Can a person be a liberal but not a leftist?

What’s the difference? Define the two, please.

^^Liberals Love, tolerate and care about all people.
Merriam-Webster
1. willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas.
2. relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.

Leftist… Urban Dictionary…
A person belonging to the political left and usually identifying with the radical, anti capitalist, or revolutionary sectors of left politics.
Me…
A religion of a political party… Only worried about power… consider people too stupid
to govern themselves.

Wow. Well. The two definitions are certainly contradictory, which kinda answers your question.

^^Thanks for actually reading my post. I am a lifelong democrat (maybe changing) but
surely my heart is always liberal. I believe people should govern themselves not
unellected bureaucrats…the swamp.

Liberals are not leftists, and leftists are not liberals.

Liberals are only “leftist” for two broad reasons:

1) Liberals co-opt the language and labels of the left in order to supplant and marginalise actual socialists and left-wingers.

2) Conservatives oblige in this charade, framing liberals as leftists for the same reason, but also to scare their own base with some threatening ideological out-group and to create the illusion of some great ideological gap where there really isn’t one

@Kropotkin Yes… Yes… and Yes!

Sure.

And it’s possible to be a repressive autocrat without being a fascist, or a “progressive” that rejects reason and fairness, or a “conservative” that embraces radical extremism. The labels that people choose for themselves and their enemies have become more and more meaningless.

So just like patriotism has always been the last refuge of scoundrels, politics is now the first choice of anyone who can’t justify their bad ideas and rotten behavior in any other way.

Sorry if I seem a little negative. My trust meds are running low…

I’m a Democrat and a bleeding heart liberal, but I’m not a “leftist.”

I’m a leftist a not a liberal. See @Kropotkin‘s reponse. Liberals and leftists are in opposition to each other.

@Dutchess_III Me too!

Leftist here. Neoliberalism has lead to disillusionment with the Democratic Party, if not outright contempt. They are the reason the Republican Party is doing so well.

Before the invention of words everything was possible. Now there is nothing but words.

Leftist seems like a new term to me. Some of these new words are just buzzwords used to rile people up.

I’m a moderate liberal like most average people: wants better healthcare and paid vacation for pregnant women, understands capitalism is a necessary evil but wants it regulated and curtailed better for people’s safety and to prevent exploitation etc. No for profit prisons etc.

Normal basic things that aren’t radical.

But I also know there are very passionate and more aggresive “liberals” that say basically “That’s not enough, we need to completely gut the two-party voting system and do x y and z etc.”

I already know activists get assassinated for even using the word socialism (Fred Hampton), and that rich people aren’t giving anything up without a fight, so it’s better to try to slowly fix the system from the inside instead of tearing it down.

Can all Liberals be extremists? No. You’re trying to put all of the eggs in one basket.

Both terms are functionally useless at this point in history because their meaning is highly contextual and enjoys little to no widespread agreement.

Instead, both are terms where people largely hear what they want to hear. Say ‘I am a liberal’ to two different people, and one thinks you want a more active and powerful state and another thinks you want a smaller and more limited state. And both views are not invalid based on some past usage of the term.

Then you get to the term ‘leftist’ which is even less useful. The left-right paradigm in politics is a oversimplification that made sense in the very specific time and place then it was coined (pre-revolutionary France), and has been shoe-horned into so many contexts since then that a person could be in favor of the exact same policies and considered to be a radical left in one time and place and a radical right in another time and place.

Yet their problems are all functions of their simplicity, and that simplicity is exactly why they kept getting used and overused. It’s so easy to say “I’m a liberal” in a particular time and place and have confidence that, for the most part, the person you’re speaking to now has a pretty good overarching idea of what you’re in favor of. Except as I said, that confidence is misplaced because people hear different things when they hear these terms.

It used to be that liberals were part of the left. Centrist-left maybe. But the leftists have pushed the range so far to the left that liberals are now being thrown in with the right. So yes, you can easily be a liberal without being a leftist.

You can be whatever you want to be, no labels required. Although when you spoke poorly of Hillary, I immediately thought you may be a conservative.

@Entropy I think that’s always been the case to a large extent. In a way, it’s the difference between academic and colloquial language.

In politics especially, there’s a lot of muddying of the waters and cynical manipulation of language. It is much about controlling people and what they perceive.

Yes. To me, a “leftist” is someone who is an outright socialist/collectivist or at least has significant socialist leanings. It’s referring to the very end of the spectrum. Its opposite would be the far-right (for whatever reason, the term “rightist” isn’t used much). “Liberal” refers to a range around the center to “left-leaning” (those who are more right-leaning might use the term “classical liberal” to indicate their affinity for individual freedom and economic liberalism but their dislike of identity-centric progressivism).

I don’t agree the labels are meaningless or useless. They are definitely misused or used inaccurately as pejoratives but they have meaning that can be described with fairly high accuracy. Some labels, like “liberal”, do cover a wide range of political positions and aren’t as precise. I think “leftist” is more narrowly defined.