the difference between American liberalism and American leftism.
In: Other
Liberalism is anti authoritarian and more “personal” freedoms.
Leftists are more “from each according to their ability to each according to their need”. Meaning if you have the ability to help the community you should, and if you need help from the community, you’re given what you need.
You have a center (centrist). To the left of that center is a range of political philosophies, ranging from left-of-center to far left, getting more extreme the farther to the left you go. The same is true for the right. Liberalism is a political philosophy that’s a bit left of center, the most common left-wing philosophy in the United States. In general, when someone says “the left”, they’re referring to any of those philosophies that exist left-of-center, though what they actually mean really depends on context. Typically, in America, when someone says “the left” they’re referring to either liberalism or progressivism. If someone refers to someone else as a “leftist” they typically mean someone who they think is deep into the left, but it also depends who is saying it as some mean it in terms of identity, others mean it in a derogatory way. In my experience, if someone refers to themselves as a leftist they’re typically progressive or socialist; whereas if it’s coming from the opposing side (someone on the right), they’re basically saying that they’re in the far left portion (beyond socialism).
to DRASTICALLY oversimplify:
Liberals: The general type of government/economy (Capitalist Market) is good, just not working as intended. We can fix it with better policy. In general, this is the pattern the US has always followed. Time marches leftward, and Liberalism is the idea that we can keep iterating on what exists. Pass social programs to help address poverty. Civil rights to address racial issues. Regulations to stop environmental pollution. Ect. This is the Democrats (at present). Think back to stuff like Roosevelt and the creation of the FDA. That’s liberalism in action. In general, while liberals will be highly progressive on SOCIAL issues (LGBT Rights for example), they will not support massive fundamental change to the structures that a leftist would view as integral to CAUSING these issues.
Leftists: the type of government economy can not properly address the needs of the people and it’s time to start looking to what comes next (Just as capitalism supplanted mercantilism which supplanted feudalism, so to would socialism supplant capitalism, and then communism supplant socialism). To a Leftist, a lot of the flaws aren’t just a bug, they are a feature. Stuff like how Housing is a fundamental need and right and should be provided to all, and the idea that a person should be able to own a bunch of it to profit off that need is immoral.
Please bear in mind that A: this is a HUGE oversimplification, and B: grouping all leftists into one is somewhat futile as there are dozens upon dozens of branches, schools of thoughts, ideas on how to make chance ect. While there are some common points (pretty much every leftist will agree, for example, about the importance of mutual aid, building strong local networks “of the people”, they will often disagree on what the u ltimate goal is, and/or how to get there.
Nothing. Labels are used as tools to divide. 80% of people identifying as either would agree on national policies. Divide and conquer is the name of the game.
American Liberalism:
Imagine you have a box of building blocks, and American liberals are the friends who think it’s cool to build a tall tower with everyone’s help. They really like the idea of freedom, like being able to choose which blocks to use. But, they also believe that having some rules can make sure everyone gets a chance to join in the tower-building fun.
American liberals put a lot of emphasis on free markets, like a fair game where everyone can trade their building blocks. They know the game isn’t perfect, but they believe that this system can help the tower grow taller and faster. It’s like saying, “Let’s use the free market to build the coolest tower, but let’s make sure everyone gets a chance to play.”
American Leftism:
Now, imagine you have another group of friends who have some doubts about the tower game. Leftists are a bit more like the friends who say, “Hey, maybe the rules of this game aren’t as fair as we think.” They look at the tower and say, “You know what? This game isn’t working for everyone.”
Leftists aren’t big fans of the current rules. They want to try a different game, one that’s more like the way they play across the ocean in Europe. They think the work-hard culture in the current game is a bit of a trick, and they want to find a better way to share the building blocks so that everyone can enjoy building the tower, not just a few people.
In Simple Terms:
American liberals are like friends who want to use the free market to build a cool tower, but they also want to make sure everyone gets a chance to play.
Leftists are the friends who say, “Maybe this game isn’t fair for everyone. Let’s try a different game where we can all build the tower together.”
In general, liberalism and leftism are two different axes of a graph. Liberal vs Conservative (also known as Authoritarian) is an axis of how much control over personal lives a party wants to grant the government. A Conservative government would be one that bans things like drug use, prostitution, drinking/smoking, gay marriage/sex, gender transition, abortion, etc. They tend to be more in favor of high police presence, strict penalties for breaking the law, the use of the death penalty, and so forth. Liberals on the flipside would seek to generally allow most personal behaviors. (A wrinkle in this, in America, is gun ownership, which is theoretically an issue that Liberalism would support, but is considered a Conservative issue.)
Left vs Right is about economic policy. Right economics focuses on low government intervention in businesses, low tax rates, minimal regulation, the privatization of services, and so on, under the belief that the free market is efficient and will solve problems best if left alone. Left economics is generally in favor of nationalizing services like utilities and healthcare, providing a broad safety net for unemployment and disability, and tightly regulating businesses in an attempt to minimize abuse. Full blown Leftism involves widespread Socialism or Communism, where private (corporate) ownership of property is abolished and the means and output of production are owned by the people, either directly by the people doing the actual labor or indirectly via national ownership and redistribution.
