Pet Peeves | Page 242 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Beatlebug said

When (typically) conservatives conflate ‘leftist’ with ‘liberal’. The kind of politics they criticize are not ‘liberal’ in any sense of the word. Classical liberalism is more of a center-right, libertarian quadrant position, and ‘liberals’ in the US are more center-left than the authoritarian progressive wing of today’s left that centrists and right-wingers complain about.  

I agree to an extent, because it demonstrates how little understanding they have that they can come out with sentences like “these liberal communist Democrats” and not realise the ridiculousness of what they are saying. But I guess that is because (and I assume you’re talking about the US here) the USA is so far to the right compared to other countries that neoliberalism seems like socialism to many people there.

However, I’ll pick up on your use of the word libertarian for my pet peeve here: when people don’t realise that the word actually originated to describe libertarian socialist/anarchist positions, first used in a political context by French thinkers Déjacque and Proudhon. The word persisted in that capacity until the 1950s when laissez-faire capitalists (a much more accurate term to use, in my opinion) tried to ‘capture’ it in reference to their own positions. To quote from Murray Rothband, who suggested his movement co-opt the term, 

One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy. ‘Libertarians’ had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over.

It’s especially pet-peevey given that the right wing ‘libertarian’ position is barely libertarian at all, given that its positions essentially advocate passing over state power to unaccountable corporate power in a way that in practice vastly reduces individual liberty (a core tenet of the ideology) for the vast majority of the people. I’d recommend Chomsky’s thought on this subject. 

But even if we assume that laissez-faire capitalist ‘libertarianism’ is actually true to the principles of classical liberalism, you don’t acknowledge that there is more to liberalism than just the classical variety. Modern liberalism is most likely what the conservatives you talk about are referring to (though I doubt they realise that), particularly if they are complaining about Bernie Sanders or AOC or whoever, as it is fairly synonymous with what is known in the US as progressivism. In John Rawls’ 1971 book ‘A Theory of Justice’ he discusses the concept of ‘justice as fairness’, which recognises that freedom without economic freedom is worth much less, and thus advocates for an enabling state using progressive redistributive taxation to maximise individual liberty that way. In real terms, Rawls would probably argue for nationalised healthcare because the individual who has it guaranteed is arguably more free than the one who is saddled with huge insurance debts and constant worry about falling ill. This reddit user does a pretty good endorsement of it:

To be honest, aside from my dislike of laissez-faire capitalism, I’m not really trying to debate here, just to clarify a few things.