[kristopolous]

If liberal is defined as "not alt-right" then sure.

But if you expect to find prominent socialists or leftist political activists or their ideas on NPR, you'll be waiting a long time. Chomsky, nader, said, hedges, parenti ... none of them get mentioned or make an appearance. Who teamed up with Richard Wolff's radio show? NPR? Nope, it was iHeartMedia. You can find these people on Al Jazeera, the CBC, RussiaToday, the BBC... Essentially the public media of every country BUT the USA.

On NPR, you'll get Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, the Heritage foundation, the Hoover institute, and other prominent vested interests and orthodox free market fundamentalism thinktanks.

The reality is the Alex Jones ilk are so out there that if you want to call anything that's not like that as liberal, you have a giant space to work with. That pejorative label corrals and prods everyone else closer to the Hannity and Michael Savages and what we get is a dedicated right and a not-so-committed, more gentle right.

When actual "not on the right" politicians rise, they get ignored, dismissed, or ridiculed by all the mainstream media. Whether it's Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders or Mélenchon. NPR was dismissive of Corbyn, who picked up the largest legislative gain in over 70 years, even on election day as trouble for Labor and mismanaging a failing divided party with old broken ideas...

It's important to remember what a non-skewed left would actually look like since it effectively doesn't exist in the mainstream us media.

[Moru]

As a swede I have a hard time understanding what liberal and conservative is. Here we talk about Left and Right politics. I get the impression USA only has Right and Right+ in swedish terms.

Left would be social security, right would be free market / privatise everything.

I have to admit that I wasn't paying much attention to politics in my schoolyears but I did try to read some political comic book (comedy central?) from USA...

[kristopolous]

in practice, liberal is the city-life and conservative is the country-life.

This really helps in gerrymandering districts and subdividing the population into two easily manageable groups since they don't talk with one another a lot.

I think the definitions are intentionally designed to keep the public fighting itself with one group always trying to take away the rights of the other so in practice it's slow impoverishment of the commons and a forfeiture of political capital.

Essentially it's a huge scam (or a "scheme" if you think that sounds too conspiratorial). It's not a new scam, and not the first time it's been done - not even the first time in this country. The history of and tactics of union busting in the 1800s and 1900s essentially worked on the same divide-and-conquer techniques of pitting groups of workers against each other.

Going back further, the Indian wars worked in a similar manner ... feigning favoritism or some entitlement to one tribe to create a tribal conflict and prevent the indigenous from being a unified front.

This is the same game ... we call it "democrats" and "republicans" in this version.

[pault]

The most effective Roman emperors were very good at playing frontier tribes against each other, and the plebeian, equestrian, and senatorial classes against each other. This is not a new tactic. :)

[robk]

The equivalent in Sweden is having a discussion about immigration. Liberal Sweden won't even talk about it in any way that could be perceived as critical. Conservative Sweden would.

[colordrops]

Whatever. Most people who identify as "liberal" in the US would not call themselves socialist, anarcho-syndacalist, Chomsky or Nader supporters, etc. They are mostly centrist Democrats.

/s/liberal/neo-liberal/g

Does that make you feel better?

[kristopolous]

Mainstream Republicans (not alt-right) are also neoliberals. They also believe structuring all of societies ills as free markets as the optimal solution (eg, CAFTA, NAFTA, Obamacare were started/proposed by Republicans and finished by Democrats and many of Reagan's championed policies were actually started by Carter). That's what's academically called "classical liberalism".

Honestly, the form of liberal that NPR is, is mostly just target demographics; what set of values an effective identical policy gets justified with. Hillary Clinton praises Kissinger, punted for Monsanto as Secretary of State...Obama used advisers from Milton Friedman's Chicago School...it's different wrapping paper on the same present.

For instance, job creators of the right become entrepreneurs and innovators on the left; it's the same people, different label. On the right, they shouldn't be taxed because they earned their wealth and on the left is because they invest in the innovation of tomorrow. Same policy, different backstory.

The American dynamics doesn't equate to substantive advocacy differences. They are effectively sports team playing the same game by the same rules with different fan bases.

[colordrops]

Not really interested in responding to you again considering you heavily edited your first post after I responded to it.

[BeetleB]

>But if you expect to find prominent socialists or leftist political activists or their ideas on NPR, you'll be waiting a long time. Chomsky, nader, said, hedges, parenti ... none of them get mentioned or make an appearance.

Actually, an NPR station where I lived had all of those appear.

People have to realize that local affiliates have some room in picking the shows they broadcast. I was in a relatively activist town, and these folks were not rare. I know at least one of the names you mentioned because of NPR.