"Liberalism" and "liberal" is a word I often hear thrown around a lot with little care as to its meaning. These days, the word "liberal" at least on this forum and others like it is used slightly more prejoratively than endorsingly. But why is that? To understand why, we must first determine what liberalism is.
To some on the right, it seems liberalism is a synonym for left-wing, often used as a prejoritive with a meaning similar to "pinko" or "SJW." And yet, to some on the left, liberalism is a synonym for "capitalist," in fact, many leftists see liberalism as "the ideology of capitalism." Already, we have two seemingly contradictor definitions that vary depending on political affiliation.
Wikipedia (the beginning and not the ending of research, but still) says "Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty and equal rights." The problem is, this is a very broad definition which could easily be argued to apply to anarcho-communists as well as to contemporary conservatives. Wikipedia then goes on to say "liberals generally support limited government, individual rights, capitalism, democracy, secularism, gender equality, racial equality, internationalism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. To me I think that provides something more concrete. From this it can be observed that liberalism generally favours policies based on individual rights & freedoms and eauality of opportunity, which I think is at the core of liberalism.
One problem though is the "individual rights & freedoms and equality of opportunity" definition arguably still leaves in libertarian socialists, who most people would not define as liberal. Maybe then; "individual rights & freedoms and equality of opportunity from a pro-private property perspective."
What say you NSG? What do you mean when you see the word liberal? Do you think I'm onto something here, or am I just way off and rambling? Furthermore, do you think liberalism's a good thing or not? I gotta admit, I think liberalism's pretty good relative to other political ideologies. I want to create some sort of poll, but I don't really know what the poll options would be... whoops.
