore the context. Perhaps in the dictionary sense of the words, a liberal will prefer a fascist government where wealth makes power and they get all the benefit of their work over a socialist one where their input helps everyone. That describes a giant swath of business owners for sure, as well as the ‘taxes are theft’ people. In the US, though, a liberal could mean a person more focused on bodily autonomy, social equality, social safety nets and other more ‘socialist’ concepts.

Another way to put this is that the political words are a 3D venn diagram. When you put your line of liberal = capitalist against someone who is thinking liberal = democrat, you are going to have friction because, based on context, that word lands in different places. I’m going to ignore any ‘all democrats are capitalists’ arguments, or complexities around our election systems. See my post history if you want my opinions there.

If anything, I’d recommend that people clearly define their words, such as a liberal vs a liberal. And even then, you can see that both are capitalist by those definitions even though, colloquially, a person may identify as liberal while preferring socialist ideals.

Basically, any absolutes, especially in the realm of political ideology, makes you a Sith (probably). Also basically, anyone firing off a one-liner in a conversation this fraught is a troll (probably).

the DNC arnt liberal though, they are center right, Dinos for the most part.

Pat Buchanan drinks water and you drink water, therefore you are as bad as Pat Buchanan /s

I mean, I’m not buying your support of two center-right corpodems.

Tbf to the previous poster, the Republican party is great at setting up sabotaging and impossible choices for when a democrat is elected. E.G. the tax bill TACO passed in his first term that was set to raise taxes for all people making under 75k in 2025. E.G.2 The troop widthdraw plan in the Middle East that had no preparation done before Biden came to office and all those munitions were left behind.

On your point though, yeah the Dems are beyond completely incompetent each time they have one of those situations. It’d be nice if they stopped pretending politeness and passivity was the same as having good morals.

I might be misremembering, but did Obama federalise the national guard to suppress the protestors? Or was it just the NYPD…