Friends & potential friends who identify as liberals, please hear me out.
The ideology of Liberalism is an attempt to reconcile right wing & left wing thinking. It's in the name! Ideally (and ideologically) liberalism is intended to be a wise, even handed voice that keeps conservatism at bay with a balancing act that maintains the status quo, just more gently. It was never, ever intended to be the force for people powered change that is required to actually make things better for the masses.
Liberals are not leftists, by definition. The actual left was scrubbed from government power of any kind during the McCarthy era. So when we say that liberals are not leftists, that's not an insult but a simple statement of fact, by the terms of the ideology itself. Unfortunately, that means that most of us in the United States have been taught to identify politically with either a right-wing or a middle position because that's all the options they present. And anything to the left of that “isn’t realistic” or “isn’t how all this works.”
I don't blame anyone for being a liberal and/or not understanding what that actually means! I did not learn this until like 10 years ago myself. But a lot of the arguments being had right now are flawed from jump because many liberals think that they are the leftmost option when that never was the point.
Now, as the country goes full fascist, a liberal position which attempts to "reasonably" reconcile left and right finally collapses as it always was going to, because fascism takes the mask off the right wing entirely. There is no longer even the facade of a middle ground permitted between fascism and anything else, so the choice is to capitulate or move left.
The good news: you only think that anything to the left of liberalism is utopian or wildly radical because that's what they wanted you to think. That's what they taught you, and tbh that’s what it looked like in the world after they systematically eradicated socialists, anarchists, communists, etc from any access to power or even public voice for decades.
Until the internet, that is, and social media especially. I will never stop saying how monumentally game-changing social media has been for the betterment of the human species, despite all the harm that has been wrought by people in power using it.
The choices rn are:
a) capitulate to people building alligator extermination camps
or
b) join with folks you've been taught to regard as utopian, goofy, know-nothing radicals who have been helping to clothe, feed, & educate people all these years despite public disdain.
I hope you choose well.
I’m used to the idea that left in the US is right in Europe & right in the US is far-right in Europe, but can you elaborate on “the actual left was scrubbed from government power of any kind during the McCarthy era”?