The Post is highly educational.

if you support private property you’re a lib

Hey, this is more of a linguistic history answer.

In the US, some writers like Mill or Painewere more popular, who truly saw liberalism as an emancipatory force that could uplift minorities into respectable culture. You can still see this in the left liberal running joke “more black girlbosses”, wherein emancipation is a small number of a minority becomes business owners. This concept of “liberalism” became more popular with Lincoln and FDR and is now what Americans imagine “liberals” are. Their opposite, conservatives, evolved from monarchists to supporters of a nascent aristocracy, to local business interests (which means oil interests, agribusiness, etc). Conserving current power, as it were.

In Europe, however, other writers were popular, and liberalism remained more of an umbrella term for the property rights parties.

Liberals think their philosophy is about republicanism, democracy, individual rights eyc. but the socialist critique would argue that it has always been about a universalisation of property rights, specifically under the hegemony of Western European pedigree. Even other concepts of property rights are there to be brutally swept aside if they cannot be linked in to the hegemony, and liberal democracies are very comfortable with non-democracies without civil rights, and are comfortable violating the sovereignty of republics that don’t hook into their markets.

Before liberalism, there were a lot of different kinds of property that could be taken or used in different ways or by different people. A lot of property was considered “rented” from the monarch, but there was also the church lands and the commons. An idea of an individual peasant owning a specific section of grass didn’t exist, or at least wouldn’t remotely be enforced. The encroachment of exclusive inviolable property advanced over centuries, to the point where the main form of aristocracy with power was ones that made the jump to becoming capitalists. The emancipation of slaves was in part justified with giving them access to the ability to own property.

Slaves were an interesting case as a big part of the expansion of liberalism was arguments over slavery, as they were a special type of property. A capitalist may believe that he is entitled to the produce of his property, but the church argued that the slaves souls were God’s domain, and thus holy acts (like marriage, baptism, birth) were outside the purview of the capitalist, could not be prevented or exploited. This squabble and others like it was a big part of the secularisation of liberalism and squashing out the power of the church, argues Losurdo in “Liberalism: A Counter-history”, rather than “Enlightenment values” as Whig history would claim.

Of course now, liberals would argue, we don’t have slaves and so long as sweatshop workers in Indonesia have the right to own property, regardless of their actual access or ability, they are not slaves. Indeed, one could argue that many liberals think of slavery as being barred from property relations. This can be seen every time a business owner is barred from a property relationship. Something something freedom rar rar.

Obviously, not every liberal is a capitalist.

“True” idealised liberalism hasn’t ever existed, but every time it has gotten close it has resulted in so much human misery and squalor that capitalists as a class have released the reigns a bit (great depression, postwar welfare etc).

Liberalism is the political system of capitalism. Its beliefs are: Free markets and competition, protection of property rights and opening new markets.

Nothing else in liberalism is inherently left or right wing. The political system of America during slavery was liberalism. America during segregation was liberalism. Abortion has been rolled backwards under liberalism. The Japanese far right inheritor of the fascists party is called the liberal party.

You have been confused and politically mis-educated about what liberalism is by the american landscape of culture war politics.

Liberalism is an economic political ideology, like socialism, socialism holds nearly polar opposite economic political beliefs to it.

Looking it up, the definition of liberalism specifies a belief in maximum personal freedom, especially as guaranteed by a government.

Personal freedom FOR WHOM ?

If you are a worker you have no freedom. You are forced to work, trapped in a system where if you do not work you go homeless and die. You are barely different to a slave, the chains are just more abstract now and you get to swap who your owner is every now and then.

The personal freedom liberals want is for the people that hold property, not for the workers. It is the belief in the freedom of capital to exploit and do whatever it wants. Liberal “freedom” is not personal freedom it is the financial freedom of the ruling class to utilise their capital to exploit the workers to maximum effect.

I, for example, consider myself a liberal, but I’m most certainly not a capitalist.

Stop calling yourself a liberal then and start immersing yourself in socialist spaces where you’ll actually learn what alternatives exist to capitalism.

my rights are guaranteed by our constitution.

The state will leave you alone as long as you are not a threat to it. The very moment you pose any sort of threat to it your rights vanish. The US has a history of murdering socialists, Assange is certainly not being given any rights, the cop city protestors are certainly not being given any rights, in fact wasn’t one summarily executed not long ago? Self described liberals are entirely oblivious.

Lot of good answers, I just wanna do my usual and show my love for when fedusers come and ask questions from a place of genuineness and goodwill.

From the sounds of it, we agree on most fundamental ideas (capitalism sucks, rights should be guaranteed). The only two cents I’d offer are that you should think about why your government (and also every corporation) is incentivised to enrich themselves at your expense, and then try to envision a way to restructure society so that isn’t such a strong incentive. This was how I took my first step from “Capitalism sucks but I don’t know if socialism is any better” to “Maybe the commies were right all along”