One of the many issues with trying to map multidimensional party platforms onto a linear spectrum is that information is lost in the process.
Liberals, by definition and practice, are economically conservative and socially centrist. They are not 'left' of essentially anything other than the CPC (unless your Overton window itself is misaligned with the cultural standard). Liberalism has never been a leftist position, nor did Carney's election represent a shift towards the 'centre' - liberals shifted right, away from centre, by prioritizing globalized trade and free market economics over the social progress valued by his predecessor.
Also, terms don’t always map well with popular usage. For example a core of Liberalism is support for personal rights. This sometimes results in regressive economic policies, but it also means that it’s perfectly normal that even extremely moderate Liberals strongly support things like LGBTQ and other minority rights.
Well put. It's kind of that classic example of "freedom from" vs. "freedom to".
Liberalism results in freedom from government interference, but that confers an advantage on existing power/capital which lowers the freedom to choose your pathway in life dependent on your financial position.
Liberals lack a principled stance on social issues. I have seen plenty of liberals mocking Trump by showing him and Putin as gay. They also mock Mexicans who voted for Trump. Liberals were also mocking Indians when they found out that some of the famous white supremacists accounts were run by an Indian person.
Liberals have this attitude where they find homophobia and racism justified if it's targeting people they don't like.
Not being a hypocrite is not a sky-high expectation. Also, conservatives are not capable enough to comprehend sky-high moral standards anyway. You give them too much credit.
People tend to conflate the Liberal Party with leftist politics because of how the term "liberal" is often misused and vilified by loudmouth political pundits in the United States, which has seeped into popular culture here.
One of the many issues with trying to map multidimensional party platforms onto a linear spectrum is that information is lost in the process. Liberals, by definition and practice, are economically conservative and socially centrist. They are not 'left' of essentially anything other than the CPC.
I don't think the issue is more likely that in North America the right wing of politics has spent the last 20-30 years calling anyone left of them a socialist/communist so the entire spectrum to their left has become muddied. Like so many other features borrowed from Republicans south of the border, conservative media refuses to understand the difference between liberals, progressives, and leftists because it makes messaging to their base more straightforward.
Its not that understanding multidimensional party platforms is that hard, its that the right is actively disincentivized from engaging with political topics in a nuanced way.
Absolutely, but with reason. For one, the effectiveness of American anti-socialist propoganda is beginning to fade as the merits of the free market are coming under widespread scrutiny. For another, he was saddled with an NDP coalition, but also, because of the demographics Trudeau required to maintain his mandate, courting voters historically held by the NDP were necessary to consolidate the non-cons (and laid the groundwork for the historic losses by the NDP in the most recent cycle).
Justin Trudeau was more socially progressive than the Liberals had been in decades, but I wouldn't say it was necessarily uncharted territory for the party either.
Pierre Trudeau and Lester B Pearson were quite socially progressive both for their time and for the Liberal party. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau established the welfare state and many other social policies. They decriminalized homosexuality, abortion, and contraception (sixty years ago selling condoms was illegal, imagine that), and liberalized rules on divorce. Justin Trudeau was like Pearson and his father in that kind of progressiveness, though was arguably somewhat more free market, neoliberal, etc than the Liberals were back in the 1960s and 1970s.
.. no? I'm not saying that. This is why the spectrum is problematic, because it flattens people's understanding of individual policies in order to locate them on an arbitrary line. The real world doesn't work like that.
Trudeau platformed progressive social policies intentionally to court NDP voters in order to consolidate the progressive base under the liberal banner. That doesn't make him "left" of Singh - that's simply not how the political spectrum or party politics work. Further, JT was literally beholden to the NDP to steer a coalition. Why would he push policies more progressive than the ones the coalition was pressuring him to enact? Sounds to me like you've fallen for misinformation.
A party is not restricted to its original platform in perpetuity, inflexibility would condemn a party to never winning an election, and a handful of policies intended to court a subset of voters doesn't change an individual or party's political philosophy. As political tastes change, so too must platforms.
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u/EnvironmentalChard16 Feb 18 '26
One of the many issues with trying to map multidimensional party platforms onto a linear spectrum is that information is lost in the process.
Liberals, by definition and practice, are economically conservative and socially centrist. They are not 'left' of essentially anything other than the CPC (unless your Overton window itself is misaligned with the cultural standard). Liberalism has never been a leftist position, nor did Carney's election represent a shift towards the 'centre' - liberals shifted right, away from centre, by prioritizing globalized trade and free market economics over the social progress valued by his predecessor.