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Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
24,544 posts, read 56,029,399 times
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Was it the Hippies who started this?
To me, 'left wing' or socialist has nothing to do with being socially liberal. They're completely unrelated things! Is it just another case of associating two completely different things, kind of like support for the death penalty and being pro-life, because that's what your party believes in?
People like Buddha, Jesus, the Amish, Hippies, and some of the most conservative religious people were 'lefties.' Not liberals, but leftists. Jesus was the ultimate collectivist. Yet we have right-wing Republican Christians claiming socialism is somehow un-Christian? How does that figure?
Does it have it's origin in the 50s and the whole 'red scare' thing...where since liberals and communists were the common enemy, they were lumped as one villainous assortment of non-Americans? In the 1950s it seemed the worst accusation against homosexuals was that they were part of the 'Communist' agenda, as was Atheism. Atheism linked with Communism, and Liberalism linked with Atheism.
How is a Socialist government even 'liberal?' Isn't it anti-liberal? China is more repressive and supposedly 'left-wing' than the US, and it's a liberal's nightmare. Socialism is about the distribution of wealth, nothing to do with whether two gay people can get married. Compare the Amish with a rich gay person, for instance.
I think it's typically bs and disingeneous, and reaches it's most exquisite level of ridiculousness in the farce that is American politics. Sadly that is creeping into Australia and Europe as well. Such a dichotomy would be completely alien in Asia, where Leftism is associated with repression and curtailing of freedom, the antithesis to the liberal platform.
To me, 'left wing' or socialist has nothing to do with being socially liberal. They're completely unrelated things! Is it just another case of associating two completely different things, kind of like support for the death penalty and being pro-life, because that's what your party believes in?
People like Buddha, Jesus, the Amish, Hippies, and some of the most conservative religious people were 'lefties.' Not liberals, but leftists. Jesus was the ultimate collectivist. Yet we have right-wing Republican Christians claiming socialism is somehow un-Christian? How does that figure?
Does it have it's origin in the 50s and the whole 'red scare' thing...where since liberals and communists were the common enemy, they were lumped as one villainous assortment of non-Americans? In the 1950s it seemed the worst accusation against homosexuals was that they were part of the 'Communist' agenda, as was Atheism. Atheism linked with Communism, and Liberalism linked with Atheism.
How is a Socialist government even 'liberal?' Isn't it anti-liberal? China is more repressive and supposedly 'left-wing' than the US, and it's a liberal's nightmare. Socialism is about the distribution of wealth, nothing to do with whether two gay people can get married. Compare the Amish with a rich gay person, for instance.
I think it's typically bs and disingeneous, and reaches it's most exquisite level of ridiculousness in the farce that is American politics. Sadly that is creeping into Australia and Europe as well. Such a dichotomy would be completely alien in Asia, where Leftism is associated with repression and curtailing of freedom, the antithesis to the liberal platform.
I'm sure that the use of 'liberal' as 'leftist' is pre-hippie. I would love to see a history of its usage and where the linkage to collectivism started. I believe that FDR used the term from time to time. I do think use of the term really took off in the 1960's (as someone old enough to remember most of that decade). The hippie generation placed high value in the idea of personal freedom and 'liberal' appealed to them. Little did they anticipate that 'liberalism' would soon evolve into nannyism, which is inevitable with collectivism. In the 80's and 90's 'liberal' had become almost a perjorative. Sometimes it was referred to as "the "L" word." It was an ongoing issue in the 1988 election between HW Bush and Dukakis: Dukakis Asserts He Is a 'Liberal,' But in Old Tradition of His Party - New York Times
Quote:
Originally Posted by NY Times
Michael S. Dukakis dropped his resistance today and accepted the label that Republicans have been trying to pin on him for months. But he defined it in his own terms, declaring, ''I'm a liberal in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John Kennedy.''...
Mr. Dukakis's embrace of the label ''liberal'' reverses a long effort to avoid it
During the early years of what I'll refer to as the Age of Enlightenment, the term "liberal" usually referred only to the defense of the rights of the individual against the power of church and state, embodied in the from of absolute monarch or pontiff.
Or as Voltaire, the first "classical liberal" expressed it on several wordings, on many occasions, "I may disagree with everyword you say, but I will defend to my death your right to say it."
But with the rise of the nation-state, concurrent with the first stirrings of industrialization and the movement of more people out of the countryside an into the emerging cities, there arose the idea, perhaps most forcefully expressed by Rousseau, that certain rights were collective --- measured as some "common good".
It should come as no suprise to anyone that this idea most readily took root with those whose insufficient supply of coins, brain cells or scruples kept them at the bottom of the heap. When the first attempts at institutionalized, government-centered charity failed, Marx and the rest were waiting in the wings. Hitler and the other architects of the totalitarian butcher-state just took the process a little further.
The crazy-quilt collection of frustrated, often-contradictory desires and unworkable fantasies that calls itself "Liberal" today is united only by a desire to access and harness the state's (the government's) legal monopoly on the use of force to do the bidding of a sufficient numcer of its "clientele of losers" to form a majority, thereby forcing the rest of us (who know better) to pay for it.
There is absolutely nothing "liberal" (in the classic use of the word) about the collection of authoritartan / Fascist ideas seeking to depict themseleves as on the same side of the aisle as the open-minded.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 05-26-2012 at 10:59 PM..
Liberalism is equated with "the Left" or socialism a) out of ignorance and b) as an easy smear tactic. That's all there is to it.
Since millions of lazy Americans decided to get political science lessons from a recovering drug addict and a mentally ill recovering alcoholic.
I got nothing against drug users or addicts, Robert Downey Jr. is an awesome actor, Charlie Byrd and Jimmi Hendrix were awesome musicians, but I'm not going to get my political science or history education from these guys.
It started just before "middle of the road" became "liberal".
In short... any position that isn't right wing conservative (and by that I mean actually conservative)
must therefore be left wing and liberal. It makes it much simpler to not compromise...
when you don't even acknowledge that there are middle ground positions to take.
Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
24,544 posts, read 56,029,399 times
Reputation: 11862
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrRational
It started just before "middle of the road" became "liberal".
In short... any position that isn't right wing conservative (and by that I mean actually conservative)
must therefore be left wing and liberal. It makes it much simpler to not compromise...
when you don't even acknowledge that there are middle ground positions to take.
It does seem the Right were more instrumental in this devious association in the minds of the public than anybody else.
It's quite disgusting how they use the bogeyman of communism to prevent things that will help the environment or extend basic human rights to all.
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Good find man!
