Hey, I’m not giving up on my Quixotic quest either: getting people to stop calling leftists/statists/collectivists/socialists/Marxists “liberals.”
Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. Adam Smith and Bastiat were liberals. Hayek and Milton Friedman called themselves liberals. Leftists are NOT liberal!
I’ll support your lost cause if you’ll support mine. ;-)
Hank
You’re absolutely right. The statist left stole that from our side, too, and diminished its formerly good name. We’re long overdue to take it back.
Of course, to me, what’s even funnier with those on the left that run from that label and prefer to call themselves “Progressive” is that that is what Communists in the Democrat party (supporters of FDR’s Second VP Henry Wallace, who ran for President in 1948) took as their new party name. They resurrected it from the Socialist Republicans of the 1910s and ‘20s.
I’d think even many of the Communists from that era and the Socialists of a century ago would be disgusted at what passes for a “Progressive” agenda today, then again, perhaps not.
Limited government, class mobility, and freedom are traditional liberal ideals, and the very things that Dems and the GOPe hate.