It has 2 common definitions:

1. Neo-liberal: a political approach that favors free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending
2. Leftism in general.

You're almost never going to hear the right-wing use #1. Authoritarian communists will use #1 as a catch-all for modern capitalism.

This discussion is funny from a German pov, as our main local liberal party (the FDP) is pretty right wing and has been so since the 1940s. "Liberalism" always had a quite neative connotation to me therefore. They are also the party most open to working together with the far right (the AFD).

Liberalism can be right wing or left wing. It makes more sense to structure the political specrum like this. But even that is far from prefect.

Yeah Tankies/AuthComs are just such an odd mixture of accelerationists, "own the libs" and just general stupidity of "a strong man makes strong men" bullshit that they support any fascist if it means maybe someday they might not be on the chopping block.

If Tankies were an actual voting bloc they'd be somewhat impactful for the first time since maybe 1949. That would imply going outside however.

It's really funny how no one really likes liberals but liberals.

Conservatives: "They're too freedom loving for my tastes! Why can't they just stay and home and be good corporate stooges like us?"

Auth-Communists: "They claim to like freedom but still willingly use the capitalist forces to oppress who they like. Liberals are okay with personal freedom until it impacts the white moderates. ~~That's our job!~~"

Anarchists: "It's literally weird to call yourself a liberal when all they do is oppose any movement against the status quo. If they can't convert them to sell away their soul to the state or capitalism, they're terrorists. They're more like conservatives than any actual progressives, and even progressives admit 100% capitalism isn't great."

Libertarian capitalists: "They claim to be for freedom but constantly require the state to check in on if people are enjoying their freedom like that Nanny's they never had. I just wanna grill for god's sake!"

Like it's just funny to me no matter where you are on the political spectrum, you have a somewhat decent reason to hate liberals (except conservatives are too stupid to tell liberals apart from "commies").

"My party is committing genocide and lost all of its credibility and ethos. Boo hoo."

At least they aren't using the word "progressive" anymore.

I am the only true leftist. The rest of you are posers and/or feds.

I'm just excited to see what happens when they find out their PC has been invaded by libs.

And then proceeds to own them by deleting them all

Pretty much. "Lol why don't you like libs?"

...cause we don't like things the way they are, and the only goal of the libs appears to be prevent any sort of progress. Maybe we are allowed relief from existing problems, but fuck you if you wanna fix em!

Conservatives, fascists, and Auth-Communists just disagree on what color the flag should be, and the name of the party in charge handing out the police to dispatch onto the people.

Liberals are somewhere between center left and center right. In the US, the alternative to republicanism is the “liberal party” and because they often encompass people further left than the party line, they are seen as left wing. Generally, I associate people who are always in favor of slow electoral measures, a strong state, strong individualistic rights that are positively defined (the right to do rather than not having the right to do) and the view that capitalism is the only method that had worked so far and is therefore best with liberalism. But thats far from an academic definition.

When you add in the fact that people usually end up seeing another person’s politics in relative to their own, things get unintelligible for someone trying to pinpoint an ideology.

An anarchist like myself will probably point towards someone like Biden or Obama and say they are a liberal or neoliberal, which is probably accurate enough (if I do say so myself), but I’ll also call conservatives like Romney, Bush, and Raegan, liberals or neoliberal even though those are people most self titled liberals would hate. A staunch authoritarian communist might call AOC or Sanders a liberal because they aren’t revolutionary communists, even though I’d personally consider them somewhat socialist progressives. Heck, I’ve ben called a liberal by hardcore communists even though my views are more similar to their definition of communism than theirs, and I’ve been called a liberal by some alt right people even though their views are closer to liberalism than mine.

Fox news, on the other hand, would call a pink haired person on a college campus a liberal for the pink hair alone. They might label a gay trump supporter who has a pride flag a liberal because of their homophobia combined with the association pride has with liberals to them. They might call someone who is genuinely far left a liberal because they either can’t comprehend their beliefs or because they don’t catch some of the indicators that they are looking at a communist, anarchist, etc.

There's only one axis on the political spectrum, and everyone left of Biden (a rightwinger) is a tankie, isn't this obvious?

Or marxists even lol

I don’t like libtards.

You can just call them liberals. You don't need to meld the term to a slur.

I mean, you should try and be nice obviously

By shaving the first two letters off an r-bomb? Come on, guy. I get what you're saying, but this is an awful way to phrase it.

Friend I'm not a friend of liberals myself but can we please not use ableistic terms that end with "-tard"?

Reserve that shit for the right wing