GarbageShoot [he/him]

Dictionaries do not exhaustively discuss topics and the scope of meanings of terms, they give you a colloquially-oriented summary of what they mean to help you, for example, parse a conversation that uses the word in passing.

John Locke being a liberal isn’t an “alternative fact”, you’re just a troglodyte.

Take it up with oxford

My point is that you are misusing the dictionary as a replacement for actually knowing about a subject. People still call John Locke a liberal, and they do it because fields have definitions that aren’t colloquial.

This discussion is about the current meaning of Liberalism in today’s political context.

Look anywhere outside of America and it readily refers to sniveling market-fetishists. In America it only implicitly does because everyone is a market fetishist.

If one is trying to define liberalism against feudalism, that definition is fine, but it’s just redditor sophomorism to act like a dictionary is a replacement for an actual historical or academic definition of a political tendency.

It’s basically just “classical liberalism and neoliberalism”, and whether politically illiterate Americans use that word that way doesn’t matter very much from an analytical standpoint, because in political science, history, philosophy, and even just popular discourse in most other countries, the term “liberal” mainly has that meaning.