ID: A scene from Legally Blonde of a conversation between Warner and Elle in the corridor at Harvard, in 4 panels:
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Warner asks “What happened to the tolerant left?”
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Elle replies, smiling “Who said we were tolerant?”
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Warner continues “I thought you were supposed to be tolerant of all beliefs!”
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Elle looks confused “Why would we tolerate bigotry, inequity, or oppression?”
Yeah you pretty much Proved my point
Liberals literally aren’t the left though, we’re not on the same side; liberals support capitalism, we don’t.
This is why liberals would literally rather lose an election than enact the overwhelmingly popular policy the left prescribes.
This is not the common definition of “liberal” used for the past few years. I’ve only ever seen that distinction here on Lemmy. Colloquially, liberal now seems to mean liberal social views like acceptance, progressive safety nets, etc. NOT liberal capitalist views. That’s why people use left and liberal interchangeably these days and then folks like yourself and others who know true definitions have to clarify and remind all the time. To the average, US citizen, liberal and left are the same, liberal and libertarian are two completely separate things.
If that’s true, it’s because you have never read a book or a serious article. This is a hundred year old distinction, and is how the entire rest of the world and the study of politics uses these words normally. E.g. in Australia “the liberal party” is the right wing pro capitalist party.
It’s true that in North America the common use has diverged somewhat, so it’s not totally surprising that people haven’t always heard it, and you could make a good argument that it might be more practical for American leftists to do outreach using different words to make conversation easier. But it’s nonsense to come into a leftist space and get upset about a much more traditional usage of those terms and which draws exactly the distinction which divides leftists from liberals, even “centre-left” liberals.
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