So, I had a liberal ask this today, and as someone who is basically the enlightened centrist between liberals and leftists, I figured I'd explain it.
It really comes down to ideological worldview. Leftism was an ideology created out of hatred of capitalism. It believes that capitalism is so fundamentally evil that we can only abolish it. Now, I don't go that far, and I dunk on leftists a lot, but as someone with a worldview to the left of the liberals, let me explain to you how liberalism looks for me.
Conservatives embrace capitalism full stop. And if I had to summarize their worldview, it's giving the wealthy people all of the property in society so they can "create jobs" for poor people to do. So not only are poor people functionally forced to work for rich people, but we act like we're doing them a favor. Like they should want to spend all of their time doing work for the wealthy and should be grateful for the very "opportunity" to do so.
Liberals....often only want a softer version of this. At best, a lot of liberals will support stuff like labor regulations, unions, conditional safety nets, etc to soften the blow, but at the same time, people are still functionally forced to work for rich people, it's just that they take the edge off the system.
Of course, this is my framing. As I said, not really a leftist. I dont support the abolition of capitalism, but I am critical of wage slavery, and approach criticizing capitalism with the same fervor of leftists sometimes. I just have different solutions. For the leftists, they believe that capitalist relations are fundamentally wrong, and it doesn't matter how you dress it up, lipstick on a pig is still a pig. It is what it is. For me, I'm not opposed to capitalism in principle, I just don't believe people should be forced to work. I have a left libertarian approach that's compatible with capitalism that I call "social libertarianism", to differ from anticapitalist left libertarians. And yeah, in a lot of ways, liberalism is just...the same thing as conservatism on a purely ideological level. It's just less extreme, and it takes the hard edges off of it sometimes. But it doesn't go far enough. Not for me, and not for leftists. That's one thing I kinda agree with leftists on, and why I can explain the issue in the way that I do.
Liberals often seem dumbfounded by this. They think being the lesser evil makes it where we should flock to them. However, over the decades since FDR and the new deal coalition, they've shifted further and further right. In the modern era, they're worthless. They're to the right of some new deal conservatives like eisenhower and nixon on the economy. I mean, Nixon actually toyed with a UBI back in the 1970s. He also did things like the EPA. From the 90s on, the democrats run to the right and try to be conservative lites. And they reject solutions to improve capitalism, preferring to sit on their laurels of past accomplishments, and even help dismantle them when the conservatives demand it.
I mean, why wouldn't anyone on the left, not even a "leftist", but even a social democrat, or a social libertarian like myself, not have absolute disdain for the democratic party? For all the talk about how bernie is a socialist, ideologically, he's just a new deal democrat or maybe just slightly left. And he's an old school jobist, which, for me, disqualifies him from perfectly representing me, but again, he actually wants to make the system work again. The "liberals" of the modern age treat him as a radical. They act as if "no one who works 40 hours a week should be in poverty" is a radical statement. It's not. It's the bare minimum of our social contract. Now, I'd go further and say "no one should be in poverty", hence the UBI comments, but yeah. Expecting people to work for a living and then expecting them to be able to live comfortably isn't a radical statement, it's literally how it's supposed to work. The fact that modern liberals have gotten so soft and so weak and so feckless is why we're at the gates of fascism. If people aren't happy, no one is happy. And I would say what brought us to this point is a failure of our system to actually address peoples' needs in more healthy ways.
That's the thing. A lot of people hate the democrats, and the modern liberals, because they dont do anything, they don't try to do anything. And they thought trump would help their situation given how useless the left has become. So yeah, that's why people hate liberals. They need to be the ones proposing bold ideas and visions to improve society, and when they don't do that, what we get is what we get. The left starts saying it doesnt matter who is in charge because they're screwed either way, and assuming we dont go full fascist, they're not wrong. Of course, we are going full fascist so at this point, we kinda gotta rally behind the liberals and hope to get them in office again just to get relative stability and hope they do something the next time they're in power, but still, a lot of leftists are just so ideologically left that they see fascism as just another extension of capitalism and all of its evilness so many of them don't care.
Really...it's the hitler situation. Germany was so screwed in the 1930s they voted for hitler just hoping it would make things better, given the failures of the left at the time. Instead, they lost democracy and got authoritarianism. We may be going down the same road now. And I really hope the liberals learn their lesson this time. Trump NEVER should have gotten elected again. The fact that he did is a sign of a sick society. If the left was strong, and had public trust, this never would've happened. Leftists (well, more of them) would've been motivated to support the democrats, and moderates wouldn't have been so desperate to vote for Trump. Really, I know people think it's in bad taste to blame the left for our modern predicament, but in my view, it was their job to stop this outcome from happening. The fact that we're here is a testament to how badly the democratic party has missed the moment. And it wasn't just one cycle. 2016, 2020, and 2024 were all connected. The same fundamental election, but with slightly different margins in 2020 allowing for a narrow win.
If we want to actually win future elections, IF we have future elections, the left needs make sure this never happens again. It can only do that by running progressive candidates that are different enough from the right that they bring people in. I'm not expecting perfection here, and neither should socialists. I think a Bernie or an AOC is "good enough" for this. If anyone still refuses such a stark difference, well, you can't win everyone, but you can win enough. Some segment of leftists are so far left they'll never be happy. Me, I'll throw shade at jobist progressives at times, but I'd still vote for them. My only major policy difference is UBI vs JG. But yeah.
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