Edit: sorry for the wall of text. I had some time during my morning coffee and it got out of hand a bit
The issue with the US is that only having two parties warps and squishes all nuance in political discourse. Everything gets forced into one of two boxes. Plurality reduced to a binary choice.
Conservativism is associated with right and liberalism with left, but it doesn’t have to be. We have a communist party - definitely economic left, but it’s packed with old conservative fucks, with focus on the so called traditional values, hoping to return to the good old days, when they were the only ruling party and they could throw people in jail for reading the wrong book or having long hair. And their voting base is mostly uneducated rural folks, much like the GOP.
Liberalism stands for personal freedoms - expression, religion, movement - hence the name. The state’s role is supposed to be to facilitate these freedoms. Think feminism, LGBT or environmental protection rather than the “government can’t tell me what to do” libertarian types.
Overall the idea is the opposition to the totalitarian forms of government - monarchy, communism, fascism - that we have faced in not too distant future past (god I hope the typo is not a prediction), right here. I suspect in the US these are much more distant, abstract, easy to think of as bogeymen rather than a real threat.
Edit: sorry for the wall of text. I had some time during my morning coffee and it got out of hand a bit
The issue with the US is that only having two parties warps and squishes all nuance in political discourse. Everything gets forced into one of two boxes. Plurality reduced to a binary choice.
Conservativism is associated with right and liberalism with left, but it doesn’t have to be. We have a communist party - definitely economic left, but it’s packed with old conservative fucks, with focus on the so called traditional values, hoping to return to the good old days, when they were the only ruling party and they could throw people in jail for reading the wrong book or having long hair. And their voting base is mostly uneducated rural folks, much like the GOP.
Liberalism stands for personal freedoms - expression, religion, movement - hence the name. The state’s role is supposed to be to facilitate these freedoms. Think feminism, LGBT or environmental protection rather than the “government can’t tell me what to do” libertarian types.
Overall the idea is the opposition to the totalitarian forms of government - monarchy, communism, fascism - that we have faced in not too distant
futurepast (god I hope the typo is not a prediction), right here. I suspect in the US these are much more distant, abstract, easy to think of as bogeymen rather than a real threat.