People have accused me of not being a liberal. Others have questioned me being a liberal. I refuse the premise that it is I who has to defend myself being a liberal.

I challenge others who speak loudly to define what a liberal is and to state where I was anything but a liberal on a given issue.


What does being a liberal mean?

What is liberalism?

Is liberalism the same as leftism to you? Does being a liberal demand allegiance to the DNC?

The dictionary definition is good enough for me. If you are not using a dictionary, then you may as well invent your own language and definitions for everything.

Liberalism is not the same as leftism to me. The left is just a pseudo-alliance of people with similar political interest, more of them liberal than not. There are some liberal Republicans just as there are some conservative Democrats.

Liberal is simply open to new ideas. All ideas originate as liberal ideas by definition. If those ideas get adopted by the majority, they become conservative by definition over time as newer ideas challenge them.

This may be the post you are referring to.

hmmm.

There is a long discussion of it at places. I check out the Wikipedia site for ideas on it all. I do not agree with everything, but their factual layout of the history of different kinds of liberalism is great.

To me being liberal means tolerance, - and non-rigidity, willingness to change as one gains knowledge and wisdom.

And what ticks me off is the pejorative implications without a list of particulars by those that literally spit out the label..

There are times when I want to shout, liberal as to what? ......I cannot be rigid, I am not finished with "becoming", not frozen in the past.
And there are times when I'd like to say that the other words used in political descriptions like moderate, independent, can apply to liberals but I know there are those that cannot grant that. Their problem, ---politics is a spectrum, we each have our own little particular quark on that continuum since every human is a unique being.


I seek........(By the way my mind is diverted, have on Cooper 360.)




lenal

I define Liberal as Liberated from traditional sources of authority and committed to the common good. Liberalism is often mistakenly confused with one or the other side of the dychotomy,
Indivdualism vs Collectivism. Another linquistic confusion that persist is that Liberalism is the opposite of Conservativism. Both concepts are scaleable. When measured separately, they are significantly, negatively correlated but knowledge of one only predicts about 25% of the variance of the other. About like the prediction of school achievement from IQ scores.