If so, was it polled somewhere?
I’ll oversimplify a bit, but here you go. In economic terms, liberalism is a market oriented economy, and the current iteration of neoliberalism is marked by social welfare cuts and tax cuts for the rich with “trickle down” effect in mind (allegedly). That ideology is shared by both the democratic and republican parties. The difference between communists and liberals in the sense the word is most often used, is that economic approach, and from that perspective both liberals and conservatives are “liberal”.
Now the common use of the word is a bit different, but that’s almost exclusively US from what I can tell. Hexbear is also international though, and liberal is a common term for right wingers where I’m from for example.
Hope I could help.
“The colloquialisms from the place I am directly talking about don’t matter as much as this one I am using, everyone who disagrees is propagandized”
This is what I’m seeing when I read your comment. I can call the sky green all damn day, that doesn’t make it green, you dip.
Let me oversimplify even more. Donald Trump upholds the American Revolution which turned British America into a liberal republic.
This isn’t a colloquialism. This is a basic definition used within political science.
If you’re going to talk politics on a serious level then using the terminology of political science matters and, if that’s too much of a stretch, then at least avoid colloquial terms which contradict the terms used in political science.
Americans can call the sky green as much as they want. In the rest of the world, Liberalism = Liberalism, not “democrat”.
Liberals are people that believe in liberalism, which can be summed up as “everyone has the individual right to be an asshole, even if it fucks everyone else over”.
Locke was a classical liberal. Trump is a neoliberal. This is very simple.
Liberalism has a couple of different definitions. The one you’re thinking of is the one in US politics where “Liberal” is synonymous with "Left’. This isn’t how it’s being used here though.
Liberalism, as a broad ideological trend that came out of the enlightenment, contains within it, Conservatism. Conservatism was theorized by people like Edmund Burke who, seeing that the previous feudal hierarchy was dying off, sought to preserve it, at least as much as was possible, by accepting Liberal notions of property rights and capitalism.
So, instead of a social hierarchy being ordained by God, it’s decided by the market, and social conflict is meditated through the liberal, Lockean, Republic.
So when we call Trump a liberal, we mean it in this broad sense. He’s still a conservative, but conservatism is a subset of capital L Liberalism.
This is in contrast to Leftism, which also contains a lot of things within it, but breaks from a lot of the philosophical assumptions that undergird Liberalism.
