Everything is liberal.

Liberal is kind of a crap word, in that it has multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings, causing much confusion. Does one mean an economic liberal, who wants trade between nations without tariffs or restrictions? Does one intend the broader original meaning; having beliefs typical of a well educated bourgeois person of the mid-1800s, which often included economic liberalism? Maybe the liberalism of 1930-85, which was socially progressive and NOT economically liberal, or the liberalism of 1985-2017, which IS economically liberal but likes gun control? There are few who could not be shoehorned into one definition or another, e.g., Engels was culturally liberal, Rothbard economically liberal. Most educated, bourgeois Americans have always been liberal, yet until Harry Truman, no American administration was liberal, thus Reagan was much more liberal than Roosevelt, but also much less liberal. Insofar as voting and other actions connected with participatory self-rule, are associated with one definition of traditional liberalism, only oligarchy and monarchism might escape the label.

I use it as a purely economic term, referring to the free market parent of neoliberalism, which I've scoffed at all my life. If someone else wants to use it to say that, like Marx, Kropotkin, De Leon and Luxemburg, I am just not vanguardist enough, then they are probably not my comrades, because we have different ideas about elitism.

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