The Liberal Trap
Much like the word “socialist,” “liberal” has become a derogative in US politics. Unlike Socialism, there is a valid reason behind that.
Slave Trader's Business in Atlanta, Georgia, 1864. Photo: George N. Barnard, Public domain
Do you know what the term "Liberal" means? For many, it brings to mind concepts like socially progressive ideals, humanist values, and reason-guided policy. In the United States, "Liberal" and "the Left" have become interchangeable terms, amalgamated into a singular political identity that somehow manages to span the entirety of the political spectrum—from right-wing war hawks like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to leftist revolutionaries such as Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King Jr., Eugene Debs, and John Brown. When you view politics from this perspective—that anything which isn't exclusively fascist must therefore be leftist—you fall into a carefully constructed trap designed with the explicit goal of derailing your own political awakening.
Many of you will experience a knee-jerk reactionary response that is likely already making you feel targeted or triggered as we begin this conversation. Nobody enjoys being looked down upon or being told that what they think they believe isn't actually what they believe. Nobody wants to confront the reality that they have been manipulated and lied to. To understand where I'm coming from, you must first recognize that "Liberalism"—the catch-all term for progressive attitudes in the United States—is actually a clever misnomer, a deliberate manipulation designed to blend the values of humanism with the explicit dehumanization inherent in imperial expansion and corporate domination across the globe.
The Two Faces of Liberalism
Liberalism, as originally defined by early Enlightenment writers such as John Locke and other humanists of the early Industrial period, represents a belief in the unassailable equality of all humans, independent of any government structure or material condition. It serves as an ideological cornerstone asserting that governments must be of the people, by the people, and for the people—a line of thought that elevates the common person above any system that does not primarily seek to empower ordinary citizens. This is what we call social liberalism.
However, liberalism took on an entirely different meaning roughly a century later with the writings of Adam Smith and his seminal work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), which laid the foundation for both the field of economics and the normalization of emerging capitalist ideology. In this interpretation, liberalism becomes a pro-business belief system—an ideology that insists the only way to build a robust economy and ensure population welfare is to limit business regulation, prioritizing individual property rights and treating property accumulation as the primary measure of a population's well-being and continued development. This is what we call economic liberalism.
The Fundamental Contradiction
Herein lies the core problem with the contemporary "liberal": one cannot authentically believe in and support social liberalism while simultaneously being invested in and executing the principles of economic liberalism. These two types of liberalism exist in direct opposition to each other—they are counterpoints, opposites, and irreconcilable contradictions. It is logically impossible to genuinely support your fellow worker, neighbor, and community member while simultaneously advocating for the deregulation that today ensures you remain consistently too poor to afford adequate housing, healthcare, education, or even sufficient food.
The historical contradictions run deep. John Locke, the philosopher who essentially launched the concept of social liberalism, was simultaneously a stakeholder in a slave-trading company and served as Secretary to the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas. He earnestly argued against the inhumanity of slavery while carving out convenient exceptions for his English colonial projects. Consider this: South Carolina was constitutionally obligated to respect slavery from its founding and provided land grants specifically tied to the number of enslaved people a prospective landowner could transport with them. This entrenched slavery in that society some 200 years before the Emancipation Proclamation would do precisely the same thing—condemn slavery as inhumane and a violation of human rights while simultaneously creating the exact same carve-outs that allowed Locke to sleep peacefully at night.
The Economic Reality
For those on the Left, developing a sharp understanding of real-world economics is absolutely essential. This means moving beyond the discussion of abstract nonsense like "widgets" that underpin the economic liberalism embedded in our ideological frameworks, and instead examining the deeper mechanics of how material reality directly affects the spurious and deliberately intangible concepts of liberal economics. It is crucial to recognize that economic liberalism is a profoundly inhumane ideology that ultimately leads us back to where this entire system originated: slavery.
For the economic liberal, nothing is quite as appealing as slavery. Here you have a completely submissive and self-contained group of labor inputs whose value and application you alone can determine for your business operations. These are human beings transformed from autonomous laborers into simple economic inputs—the collective social costs we have determined to be acceptable as payment for labor become completely unnecessary and ultimately damaging to the business owner, whose primary concern remains profit maximization.
This entire premise—deregulating industry so that it can more effectively prey upon both domestic workers and laborers worldwide—forms the foundation of the neoliberalism that has dominated global politics since the 1970s and 1980s. This is precisely why "Liberal" has become a pejorative term for many who might not otherwise view it negatively. The Clintons, Bushes, Obamas, Trumps, Bidens, and Reagans—all economic liberals, none of them authentic social liberals.
The True Divide
Social liberalism is fundamentally a leftist belief system. If you believe that workers deserve protection over the companies attempting to exploit them, you are a leftist. If, however, you support companies using their accumulated wealth and influence to form monopolistic conglomerates, to effectively steal your voice and political efficacy through sheer corruption and cronyism, then you are an economic liberal—and most likely a right-wing reactionary, regardless of how you might label yourself.
The time has come to recognize this distinction and choose which side of this fundamental divide you truly stand on. The merger of these contradictory ideologies has served only to confuse and disempower those who might otherwise recognize their own exploitation and organize accordingly. Understanding this difference is the first step toward authentic political consciousness.
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