Talk:Liberal (disambiguation)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the U.S. a liberal is someone who favors government intervention to encourage equality but not to encourage social order. This is a common definition in many political science textbooks, why is this not mentioned here? In the U.S. a true liberal is in fact a libertarian, while a "liberal" is essentially a semi-socialist. If anyone looks at the demands of both socialists and "liberals" they will see that the two groups have quite a lot in common.

---

I have just arrived here from "The Liberal Democrats ("Lib Dems") are a liberal (in the European sense)..." -- where do I go? Liberalism doesn't seem to be the right thing to go to. Having read that intro on Liberal Democrats (UK), I'm expecting (in my role as "average reader" ;) to find some sort of mention of the "European sense" and the "Other sense" -- Tarquin

Everybody uses "liberal" in that sense, Tarquin, not just the Europeans. The use of "liberal" to mean something like "big spending semi-socialist" is a strictly American oddity, and should be regarded as an entirely different word, as the overlap in meaning is very small. There should be a seperate entry on "liberal" to consider the US sense, and a link to it. Tannin

Yep -- agreed with Tannin; there is a remarkable difference in interpretation between the US and Europe of the term "liberal". Separate page for the two views? --Guus 20:23, Mar 11, 2004 (UTC)

Usage is inconsistent even within the article. e.g. the description of the Liberal Party of Australia as conservative rather than liberal contradicts the previous paragraph where it says that most countries use liberal in the opposite sense to the US sense. --James Tauber

Contents 1 Visit Liberalism 2 Need separate page for left-liberalism 3 Merge this article into Liberalism 4 Changed the page into a disambig page 5 American Liberal 6 anouncing policy proposal 7 definitions added for a reason 8 Old requested move 8.1 Voting 8.2 Discussion 9 This page is blatent bias 10 Liberal and Liberal (disambiguation) 11 Requested move

[edit] Visit Liberalism

I would like to invite you to visit the redrafted Liberalism page. It explains the various traditions named liberalism. Most European liberals would agree that the liberalism of the LP of Australia is different from European liberalism and would be named conservatism in Europe. The party might have some classical liberal influences. Gangulf 07:40, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Need separate page for left-liberalism

This needs a separate page for left-liberalism (what is known as "liberal" in the USA). This is messing up a lot of wikipedia and causing much confusion.

What we did in the last weeks is redrafting the liberalism and related pages. The different usages are explained in the article liberalism. We should refer in this page to the discussion at the Liberalism page. We don't need at that moment a separate page. Gangulf 06:16, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Merge this article into Liberalism

I would prefer to merge this article into Liberalism, since that article includes all the discussion. --Gangulf 12:55, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Changed the page into a disambig page

To prevent the samendiscussions to take place in more places, it seemed wise to me to change this page into a disambig page with links to pages with a more comprehensive discussion. --Gangulf 19:49, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I totally agree, this is a great improvement. Passw0rd 19:55, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] American Liberal

The funny thing about the term liberal in the United States is that most Americans are so uninformed (generally) that most of the time, they don't even know what liberal means. I love how Americans classify themselves as liberal and then also have anti-gay, racist, sexist, and pro-war thoughts at the same time. Also, a lot of Americans will claim to be liberal when they are a feminist, but at the same time anti-gay, racist, and pro-war.

While someone may consider themselves liberal in the U.S., they are in fact considered conservative in most parts of the world. The United States is such a conservative country that someone who isn't racist, sexist, or pro-war is considered liberal. One thing we must examine is the two U.S. states of California and New York. They are supposed to be the most liberal states, but they both have republican governors. That just gives a glimpse to how conservative USA is.

Two points. 1, ease back, you're trolling. 2, sign your comments with ~~~~. --Yath 02:46, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Sure, American liberalism has very little to do with classical liberalism. This twist of words happened somewhere in the early 20th century. I'd recommend writing "American-liberal" or "American-liberalism" whenever referring to this concept. Without the prefix "American", the concept is as informative as the Russian "Liberal Democrat Party" of the national socialist Vladimir Zhirinovsky (or its Japanese counterpart, which is conservative rather than liberal).

[edit] anouncing policy proposal

This is just to inform people that I want Wikipedia to accept a general policy that BC and AD represent a Christian Point of View and should be used only when they are appropriate, that is, in the context of expressing or providing an account of a Christian point of view. In other contexts, I argue that they violate our NPOV policy and we should use BCE and CE instead. See Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/BCE-CE Debate for the detailed proposal. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:55, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] definitions added for a reason

Within the United States the formerly obsolete usage has slowly come back into general useage. Especially in the western united states and Texas. I have personally experienced this on a trip to Colorado, where individuals in a restaurant spit the word liberal at me due to my east coast accent. Sadly, the noble meaning of the word is being tarnished. I added the more general meaning to clarify that this is the most common useage of the word today. However, should a reader of Wiki travel to the western states and find a native of that state calling him "Liberal" and laughing with malice, he or she will now know why.

While Michael Dukakis may have contributed to the resurrection of the derogatory use of the word liberal, he is not the main reason. There are multiple factors to the resurgence of this form of the word. The term has become something of a "swear" or "cuss" word due to the gun-control, environmwental, and socialist agendas pushed by the US Democratic party during the 1980s and especially the 1990s. Tetragrammaton

I'm intrigued. If you don't mind me asking, did the people in the Colorado restaurant spit the word liberal at you just because they happened to hear your accent, or were you in a political discussion with them? — Trilobite (Talk) 28 June 2005 17:58 (UTC)

[edit] Old requested move

Due to the number of links to the article, I believe it should be moved to Liberal (disambiguation), and replaced with a redirect to Liberalism. (Compare Conservative.) - Mike Rosoft 18:48, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Voting