Sofia wrote:I don't know the difference in a right-winger and a conservative...
I thought all left-wingers were liberal thinkers--and all right-wingers were right-leaning. I really don't think there's a difference.
Hmph! <grins>
I am a leftist, but I aint no liberal. Liberals are wishy-washy good-doers from the middle classes, who believe in the free market. I dont want some tinkering with the present system thats fueled by the upper middle class's sense of guilt - I want the working class to demand its rights! I want system change!
Seriously tho, to my (European) mind liberals are nicely socially tolerant (on, say, gay rights, drug policy, abortion, euthanasia and religion in general), but economically way too pro-market, pro-privatisation, pro-liberalisation (the word says it) - they dont have much up with our beloved social-democratic welfare state. To my (European) mind they do not count as leftists.
But then we've had this semantic discussion between Americans and Europeans/Canadians/Australians about what liberalism means a coupla times already.
Also, it has to be said, "classic liberalism" as described above is hard to find even here. Its all hybrid. Emblematically speaking, liberals should be pro-free market but free-thinking on social issues, while conservatives/christian-democrats are strict on religion, moral issues and modern society in general and more nationalist, but (therefore) also quite "protective" on economic issues. (The national welfare states here were created in co-operation with the christian-democrats.) Finally, the third "stream", the social-democrats, are historically free-thinking on cultural issues but egalitarian/statist on economic matters. Most European countries have/had some kind of variation of this three-way system.
But the last few decades especially its become all merged and mixed. Social-democrats moved further towards embracing individualism and the free market, yielding us Blair's centrist "third way". Conservatives and christian-democrats like Thatcher and Kohl in the 80s embraced more of the tough economic policies of budget cuts, even when it meant breaking up some of their parties' emphases on traditionalist, national unity. The liberals, meanwhile, ended up with the ideological victory (with everybody moving in their direction), but in a political squeeze.
Their response has been contradictory. On the one hand, Dutch and Belgian liberals, for example, entered into governments with third-way social-democrats that allowed them to implement much of the classic liberal agenda (free market, free morals), but at the cost of their political profile: them and the Blairites became all the same, each privatisation project offset by some employment subsidies, and together against the Church.
In reaction to such "left-liberalism", there are other strong forces that want to make the liberals (again) into a populist, no-nonsense right-wing party: still against the church, but most of all against taxes, for new freeways, and against welfare. Add a rich dose of anti-immigrant and asylum-seekers rhetorics and you have the "other" kind of European liberal party. The German, Dutch, Belgian, Danish liberals have all flirted with that or (now) outrightly chosen for it, and the consequence of choosing that path eventually is going the way of Berlusconi's Forza Italia, first -- and if it really goes wrong, that of Austria's Freedom Party, once a classic liberal party and now Joergen Haider's far-right anti-immigration vehicle.
Anyway, thats one European perspective on how "liberal" is different from "left-wing" - and I think Canadians and Australians might have some variations on the same theme? In
Central and Eastern Europe, mind you, it's different again ... there the liberals are (if we don't count the Czech republic's Vaclav Klaus) mostly of the classic variety still, strongly pro-market but also strongly freethinking, up to including a strong defence of minority rights. (The most ethnically tolerant parties in Slovakia, Hungary, Russia are the pro-market liberals). But in much of Eastern Europe that combination has them actually tagged as left-wing or centrist, because the cultural dimension of politics there traditionally outweighs the economic one.
Always interesting, finally, is to see how the far left and far right basically meet up. I always say, it's a circle, not a line. The far-left and the far right both espouse protectionism, statism and anti-EU and anti-Western populism, while especially in the murkier regions of Eastern Europe the far left also shares the far-right's nationalism and xenophobia. We've had so-called "red-brown" coalition governments in Romania, Serbia, Slovakia ...
