Liberal vs Leftist

That explains why I don’t like Catholicism.

That explains why I don't like liberalism.

But it doesn’t explain why some Catholics vote liberal.
Like all ideologies, there’s a spectrum. I’m always surprised when people mock being open to new experiences. How else do we grow If we never try new things? That is the core of liberal thought.

THAT'S the core? How does that align with taking away my chance at self employment? A national AB5??
I think there's a huge difference between leftists, whose ideas are far more authoritarian and collectivist -- and classic liberals. To be liberal is to be open to experience. To be leftist is to put everyone in an identity box with the intention of controlling them -- which is how they are going around the horseshoe toward authoritarian.

This post came across my feed and a conversation ensued about the difference between liberals vs leftists. As someone with strong classic liberal tendencies, I think this is a distinction with a difference and explained as much to some right leaning folks.

I understand that in society people are lazy and allow themselves to be manipulated by the narratives around them. I understand the lazy view of things these days it that the “democrats” are “liberal” yet I’m not so sure that’s accurate across the board. I could be wrong, but I think there are factions on the left (as with the right) where the loud minority of folks get the press because, like the KKK on the right, they are the worst actors. I differentiate them, liberals vs leftists, because occur as differently motivated by my measure.

Liberal is an attitude.
Leftist is a socio political philosophy.

Liberals believe in free speech,
Leftists believe in hate speech.

Liberals believe in calling people what you call them
Leftists believe in telling you how and what you should call them with compelled speech

Liberals are actually tolerant
Leftists pay lip service to the concept whilst they continue to pigeon hole you into narrower and more rigidly defined boxes.

While we could say that all these people are “on the left”, I think it’s a bit more complex than that. For one thing examining liberals vs leftists, I’m inclined to think many liberals are more centrist whereas leftists occur as the KKK equivalent on the left side of the compass. If I had to explain it to people on the right, I’d suggest that these days the left is divided into three main groups:

  • You have your classic liberals: these are the people who oppose the patriot act, oppose the military industrial complex, are pro free speech (thus against safe spaces and compelled pronouns), and pro choice (which in the classic sense would mean at this point for both masks, abortions, and vaccines), pro gay marriage, pro do what you want in the privacy of your own home, many of whom are barely left of center since the left has moved so much further left due to the last group.
  • There are the chicken hawk type Democrats who are pro military industrial complex, in cahoots with the corporate owned politicians like HRC and Biden and are akin to republicans (i.e., Biden is against legalization of cannabis despite the fact that 65% of the population including a fair share of republicans are pro legalization) except they differ from Republicans in that Republicans are pro abortion rights
  • And then there are the real leftists, aka Marxists who are into critical race theory, safe spaces, compelled pronouns, identity politics and other such “ist”/“ic”/“ism” ideas that are deeply suspicious of the patriarchy, colonialism and systemic oppression whose fundamental beliefs rely on a system wherein people are, by the nature of the very location where they are born and color of their skin, internalizing systemic oppression, i.e., all whites are born that way, it is internalized (subconscious), unmeasurable and thus unable to be proved or disproved and similarly can’t be improved since it’s not measurable — which to my thinking is about as disempowering a mindset as one could take on which has me reject it outright. Their philosophy is racist and sexist at its core (i.e., asserting men have internalized patriarchal power because they are men and whites have internalized white supremacy because they are white, respectively being sexist and racist characterizations), an irony since they alleged to be fighting against both racism and sexism.

This last group appears to be the smallest group. Although this data is a few years old and they do not explicitly use the term “marxists”, rather “progressive activism”, one can see examples of how they interact in society in less than civilized ways in the following examples:

These people fundamentally are not the kind of folks who believe in civilized society it seems to me. When I say “these” people, I most certainly mean the ones in these videos, not “the left” as a whole which is why I distinguish between liberals vs leftists. That said, I don’t think people on the right differentiate the left as I have above (though I’m not sure how many on the left do either). As such, when a loud minority doing uncivilized things gets a lot of attention, the right mistakenly believe they are representative of the whole left. It goes both ways: when a loud minority doing uncivilized things on the right gets a lot of attention, the left mistakenly believe they are representative of the whole right. Harassing people while they are at dinner to raise their fist? Cheering over someone being shot whom they don’t even know because they are on “the other team”? That’s the sort of crap I’d expect from the KKK, not from the left, personally, and I don’t view this behavior as the right step for society; I’m not sure most sane people do.

Thus, I’m asserting the right leaning folks object most fervently to the leftist Marxists — and for my part, I think for good reason. While it most definitely makes sense to discuss how we can continue to reduce all manner of inequality, starting with the baseline perspective that whites have internalized white supremacy as a matter of being born white is no better than it’s inverse while it further increases division without solving the problem.

Even if/when you get all the folks on the right to assume that none of the violence in the 5% of protests that were considered “non peaceful” was committed by the people on the left (though there is evidence to suggest it isn’t solely anti BLM actors causing the riots ), it is folks pushing these theories which are fundamentally anti-USA to whom they object, or so it appears to me.