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File: 1000047442.jpg (72 KB, 850x748)
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What historical factors lead to American political discourse having radically different semantics when it comes to politics? How did U.S. history make it possible that the definitions of universal terms like liberal, socialist, and libertarian, became contentious, and how did we get to a point where people argue America is 'a republic, not a democracy,' when those two things aren't mutually exclusive?

>Liberalism
US Definition: A left-of-center ideology focused on government regulation, social justice, and expanding the social welfare state. It is synonymous with modern progressivism.
Global Definition: A philosophy centered on individual liberty, free markets, and limited government intervention.

>Libertarianism
US Definition: A philosophy demanding radical free-market capitalism, absolute private property rights, and the near-total elimination of the state. It exists on the far-right of the economic spectrum.
Global Definition: Historically, an anti-capitalist, left-anarchist movement centered on worker autonomy. Associated with anarchists and left communists.

>Socialism
US Definition: Used as a blanket term for any public spending on civillian if, high taxation, or state-regulated healthcare. Variously conflated with nordic "third way" social democracy and authoritarian communism.
Global Definition: Collective, public, or cooperative ownership of factories, land, and resources.

>Republicanism vs. Democracy
US understanding: Framed as a binary opposition. Popular discourse claims democracy is dangerous "mob rule," while republicanism represents a distinct system protected by a constitution and rule of law.
Global understanding: Complementary concepts. Democracy is a system where power derives from the people, and republicanism is simply the political philosophy of a state without a monarch.

Please keep it civil, there's a reason I didn't ask /pol/.
>>
I would say each difference has its own separate reason. Based on nothing but my own understanding and experience talking with people across the spectrum:
Liberalism is associated with left-leaning stuff in US because of New Deal Liberalism's success, leading to anybody left of center wanting to associate with it and anyone right of center wanting to smear it.
Libertarianism is the most clear cut, redefining it was a coordinated effort by Rothbard and his ilk, they admit to stealing the term in an attempt to mislead and undermine.
Socialism's US definition seems to come from a combination of neoliberals trying to smear anyone left of center with cold war era fearmongering, and socialists like Bernie trying to counter it by espousing basic left-leaning policy and loudly calling it socialism to get people to associate positives with the term. IIRC he had an argument with Bookchin about this?
Republic/Democracy... burgers are simply illiterate and get their facts from the TV, so they learn about these words from political campaign smears, thinking party names accurately reflect ideology and vice versa.
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>>18602458
Pseudo intellectuals not being checked by diogenes and being celebrated instead led to the problems.
>>
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>>18602458
>definitions of universal terms like liberal, socialist, and libertarian
Imagine being THIS delusional.
>>
Socialism is suppoed to mean the gateway in a stage theory from capitalism into communism. Between actual disagreement in what it's supposed to be (classical example being Lenin's criticism of socdems) and sloganeering is how it acquired 1001 meanings
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>Socialism is suppoed to mean the gateway in a stage theory from capitalism into communism.
Fuck, nuchan is stupid...
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>>18602458
People need to familiarize themselves with the political compass, because it describes it perfectly, even if the online quiz is weak. The left and right axis is economics and the north and south axis is social issues. So you can be a right wing liberal (Ayn Rand or Ron Paul) you can even be a conservative leftist (Huey Long, FDR or ShoeOnHead) then you can be a leftist liberal (The people who are annoying like SJWs, or AOC or Noam Chomsky) or you can be a right wing conservative (The Democrat Party, Kings of Europe, The Republican Party.) You can have people who are towards the center as well. Both the left and the right try to push Hitler to the other side, but Hitler was towards the center when it came to economics, even if he was very authoritarian.
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>>18602575
>People need to familiarize themselves with the political compass
No, people need to forget about the "political compass" with its simple-minded, arbitrary axes.
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>>18602577
I think it does a great job of showing how nuanced political beliefs can be. Why do you think the axes are arbitrary?
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>>18602580
>this graph has been stretched diagonally along the authleft/libright axis as the actual scatterplot was much closer to a line
eks dee
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>>18602580
>two axes chosen based on American current-thing debates
>they're not even properly orthogonal as the things they measure are correlated
>"nuanced"
Yeah, ok. I guess it's as "nuanced" as product for the dumb American masses can be.
>>
dunno op maybe the atlantic ocean and the fact european discourse slipped from country to country because they are Texas sized at most
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>>18602591
That doesn't explain anything. The definitions are clearly universal so why aren't you using the universal definitions? Check-mate.
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>>18602590
>>they're not even properly orthogonal as the things they measure are correlated
this is the thing that drives me mad. how did they manage to convince midwits that pretending correlated things are independent is nuance? a misleading model is not nuanced. a nuanced model reveals the details of a situation, it doesn't obscure them
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>>18602458
>US Definition: A philosophy demanding radical free-market capitalism, absolute private property rights, and the near-total elimination of the state. It exists on the far-right of the economic spectrum.
I've ever understood how libertarianism and national socialism are both "far right" while international socialism somehow veers the left
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>>18602561
>>18602564
>>18602458
It's easy. America is the only EFL country and a bunch of ESL countries like yurop and latinx America have incorrect definitions



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