Memes

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,

Okay sounds like you're just describing different labels for liberalism.

Compare these people to a communist who thinks we should literally nationalize and worker-self-manage the relevant sectors of economy and you'll see what people are trying to tell you about how liberals and conservatives are basically the same.

No, I have a lot of experience in liberal organizations and they are not, despite the memes, closer to conservatism than progressivism.

Perhaps if you redefine progressivism.

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.

Yep, you redefined it.

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.

Conservatives often do, and the distance between genuine progressivism and liberalism is shorter than liberalism and conservativism.

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.

Electoralism will not save you.

rofl! The difference vetween a progressive and liberal is NOT just when they decide to intervene in corporations...

American liberals want to means test EVERYTHING that could concievably go to a poor person. A progressive realizes the red tape is fucking stupid and expensive in its own right. Remember the COVID funds? Sucked up by megacorporations more than small businesses like it was supposed to be for? Notice how American liberals didn't go after those corporations or really care that the money instantly dried up for smaller fries?

Yea, American liberals are ABSOLUTELY closer to American conservatives in practicality. It doesn't matter how many polite words they use if the end result is FUNCTIONALLY THE SAME. No, conservatives wouldn't have given any money to poor people, but as already said, liberals didn't care that corporations with lawyers that could push all the red tape got the money, not small businessesthat actually neededrhe help.

They BOTH serve to drain the government of public funds. You've just fallen for the pleasantries they put on the same negative slant of actions. No, liberals are not fascists themselves, but they're always, always dumb enough to make things suck enough that fascists sound nice to fools.

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.

I was lazy picking Wikipedia when everyone knows it's got an American brainrot problem. That's entirely my fault.

It is true that "conservative opposition to liberalism" is a thing that has exist and currently exists, but the issue is that "conservative" is a relative term, it refers not to an absolute ideological tendency (like liberalism does) but to the necessarily relative value of seeking to conserve the current order of things. This is relative because the order of things can be different, and that changes the question of if you want to conserve it (conservative), go back to some past state, real or imagined (reactionary), or advance to some future state of greater development (progressive).

So when liberal revolutionaries set the west on fire, conservatives were in conflict with them because the conservatives were trying to preserve the feudal/aristocratic/monarchic order that the liberals opposed. Now that the liberals in the west are no longer revolutionaries but overwhelmingly the establishment and without any serious contest, the acting of promoting liberalism over other ideologies is conservative and the old position of promoting a feudal/aristocratic/monarchic order is reactionary. The rise of neoliberalism, in particular, represents the overwhelming historical victory of liberalism over both reactionary and progressive forces ("There is no alternative," the perfect conservative slogan).

Of course, a political ideology can be a mix of conservative and reactionary or conservative and progressive (I'll let you decide on reactionary/progressive), and I'd say that former pair is pretty important for understanding the ideology of the Republicans, but don't let that exaggerate in your mind the piddling degree to which the latter pair applies to Democrats.

Is that a better explanation? Whether this is how you personally want to use the words or not, this will help you understand how socialists use them.