Americans are so liberal that they have like ten words for it and every mainstream political opinion is just a type of liberalism.
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
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You've upset a lot of liberals who think liberals are leftists.
I hate how these terms are used colloquially. Here are wikipedia's definitions:
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.
So no. The definitions are very different. Now you can say that liberals and conservatives are similar in your country or that you live in liberalism and therefore trying to keep it is conservatism, but there is no necessary overlap afaik.
since we're unironically using wikipedia as a source for some reason, you're conflating liberalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism) with social liberalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism).
you are the one using the terms colloquially. americans might use the terms conservative and liberal to represent republican voters and democrat voters respectively, but both of those ideologies are different flavors of liberalism as the rest of the world understands it.
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.
These are just different ways of describing support for the status quo with different flavor modifiers. The core of both is the protection of Capital from any threats from the left (aka socialism, the democracy of the workers, removing power from the owners of capital).
This is why from a leftist perspective, they are essentially the same in that they both are against any actual emancipation of the working class if it threatens the existing power structures of capital owners.
Conservatism can easily be a form of liberalism, and can even be considered progressive. It sounds contradictory but conservatism of progressive traditions, customs, and values is a component of many liberal societies. That's your Teddy Roosevelts, the Southern New Deal Democrats, and the Blue Dog coalition.
there is no necessary overlap afaik.
As long as it is recognized that overlap isn't a necessity, I think this is fine. The important thing to remember is that none of these terms are wholly exclusive to each other. Discussion just needs to agree to the context of used terms.
Plenty of (big C) Conservatives want to conserve the social institutions of racial segregation or other regressive concepts. But you can also legitimately say Xi Xinping is a conservative in the context of the PRC. So there's a wide field for the context of the terms to get stretched around and (mis)used and (mis)interpreted.
Liberalism too. It is a concept that has existed and been applied to right wing monarchies and left wing republics. The entire French Revolution is exemplary in how these terms have no strict limit and so a baseline of agreed context is what is necessary.
Language prescriptivist are bad and wrong. Words mean what people think they mean.
“Conservative” means wanting to conserve the status quo of an existing system. In that sense, the “liberals” are far more conservative than the self-proclaimed “conservatives”.
What these “conservatives” want is to destroy the current status quo and return to the values of the Confederates. This can be defined as being “reactionary”. Fascist governments have a capitalist economy model, so we can say they too are liberals.
All in all, both of them are the enemy of the working class, and must be crushed wherever they are seen.
Even funnier when you tell them you hate liberals too and their brains short circuit
During the French Revolution, the Conservatives were on the side of the aristocrats and french nobility. Squarely against the revolution and democracy.
Not much has changed really.
If you believe in democracy, personal rights, and capitalism ... congrats, you're a liberal.
(Though, given how much modern 'conseravtives' hate democracy and personal rights, a lot of them aren't really liberal anymore. They're fascist.)
democracy
You mean capitalist dictatorship / rule by the rich. We should not allow the liberals to call their sham system / theatre piece of stacked elections picked by the rich, a "democracy".
Yup. They're not looking to conserve a thing, they'd much rather burn down modern society as a whole.
Traditional conservatives are looking to conserve existing power structures. They believe that those in power deserve to be in power, and those without power deserve to be without power, and they seek to keep it that way. In the American Revolution, conservatives were monarchists. In the Civil War, conservatives supported slavery. In the civil rights era, conservatives supported Jim Crow and opposed equal rights, etc, etc, etc. They're always looking to maintain and strengthen existing power structures. (Regardless of how unjust those power structures may be.)
But, again, modern 'conservatives' are straying more toward fascism, so that begins to break down. What they're trying to 'conserve' now is an imagined golden era that never truly existed in the first place, where their in-group supposedly had even more power than they ever really did, and where out-groups didn't even exist.
*bourgeois democracy (people's democracies are good)
If you believe in democracy, personal rights, and capitalism
🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like the other 🎶
🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like its brother 🎶
given how much modern ‘conservatives’ hate democracy and personal rights
"This far and no further" politics is a pox on conservatives and liberals alike. This is one of the reasons you see Gavin Newsom fucking around with TERFs in the name of fairness in college athletics. Its one of the reasons why so many people soured on Barack Obama inside his first term.
"Personal Rights" always seem to terminate at the edge of popular consensus.
🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like the other 🎶
Well, yeah. It's perfectly acceptable to believe in two of those things and not the third.
That just means you're not a liberal.
(And really, since capitalism constantly corrodes democracy and personal rights, being a liberal is kind of a self-contradictory nonsense stance. Shame that so many people still are liberals.)
Ok… if we're looking at this dispassionately and considering history, this meme may be accurate only in some places, but not in the rest.
Conservatism was articulated in response to liberalism. Liberalism argued for rationality, contractual social relationships, and natural rights. When liberalism proposed this, conservatives articulated a response: it argued for tradition, organicist and inherited social relationships, and traditional wisdom.
These two worldviews were so incompatible that hundreds of thousands of people died defending their views against the others'. An example is France in the 18th century.
Some conservatives recognized the power of liberalism: a bourgeois elite was burgeoning. Faced with this reality, some conservatives adapted to this change. This is what some people may take as evidence of "liberalism contains conservatism". But that's not the whole story.
Historical materialism may point out that both conservatism and liberalism have fought for capitalism, and that therefore they serve the same function. If that's all we ask from an analytical framework, then that's okay. But I want to understand why there are hundreds of thousands of dead people in the 18th century. And, luckily, historical materialism istelf can, at its best, explain the difference between liberalism and conservatism.
For example, the 18th century revolutions occurred in response to the growth of the bourgeois. Conservatives defended pre-capitalist social structures and modes of production. This was not capitalist versus capitalist. And historical materialism can explain this violence by distinguishing between these class formations, not by collapsing these class formations.
Even if both conservatives and liberals later prove capable of ruling capitalist societies, I believe we shouldn't settle for a reductionist view of history.
There's a further complication: America. The American Revolution is as American as the French Revolution was French. They were not the same. Americans lacked the aristocracy that the French had. Therefore, conservatism in America is not at all the same as conservatism in France. American conservatives defend a country that was born liberal.
In my view, saying that conservatism is the same as liberalism is problematic. It seems reductive and reduces the explanatory power of both concepts. For example, if someone truly believes there is no difference between liberalism and conservatism, how would they explain the hundreds of thousands of dead in the 19th century revoutions? Plus there's the following problem: at its worst, conflating conservatism with liberalism is a way of imposing the American lens on the rest of the world.
Modern conservatives who aren't fascists are classical liberals.
how would they explain the hundreds of thousands of dead in the 19th century revoutions?
Capitalism and imperialism
Capitalism and imperialism
So that I can picture clearly what you’re saying, could you elaborate?
I'm pretty sure they are referring to imperialism as defined by Lenin, as an evolution and natural consequence of capitalism itself.
I think these paragraphs from ProleWiki: Imperialism give a good introduction:
Imperialism is the most recent evolution of the capitalist mode of production that began in the late 1800s to early 1900s, in which monopolies and cartels become the dominant economic force of society
It is a global system of economic, political, and military domination, with the imperialist powers using a variety of means, including economic sanctions, military interventions, and cultural influence to maintain their dominance over other nations.
I didn't mean to imply that liberalism and conservativism are completely indistinguishable, but rather that conservative thought generally represents the right wing of liberalism in the west. Sorry if this was unclear.
This omits what an earlier comment pointed out: that your typical MAGA/MAGA-adjacent "conservative" public figure is essentially fascist.
We're all libs down here