this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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I know that conflating Liberals and Conservatives is practically lemmys official pass time, but I have to point out they are not the same.
Liberals and conservatives are more similar than liberals and progressives.
No, I have a lot of experience in liberal organizations and they are not, despite the memes, closer to conservatism than progressivism. It honestly makes me feel like most people on lemmy have never really worked with liberal groups.
The major differences between a liberal and a social democrat or progressive comes down largely to deciding when a market has failed and when to use government intervention, both Liberals and progressives are fine with intervention, only the threshold changea. We want the same things, mostly, but disagree on how to get them.
Conservatives, philosophical Conservatives anyway, won't typically even consider such a thing, and often do not even want the same things as Liberals or progressives.
This both sides same stuff just hurts progressive causes, because it sours mushy people with little to no real philosophy on voting for liberal parties. Those people flip flop back to Conservatives when they get angry and we lose the progress we've made, as is about to happen in Canada.
I think the fact that you've spent a lot of time in liberal organizations is why you think that way about where it falls on the continuum between progressivism and conservatism.
Interesting that you characterize my statement as "both sides"ing. I would say the thrust of my statement is not "both sides" but "one side". America does not have a progressive party, only conservative and conservative-lite. Given the choice, of course I'll choose the latter, not least because the former is so far off the deep end it may never recover as a party. That does not mean I think that both parties are the same.
Visually:
--------Progressivism ------------------------ Center ------ Liberalism --------------------------- Conservatism.