"there are lots of yuppies who want to defend their housing prices who might be liberal but I don't associate this position with leftism in any way"
People tend to call the Democrats the left, as they're at least somewhat leftward of the Republicans. It's at least easier for discussion purposes than speaking of the right and the other right.
Yeah, I get it. But we also use liberal and I think in this particular case its worth drawing the distinction between these two "camps" of the democratic party.
The meaning of liberal and conservative has shifted so much over time that the term is now useless. The original meaning of liberal was about not killing you neighbor if they were a different religion - from which we get freedom of religion. That slowly expanded to things like freedom for slaves and women voting.
You're describing classical liberalism. The meaning of the term liberalism in the US switched to social liberalism back in the great depression (unless specified with a qualifier). It has remained roughly constant for as long as most people on this site have been alive. Though I will grant that the policies social liberals support have changed since then.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism
This is Phil Ochs describing liberals in 1966
In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.
They haven't changed.
1966 is still modern. The liberals I'm describing go back much farther. The decleration of independence is perhaps their most famiuos work though even then things were changing
The impression i get as an outsider is that liberals are basically republicans that don't hate minorities.
No. Republicans believe in full privatization of schools, Social Security, and Medicare, in flat taxation, the abolition of the regulatory state, the replacement of government-provided services with cash vouchers, and policymaking devolved out to the states. Liberals generally commit to none of these beliefs.
I've gone out of my way here not to make value judgements; Republicans have coherent arguments for why all these policies are better. "Republicans who don't hate minorities" is not a good way to describe liberals, who make up the majority of the Democratic party, the "other" American party that opposes the Republicans.
> Liberals generally commit to none of these beliefs.
Liberals fucking love charter schools, 401ks, they voted against the Illinois progressive income tax (Biden won Illinois big when that got defeated). I could go on. You're so far off the scent.
They are usually also ok with LGBQT people, which is good. Realistically, I think liberals are just not particularly reflective about the economic realities our system creates. Americans are drowning in propaganda, of which the right wing sort which characterizes Trumpism is only the most obvious. Add on top of that that the 20th Century makes a pretty compelling case that leftism as imagined in that century isn't a going concern, its not really a sign of a major moral failing that one might be a "republican who isn't into cruelty."
Also, in fairness, there are a lot of republicans who aren't into cruelty too. Its just that the jerks are an important part of the current right coalition.