In the US, the way national politics are set up, the system does not really support more than 2 parties, so pressures have caused these axes to largely collapse. We have Democrats, which are Liberal and Left (at least, ish), and we have Republicans, which are Conservative and Right. In other countries, there are parties that span the spectrum, and you can have Right Liberal or Left Conservative parties, as well as Left/Right + Moderate, Center + Liberal/Conservative, and more specific groups focused exclusively on single issues or positions. The closest thing the US has is the Libertarian party, which claims to be a Liberal-Right party, though tends to focus more on the State vs Federal divide and is perfectly happy allowing states to be more Authoritarian than the Federal government currently allows if it means weakening the Federal government.
In general, either a Democrat or a Republican will interchangeably use Liberal and Left(ist) to describe the Democratic party. On the global scale, though, the Democratic party isn’t particularly Liberal or Left. It supports a few Liberal positions like gay marriage, marijuana decriminalization, and abortion, but on the whole it is pro-police and pro-abolition (the banning of most recreational drug use), and anti sex work. On the economic scale, similarly, they are the more Left option as they support expanding nationalization, but not at a significant rate. The Affordable Care Act was a Center-Right take on healthcare reform, which preserved the for profit health insurance industry, and the best Biden has promised in that regard is an expansion of Medicare to allow it as an alternative to health insurance (and even that is nowhere near materializing). On a Punnet Square (a Left-Right vs Liberal-Authoritarian), both parties fall in the Right-Authoritarian quadrant, with Democrats closer to the middle and Republicans closer to the outer corner.
The only ones likely to use Liberal vs Left distinctly are actual self-identified Leftists, the kind that think Bernie Sanders would have been a step in the right direction but not nearly far enough. They will often dismissively call Democrats “Liberals”, implying that they only care about “identity politics” issues and not actual economic solutions.
Liberals are true capitalists. The US is a “liberal democracy” and “Liberalism” as Adam Smith championed it focuses on the individual, including individual rights/civil liberties, free trade not subject to protectionism, and allowing money and people to freely travel across borders. They take a more right wing approach to the economy, with mild concessions given in the form of Medicaid, Medicare, etc. Regarding social issues, they tend to believe inequality due to discrimination is wrong, but inequality due to economic factors is just. Today, they rarely include class in their discussion of policy, but they did used to. Over the course of the 20th century, the US made great strides while it was competing with the Soviet Union. This included making concessions to the working class, including poor black citizens and other minority communities. However, when the Soviet Union fell, the government, with bipartisan support, passed NAFTA, which led to the hollowing out of rust belt, Appalachian, rural communities in general. Liberalism then became concerned more with cultural issues than broad, sweeping economic ones (could go into the history of the new deal and the great society and why they both worked, but it’s a long discussion). Generally, now, liberals favor small, incremental change to the economy in the form of complicated policy that generally just redistributes money instead of de-commodifying entire industries.
Leftists on the other hand focus on class, and see problems associated with race or gender as being rooted in class. They believe that all social problems are ultimately traceable to material conditions (slavery is a great example- it was economic factors and the southern aristocracy’s dependence on cotton that perpetuated slavery while the north industrialized and outlawed the practice. The slavers were landed gentry who owned extremely large plots of land- capital was concentrated in the hands of a select few). However, it’s not so simple as saying, for instance, “if you’re poor you’re more likely to commit crime.” Capitalism ultimately erodes and degrades all social bonds and leads to alienation, anger, a lack of care for your fellow human being, which causes a host of social problems. Leftists believe in the de-commodification of industries like healthcare, housing, education etc. They would tell you these things should be publicly owned, with greater democratic input into how they’re ran. A leftist would tell you that inequality due to discrimination OR wealth is unjust. It is incredibly difficult to break out of the working or ragged classes, and even if you do climb out, you are constantly precarious- one medical emergency for instance can wipe out everything you have. This is partly due to the fact that, it stands, most people do not have “capital,” they do not have a mode of production or a method by which to generate capital. Regular people have “money,” which we are always giving back to the capitalists in the forms of rent, car payments, bills, household goods, etc. They do this by selling their labor either to the capitalists or to the public in the form of services. Labor is the only commodity available to most people, and leftists believe that it is the workers who actually generate capital for the capitalists, as they’re the ones doing the work to actually generate it. Yet, the capitalists keep the lion’s share. A leftist would say this is unjust while a liberal would say it is just.
TL;DR- liberals are still ultimately capitalists like conservatives, but they do believe in some semblance of a safety net, while leftists believe the inertia of the state and industry should be redirected toward people instead of profit.
I call myself both depending on who I’m talking to, even though they are mutually exclusive and I am firmly a leftist.
To many people, liberal just means “votes for Democrat”, which kind of encapsulates most people who are for social freedoms and at least somewhat for welfare spending. If someone isn’t very politically inclined, this is probably what they’re thinking of when they say liberal, and when this person says “leftist” they mean someone who is strongly in favor of social freedoms and more welfare spending. To this person a leftist is a type of liberal.
This is kinda sorta true, but most leftists(myself included) would make the distinction that leftists generally believe capitalism has peaked, and that some form of socialism must be implemented to continue improving living conditions for most people. We would say that a liberal is someone who supports social freedom, but supports the continuation of capitalism with minimal restraints/regulations/safety nets, whereas we ultimately think capitalism should be replaced with socialism or eventually communism. We would not call ourselves liberals (most of the time, sometimes it’s just easier to say “I’m very liberal” than explain all this, because most people aren’t asking about your favorite economic philosophy, they’re asking how you feel about social issues).
Also when I say socialism, I’m generally referring to an economic structure where the workers democratically control their workplace (like in a union at a minimum).
And for all you socialists/communists/anarchists out there I know I am simplifying stuff.
Thank you all so much!
Latest Answers