I'm not a socialist, I'm a liberal, and yes there's a difference

A very interesting analysis. Thanks to scbutler for pointing it out.

"Anyone who's spent time around radical leftists knows that one of the worst insults you can level at them is "liberal". Liberals aren't socialists, or radicals, or anything like that. Liberals want to keep capitalism and reconfigure it to satisfy their ideas of fairness and equality; to a socialist, this is all a matter of quibbling over the terms of oppression rather than abolishing it. A liberal, then, to a socialist, is someone who speaks about equality and fairness while acting to ensure that neither will come about. The goals of socialists and the goals of liberals are completely at odds with one another, and to conflate the two is to make it difficult to talk about either liberalism or socialism, and by extension makes it difficult to discuss other political ideas which are similar-or completely dissimilar- to them."

Discussions like this are why I'm an LJ addict.

I'm not a socialist, I'm a liberal, and yes there's a difference

A very interesting analysis. Thanks to scbutler for pointing it out.

"Anyone who's spent time around radical leftists knows that one of the worst insults you can level at them is "liberal". Liberals aren't socialists, or radicals, or anything like that. Liberals want to keep capitalism and reconfigure it to satisfy their ideas of fairness and equality; to a socialist, this is all a matter of quibbling over the terms of oppression rather than abolishing it. A liberal, then, to a socialist, is someone who speaks about equality and fairness while acting to ensure that neither will come about. The goals of socialists and the goals of liberals are completely at odds with one another, and to conflate the two is to make it difficult to talk about either liberalism or socialism, and by extension makes it difficult to discuss other political ideas which are similar-or completely dissimilar- to them."

Discussions like this are why I'm an LJ addict.