Leftism Is Not Liberalism. Here Are the Differences.

Commentary from Dennis Prager on The Daily Signal.com:

What is the difference between a leftist and a liberal?

Answering this question is vital to understanding the crisis facing America and the West today. Yet few seem able to do it. I offer the following as a guide.

Here’s the first thing to know: The two have almost nothing in common.

On the contrary, liberalism has far more in common with conservatism than it does with leftism. The left has appropriated the word “liberal” so effectively that almost everyone—liberals, leftists, and conservatives—thinks they are synonymous.

But they aren’t. Let’s look at some important examples.

Race: This is perhaps the most obvious of the many moral differences between liberalism and leftism.

The essence of the liberal position on race was that the color of one’s skin is insignificant. To liberals of a generation ago, only racists believed that race is intrinsically significant. However, to the left, the notion that race is insignificant is itself racist.

Thus, the University of California officially regards the statement, “There is only one race, the human race,” as racist.

For that reason, liberals were passionately committed to racial integration. Liberals should be sickened by the existence of black dormitories and separate black graduations on university campuses.

Capitalism: Liberals have always been pro-capitalism, recognizing it for what it is: the only economic means of lifting great numbers out of poverty.

Liberals did often view government as able to play a bigger role in lifting people out of poverty than conservatives, but they were never opposed to capitalism, and they were never for socialism. Opposition to capitalism and advocacy of socialism are leftist values.

Nationalism: Liberals deeply believed in the nation-state, whether their nation was the United States, Great Britain, or France.

The left has always opposed nationalism because leftism is rooted in class solidarity, not national solidarity. The left has contempt for nationalism, seeing in it intellectual and moral primitivism at best, and the road to fascism at worst.

Liberals always wanted to protect American sovereignty and borders. The notion of open borders would have struck a liberal as just as objectionable as it does a conservative.  [read more]

What Mr. Prager calls a liberal is what sometimes are called the Old Left—eg FDR, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, etc. Although, Woodrow Wilson was a racist so he doesn’t completely fit the definition of a liberal. Senator Joe Biden is a liberal. The New Left got started somewhere in the 1960s.