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by jomamaxx 3523 days ago
:)

'Liberal' - in every country in the world except the USA (and Canada) means 'Classical Liberalism' which 'economic liberalism' or 'everything not run by the Monarchy'. This is we call the Judiciary and Legislative 'Liberal institutions'. Economic liberals are kind of the old Bourgeoisie.

The 'Liberal' parties of the world are more like 'Libertarian' parties of the US, but they tend to be more 'business' like, and not so much 'anti government' and the don't have this 'don't tread on me' colloquial/aggressive attitude. They tend to be somewhat left-leaning on social issues.

'Neoliberal' is a term to describe those who are 'super free market' proponents, i.e. Chicago school of economics - free trade everywhere, no government 'interference'. etc..

I think what you mean is 'left-leaning' or 'socially leftist dogmatically'.

Also - European Football is not 'left leaning' - it's also what the rest of the world plays, and so do a lot of Americans.

I've read some polls indicating that the vast majority of Americans are upset with Kapernick, and the corporate tone of ESPN is getting fairly PC these days, which can be a good or bad thing depending on ... personally, I think sports is kind of an arena where people want to escape political issues and just play sports. ESPN has made some PC decisions lately and I wonder if this has been a factor myself.

1 comments

I would describe the Liberals in Canada as classical Liberals. They are strongly pro free trade for example. This very weekend Trudeau is on his way to Brussels to sign the Canada/EU Free Trade deal that was negotiated by his Conservative predecessor.
You make a good point about that specific issue, and they are similar to Classical Liberals, but really they are not.

They are a centre-left party.

They are pro-union, strong minimum wage supporters, in Ontario they are making massive investments in green energy that are sadly not very effective (I wish they were), they socialized the University system, and fully socialized healthcare to the point wherein it's illegal to pay a doctor to fix you - that's more 'socialist' than any European country on that point.

A 'Liberal' party in Europe would not support any government that barred private citizens from building a hospital or school - that's a pretty fundamental issue.

But I do agree they share some similarities.

But 'free trade' is one of the issues the socialist have pretty much lost/caved on - although we can almost all agree there can be downsides and weird caveats, on the whole most, even leftish economics buy into the idea of free trade.

FYI 'free trade' between two modern states is a very different thing than 'free trade' between a superpower and a small, agrarian, less-developed economy like USA-Chile or something.