You’ve upset a lot of liberals who think liberals are leftists.
Even funnier when you tell them you hate liberals too and their brains short circuit
We’re all libs down here
Language prescriptivist are bad and wrong. Words mean what people think they mean.
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.
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