this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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There are anticapitalist liberals...?
No, but there are confused Westerners who only understand "Liberal" to mean "the more progressive half of my country's Liberal parties".
Liberal in modern western political discourse has little to do with capitalism anymore and more about your stance on social issues like LGBT rights, racial equality or healthcare. Half of lemmy pretends not to understand it for some reason but it's been like that for a few decades.
It's the result of conservatives using "libtard" and "communist" interchangeably for everyone to the left of Reagan while by the old definition they're actually liberals.
Languages evolve. Prescriptivism is useless.
What you are describing is the Culture War 😘
While I usually find myself agreeing that linguistic prescriptivism is useless (it is), that generally applies less to terms that have technical or academic meaning, and just lumping progressive and liberal into meaning the same thing completely takes away our ability to discuss one of two dominant political ideologies in the united states
People regularly conflating things doesnt mean we should all just conflate things because thats what they now mean, thats a horrible way to apply the idea of linguistic descriptivism 😅
People on lemmy use the term liberal to mean liberal and not progressive because half the conversations here are completely impossible sans language for the dominant "progressive" political ideology in the US that embraces capitalism and superficially supports minority interests.
Positions do matter, the fact that both conservatives and liberals are economically liberal does not mean liberalism has ceased to exist as a philosophy in the US.
American once again not realising that there are other countries on Earth.
American centric much.
So, not anti capitalist.