The party is splitting between liberals and illiberal authoritarian leftists.
I do hate to see this.
There was nothing remotely liberal about the "liberals" in the first place.
What we're witnessing is the natural outcome of the authoritarian statist mindset that they all share....The oldsters have only been more on the down-low about it.
"Liberal" is not, and has never been "authoritarian". Those are what we call "opposites".
As long as discourse is dishonest this shit will go on shitting.
Wrong....Progressives stole the term "liberal" (which to that point had always meant libertarian) back in the 1930s, when it became evident that they were total authoritarians...Cozying up to identity groups over the last several decades gave their dictatorial attitudes an air of moral superiority, phony as it was.
Again, what we're seeing out of the new breed is that progressive/socialistic authoritarianism flushed out in the open for all to see.
PoliSci 101 .... strike that, PoliSci 99, the pre-course for those not ready .... "Progressives" were
already gone by 1930. "Liberal" has never meant "libertarian" (it's older), nor has it ever meant, nor is it capable of meaning, "authoritarian" since Liberalism is its
polar opposite.
You are correct that the term "Liberal" was stolen but that was a bit later, in the "Red Scare" of the Booga-Booga Times, also known as the McCarthy Era, when Republicans who had been shut out of the White House for five straight elections, tried to obfuscate the philosophy that
birthed this country by trying to associate it with the booga-booga "commies" and ergo "the left" --- which is not what Liberal means anyway. George H.W. Bush notably reiterated the same bullshit when he snarled the adjective "Liberal" at his opponent Dukakis, as if it were some kind of slur, because honest discourse was never in the playbook of Lee Atwater.
Not only is all that grossly dishonest, it's philosophical
treason.