the difference between American liberalism and American leftism.
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OKAY so people are using this as an opportunity to push a political agenda instead of answering the question.
The closest you can come to definite terms here is American liberalism and general “leftist” thought. As most political terms, they are broad and can mean many things in different situations. American liberalism generally is the philosophy of individualism, a democratic egalitarian social order, and libertarian in economic and cultural ideology (the idea that people should be free to conduct their own affairs without government interference, not the libertarian party). When people think of liberalism, some of the big philosophers they think about are John Stewart Mills, John Locke, and John Rawls. Rawls, arguably, is the spokesperson for American Liberalism.
Leftist thought is not necessarily the opposite of liberalism, it just has fundamental disagreements. Leftism, GENERALLY, is anti-capitalist, collectivists socially, and anti-class structure. The big thinkers here are Mark Fisher, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, and (of course) Karl Marx. But “leftism” is such a nebulous term, it can mean anything from “anti-capitalist American left” to “Stalinist” to “Anyone to the left of Donald Trump”. This term is really one where you need to figure out how people are using it and that usually means figuring out where THEY are politically.
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