I agree it can get extremist. I'm left in some areas, right in others so I just keep my opinions to myself. I've found generally when I say anything that isn't extreme left I get some nasty comments. It's a shame cos I love balanced and reasonable conversations with people.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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I can say so much fked up shit on tiktok and it gets appealed, anything leftest/liberal gets auto removed with no appeal
I’m kind of surprised to not see this answer, so I’ll throw it in: it seems to me that there are a lot of people from various countries who have built-in language for politics that they believe is shared across the world - but it isn’t.
As a dumb American, I’ve always been a liberal because that was the inclusive, progressive, luxury-gay-space-communism option as opposed to the conservative, regressive, racist, ignorant violent option. People from other countries don’t seem to appreciate that at all, because their “liberal” is what we’d call neoliberal or corporate Democrat, and they apparently don’t have a FPTP / Slaver’s College fix on their elections and they just don’t grok the two party thing.
As you can imagine on here there’s a lot of hate from both conservatives and leftists for “liberals”. I think that’s ridiculous but it’s usually easier to try and adopt their definitions than to explain why the other 379,999,999 of us don’t use it that way. (Well - 350M, say. Parts of the PNW use it that way too.). It’s just kind of exhausting in threads about American politics.
If someone calls me a “liberal” (or libtard, libcuck, etc) I naturally assume they’re racist, fascist, AM radio fuckwits. But then they want to jump into some world where H4A, UBI, No Oil is what they’re all about and once again I’m like - well, yeah we agree, again. So.
(Usually the retort is, “well then why are you a liberal?!” Which. Goes back to the exhausting thing.)
The most important point of unity for the left is the economics. Political identity must be defined by being the proletariat first and foremost.
When you have people who break that, well their place is questioned.
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To me as a European, posts and comments about US politics can be very confusing. There’s the different interpretation on the word liberal you mentioned. There’s also the fact that the colours are reversed: here red is for the left - socialists and communists - while blue is the liberal right (not so much conservative right, though there are conservative subgroups of the “blues”). And there’s the fact that they often assume familiarity with political events and people unknown to me.
Somewhat related: posts and comments from the far and extreme left are often even more incomprehensible. They seem to have their own language entirely.
Lemmy has been enlightening in teaching me these things but yes - different!
Liberalism has an actual definition. Neoliberalism is a subset of liberalism. Either way, neither position is socialist and both are capitalist. That's the distinction. That's always been the distinction. Leftist politics is distinctly anti capitalist.
To leftists, liberalism, even progressive liberalism, can never address the material concerns for workers, inequal accumulation, and capitalism's contradictions because it cannot attack the central tenet of its ideology: the private ownership of land and resources. And most of the social stuff was being advocated by leftist groups in the west for years before they became popular enough for the mainstream, liberal parties to embrace.
I'm an American. Conflating liberalism with leftism is a media game that has successfully ensured the Overton window does not shift left. It reveals the mass political ignorance here. Of the policies you've listed, only H4A is arguably socialist.
You can understand the two party system and make decisions to support certain candidates/policies in an election without identifying as a liberal.
To leftists, liberalism, even progressive liberalism, can never address the material concerns for workers, inequal accumulation, and capitalism's contradictions because it cannot attack the central tenet of its ideology: the private ownership of land and resources.To leftists, liberalism, even progressive liberalism, can never address the material concerns for workers, inequal accumulation, and capitalism's contradictions because it cannot attack the central tenet of its ideology: the private ownership of land and resources.
Well put, and yes I’d agree. Where I seem to draw the ire of leftists is when I point to the clock and say we have one year before we have to vote, and all things being equal we’re going to vote for the Democrats because attacking the central tenet of this country’s dominant ideology is not going to happen in this election cycle.
The 2024 Presidential election threads were a depressing reminder that some leftists can’t get out of their heads, or ivory towers, or whatever to make incremental progress because the glorious revolution is at hand. Or something. So I get to be the evil liberal who wants healthcare for all, student loan forgiveness, and a Green New Deal. And all of those things go down the shitter because republiQans vote as a single juggernaut bloc and we don’t.
most other SOCIAL media, astroturfs left leaning communities with right wingers. its very hard to find them. and likely most of them were banned on other SC media.
I'd like to share my offline perspective here. All online spaces are kind of heightened versions of the discourse, Lemmy less so than other places but it's still there.
In the real world leftists are generally kind and empathetic people who genuinely want to do good. It's nice when you find another leftist, I have friends who are various flavours of anarchist and socialist and even some real life, genuine, aging commune hippies now living in town. There is no animosity and we would basically all agree on local direct action or local politics. In my experience even most liberals are just naive rather than genuinely holding counterproductive political beliefs.
