General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Liberal or Progressive [View all]Selatius
(20,441 posts)If you go to Japan, for instance, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan is considered the center-right political party. It also is the most dominant party there and has been for decades. The option for voters that is to the left of the LDPJ is the Democratic Party of Japan, which recently just lost power back to the LDPJ.
If you go to Australia, the Liberal Party is the right-wing party in Australia. The Labor Party there is considered to the left of the Liberals. The Green Party is even further left than the Labor Party, occupying the old positions that Labor once occupied three decades ago.
The reason the word liberal means something entirely different in the United States is because Franklin Roosevelt co-opted the term "liberal" from the Republican Party. He redefined it to mean working class freedoms from unfair competition and monopolies and the freedom to pursue renumerative jobs that offered human decency and a comfortable standard of living.
Prior to FDR, liberal basically meant the freedom to run a business however one saw fit, even if it meant using child labor and little or no environmental pollution control or workplace safety standards. That's what liberal meant, and it's what I still consider the accurate term. "Neoliberal" as a term was invented in the US because of this historical anomaly with the term.
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