Robert said:
RL: You have to at the very least support Social Liberalism.
Tulio: Do you mean Liberalism? Did you mean Fiscal Liberalism?
I do not mean fiscal liberalism at all. The heck with that. In most of the world, classic liberalism means neoliberalism or laissez faire economics. However, here in the US the left wing of the Democratic Party somehow ended up getting called liberals. Somehow out of all of this, the term Social Liberalism arose as an economic system. Bottom line is that Liberalism means something different in the US than it does in most of the rest of the world.
Social Liberalism is a confusing term, but this is what the liberals in the US push. In terms of economics, it means ideally the sort of economics and politics that liberal Democrats push – the New Deal, the Great Society and all of that. Pretty much Keynesian regulated capitalism with a good safety net. They just happen to call that economic system Social Liberalism. There is a similar system in Canada called something else but it is more leftwing. Both of them are headed away from the center towards Social Democracy, but Social Liberalism is nowhere near Social Democracy, it’s just headed in that direction. Social Democracy is a lot more Left than Social Liberalism.
