Quote:
Originally Posted by roughbeast
I like your attempt to characterise Conservative, Socialist and Libertarian, but I'm struggling a bit with this semantic discussion we are having, because it could become completely arid and is probably impossible to resolve. We may talk about Liberalism as if it was something different than Libertarianism, but they are differentially towards the same end of the same spectrum and are qualitatively similar in many ways. Meanwhile, the desire to have a common understanding of the terms we use, is constantly frustrated by the continuous morphing of meanings in common parlance. e.g. For a long time the right of the Conservative Party and the GOP have been referred to, pejoratively, as 'NeoCons', then that term quickly drifted out of use and now they get labelled as NeoLiberals! Perhaps they are both.
|
It's the Americanisation of it that is causing the confusion, it's what started this conversation in the first place as British writers are using the American definition of liberal more and more. Europe has a specific meaning that differs from the American meaning. In America liberal is used for most of the left.
However Libertarianism is the same across the West IIRC. It's defined by almost no government at all. A Libertarian would want to drastically reduce the size of government including the NHS and welfare. They would not want to use state intervention to reduce inequality as they would claim that this is better achieved by the government getting out of the way. Corbyn is not a libertarian at all. I think old school liberals, classical liberals, are a lot closer to that than modern day European liberals.
I think after that it gets more difficult. A lot of people from Nick Clegg to Daniel Hannan could be described as a liberal by some definitions. The latter example being why it's so stupid to use the American definition of liberal when talking about British politics. The Liberal Democrats themselves split into two groups divided between how much they think the state should get involved in the economy but united on social freedoms. I think what you've described earlier was social liberalism. The idea that economic inequality is a barrier to freedom so that should be addressed.
I would say where liberals differ from Corbyn is that Corbyn believes in equality of outcome. He wants to use taxation, welfare, regulation and other things to bring everyone onto the same level as much as possible.