It can feel very lonely but you're not alone.
Because politics is not limited to Left and Right, compressed down to it's minimum reasonable simplicity it is at least two dimensional. In mass media you see "Left" vs "Right" division, on Lemmy you see Lib Left vs Auth Right vs Center divisions, which are just as strong but largely suppressed by entrenched political interests especially in the US but also across the industrialized world where Lib Left has been suppressed by the capitalist political apparatus.
Note that most of the time when someone on the Fediverse decries "Liberals" they mean capitalist centrist in the "Neo-Liberal" mode. In some specific circumstances though you might see Auth Left criticizing Lib Left with the term, essentially insulting them by lumping them in with the Centrists. In other cases more in line with mass media you might see any Right position using the term against anyone center or left of center.
Essentially, Liberal has become a term only meaningful in context, and for that reason largely useless in common discourse. This is why the Political Compass is so useful a tool, situating political positions in their context, though of course it is flawed by being only two dimensional when actual political groups are very much multidimensional.
The political compass is actually a terrible tool. Left vs right is broadly okay if framed as collectivized ownership as principle vs privatized ownership as principle, but economies in the real world aren't "pure," and trying to gauge how left or right a country is by proportion of the economy that is public vs private can be misleading. The next part, "libertarian vs authoritarian," is a false binary. The state is thoroughly linked to the mode of production, you don't just pick something on a board and create it in real life. There's no such thing as "libertarian capitalism," as an example. Centralization vs decentralization may make more sense, but that can also be misleading, as centralized systems can be more democratic than decentralized systems.
This is a pretty good, if long, video on the subject. The creator of the compass is also politically biased.
As a fun little side-note, I can answer the standard political compass quiz and get right around the bottom-left while being a Marxist-Leninist that approves of full collevtivization of production and central planning. Yet, at the same time, the quiz will put socialist states in the top left, seemingly based on how the creator wants to represent things. It's deeply flawed. Add on the fact that it's more of an idealist interpretation of political economy than a materialist one, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
At first read I see a flaw in the first part of your argument, which is that centralization vs collectivization of economic ownership is not directly indicative of policy, rather it is the percentage of economic output which is used for collective services that dictates the Left/Right spectrum, which indeed is how a Far Left position can be coextant with a market economy and private ownership but with a tax or public stake in economic actors that returns a majority of the "profit" to collective service, it is rather the degree of enforcement of property rights as one of a set of rights and regulations by a central Authority which lies on the Auth/Lib spectrum that dictates the structure of the economic order. This is how for example you could be a Lib/Left Marxist who prefers central planning of the economy, so long as you don't believe the central planning should be enforced by monopoly of violence and instead implemented by collective consensus, there is no fundamental conflict in the position. Leninism on the other hand implies use of force by a centralized state military/police to restructure the economy along central planned lines, which is an Authoritarian position.
I agree the "quiz" is very flawed, it would need an order of magnitude more questions to be accurate, and authorship bias is certainly an issue.
That said, the compass itself I find to be quite accurate to the mental political models of most individuals. What you are pointing to, Centralization vs Distribution, is a relatively new way to concieve of the older Federal vs Local or State vs Community political framework. I would indeed view this as a "third axis" or omission by the two axis compass, as both Authority and Economy can have organization and flow biased towards fewer or more numerous nodes of participation/enforcement. To go back to your Lib Left Marxism, you could say that the Marxism part of that formula calls for a State economic planning model with high collectivization of economic output and low State enforcement of policy. On thing often missing from the Auth/Lib axis description is that reduced State enforcement does not mean reduced enforcement overall, but rather that the enforcement does not rely on the state monopoly on violence, instead directing enforcement through social exchange relying on the individuals applying their independent power onto each other to discourage deviancy from the consensus.
An easy example of this is in many tribal groups and including pacifist Western religious sects the worst corrective action an individual faces is shunning, which relies on all of the individuals of the community independently choosing to no longer participate socially or economically with the individual being corrected. The decision to do so may be more or less centralized or decentralized (for example a Priarch/Priest might declare shunning in a nonviolent Christian community, while a specific tribal group may only do so through a process of full group consensus, or even the most lib/local of all a spontaneous reaction of each individual against the deviant based on norms.
You're wrong about the Marxist-Leninist position, though, and that's exactly why the compass makes no sense. Marxists all agree on using the state as the collective means by which planning is accomplished. All the compass does is make things more confusing.
Overall, it is much better to abandon trying to measure things on a non-existent spectrum than it is to try to force them into one.
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