Someone else will answer you better than I can, but liberals are definitely capitalist, right-wing and imperialist.

Since when are capitalism and liberalism related?

A Liberal political party is the face of the USA right now. You know, capitalism central?

Do y’all really trust your governments to look after your best interests? As a U.S. American, I know I wouldn’t trust my government or politicians to do anything but enrich themselves at my expense, but I don’t have to; my rights are guaranteed by our constitution.

We don’t trust capitalist governments to look after our best interests.

my rights are guaranteed by our constitution.

No, they aren’t. Slavery is still legal in the US if the state deems you a criminal.

What about your right to health? Education? What about your democratic rights? What about a right to clean water? What about the rights of indigenous people to not have their land stolen and a pipeline run through their land without permission? Why do private donors and corporations have more of the government’s ear than the people do? Why can the rich lie and cheat and steal and kill people and entire ecosystems without any real punishment? Why can they arrest people for protesting? Why can the government buy your personal info from tech companies any time they want? What about the rights of homeless people not to be removed by police for existing? What about the rights of all the countries the US invades? What about the rights of the millions of people who died from the pandemic so corporations wouldn’t lose too much profit? What about the genocides the US is funding? The rights of the people the US coups to decide their own governments? The rights of those kids in cages at the border?

I don’t see any liberal governments passing any policies that indicate they are anything but Republican-lite. Literally most if not all of the Democratic party are landlords that do not give a fuck about you or your rights. If they cared about peoples rights they wouldn’t allow the Republican party to exist, let alone “reach across the isle”.

The problem with liberalism is that it pretends to be about personal freedom, but personal freedom for who? Only people with money.

, but I’ll bite

Liberalism is the ideology that emerged in opposition to royalism during the European bourgeois revolutions and the American creole revolutions. It advocates for a capitalist system that is progressive in the context of feudalism, but conservative in the context of socialism. Every political organization that holds any real power in the USA represents some strain of liberalism. Anticapitalist liberalism is not a thing. Liberals may advocate for socialist structures within the capitalist system, but will never support the actions necessary to dismantle the wealth and power of the capitalist class.

Oof. There’s a whole lot of history to go through to explain all of this. Like “libera” as it’s used in American discourse and “Liberal” as it’s used in more academic, especially marxist, political economy have different meanings. In common American usage “Liberal” is a loose set of progressive ideals. In politics and economics liberalism is tied to concepts like the “free market”, ideas about state regulation of the economy, a lot of other shit. I don’t have the juice to really go in to it write now and i’m really not the best person for it.

As far as I’ve always known…As a U.S. American

your political, civil, and historical education has been so lackluster and propagandistic that it is functionally worse than useless to you. this would be difficult for a forum post to particularly correct.

I’m most certainly not a capitalist. I’m stuck in a capitalist society in which I have to play by the rules if I want to feed my family, but that’s as far as my support for the system goes. I’m pretty sure a lot of Americans feel this way.

this is a correct statement, assuming that you don’t own capital.

Looking it up, the definition of liberalism…

the dictionary definition? an encyclopedic definition? a political scientist’s definition? you’re asking about the particulars of calling all capitalists liberals, or presumably saying something like Republicans are liberals, which is true, but you seem to be coming in without a very historically informed view of liberalism as a political concept. everywhere outside of us america considers liberalism to be specifically the political norm of capitalist states. the primary responsibility of the state is the mediation of capital under the liberal and bourgeois order. this is what you currently reside under. the american Republican party is liberal because they’re aggressively pro-capitalism with fascist characteristics. the american Democratic party differs from this in the form of small particulars, such as how to treat groups of people with very little political capital or economically organized power, but not at all in the main task of the government being to ensure the continued and smooth operation of capital. as capital continues to decay, the reaction between capitalists and the state will continue to develop in contradictory ways. liberalism is the politics of the capitalist, by definition.

personal freedom, especially as guaranteed by a government.

what does that mean exactly? personal freedom to do what? to starve without work from a capitalist, to freeze without renting from a capitalist, to be executed by the state for exercising the freedom to do either? you will find that you are not free from such burdens. you are only freed by the state to engage in capitalism. i know that you think that the protection you are given to speak and assemble freely, to be free from state exploitation, exists for you and not for say, a Chinese person. however, that cannot be the case. during the 2020 protests in the us, cops were shooting journalists in the face with rubber bullets and using chemical warfare that is banned in intrastate warfare. during covid protests in china, the state ultimately decided to lift many of the ongoing restrictions. you are free to protest the state, but you are not free to actually act against it, nor are you free when you threaten capital.

Do y’all really trust your governments to look after your best interests?

which brings us to: no, we have no trust in the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the form of any particular state to magically look after any proletarian. the belief of many people here is that the apparatus of a state, which is to say the notions of sovereignty and social ownership, could be effectively wielded on behalf of the proletariat. that isn’t a belief that the us political structure dreamed up by the owners and systematic abusers of human beings 300 years ago had ideas that are impossible to improve upon. it is the opposite: this structure is designed for and only capable of the benefit of capitalists.

your beliefs about certain other currently existing or historically notionally socialist states are likely mired in a large amount of literal cia propaganda.

if you’re serious about learning more, i highly recommend reading Debt: the First 5000 Years by David Graeber. he was a serious anthropologist, and this is his best work. the writing is also much more enjoyable than most academic prose. the reason i recommend this is because there’s a lot of class history wrapped up around a central economic concept and not political development specifically.

Liberalism is a political philosophy which generally embraces republicanism, constitutionalism, rule of law, political equality, free markets, private property, among other things. Setting aside the outright Fascists, the majority of American Conservatives are in-fact Liberals, though they have exceedingly terrible opinions about social equality. The spectrum of acceptable political discourse in the US is simply so narrow that it runs from Liberal to Liberal but enthusiastically bigoted.

From the Marxist perspective, culture, politics, and ideology are all outgrowths of the underlying material conditions. In the grand durée of history, the emergence of Liberalism coincides with the wave of Bourgeois revolutions which marked the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism as the prevailing mode of production (which didn’t happen everywhere all at the same time). To this day it is the prevailing ideological framework under the conditions of Capitalism (except under conditions of overwhelming crisis where all pretenses of republicanism and rule of law are dropped to defend private property against the threat of social unrest).

The Marxist critique of Liberalism comes from a few angles. Naturally, we take issue with the inviolable right to private property. We believe in the collectivization of the means of production. Likewise, we take issue with the sort of free market absolutism which puts a price tag on everything under the Sun and turns everything into a commodity. We think the rule of law, republicanism, and constitutionalism are all for the birds insofar as these institutions stand as a bulwark against the realization social justice (which they invariably do under a Capitalist oligarchy).

But more fundamentally, we are Materialists. This gets really abstract, but basically there are two overarching schools of philosophical thought: Idealism and Materialism. Idealists believe that ideas are the driving force in nature, which the world is shaped by, while Materialists believe that our ideas are simply a reflection of the material world we find ourselves in. Liberalism is an idealist philosophy. It essentially proposes “This is the way things ought to be. If enough of us share this belief, it shall be so.” Marxism is a materialist philosophy. It begins with an empirical study of the material conditions throughout history, attempts to identify the processes which are unfolding, the forces which transform society, and uses that as a basis for identifying the most fertile points of social struggle.