[gizmo686]

Political labels are fuzzy, and highly subject to drift. I use the term "liberal" and "leftist" because in current US politics, there are two clusters of political thought and, in current US politics, "liberal" and "leftist" are the names that we seem to be assigning them.

A European leftist is not the same thing as an American leftist. In fact, if we were to look at a different issue, the division between liberal and leftist would be different, even withing American politics.

For some issues, there is so little corralation with the general notion of liberal and leftist, that we would not even think to frame the problem in terms of those lines.

My point being, political identities are not a fundamental unit. They are an abstraction that is only meaningful in a particular contexts. There are real clusters of thought in politics; and we are currently discussing the relationship between two particular clusters of American politics. For the sake of communication, we are forced to give these clusters names, and we choose liberal and leftist because they are the best names we have available.