Democrats today are more likely to say they want their party to become moderate than they were four years ago, according to a Gallup poll published Thursday. The survey, conducted in the first week of President Trump’s second term, gauged partisan preferences on the ideological direction of respondents’ respective parties. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 45 percent say they want their party to become more moderate, while 29 percent say they want the party to become more liberal, and 22 percent say they want the party to stay the same.
In the US, “liberal” is associated with New Deal era social liberalism and today is basically used as a synonym for “the left side of the political aisle”. This is complicated by two other factors:
On many (though not all!) topics, I’d say that the center of the European political spectrum is further left than on the US political spectrum.
Due to sheer chance, the colors are also the reverse of the European conventions. Europe has a set of political colors that get used to “bin” political parties across countries. Light blue is conservative, for example, light red is social-democratic, and so forth. The US used to use red and blue interchangeably, just because red, white, and blue were the colors on the flag and it had a nice theme around elections. They were often used when color-coding maps showing which state each candidate had won in Presidential elections, but there was no consistency. Around, I think, the Bush Jr elections, it became convention to use “red” and “blue” the opposite way they’re used in Europe – “red” is associated with the Republican Party, which is the right side of the aisle, and “blue” with the Democratic Party, the left side of the aisle.
kagis
Yeah, Wikipedia says that it was the 2000 elections where we got the colors assigned, so Bush Jr.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states
Oh, and another good bit: while it’s not as common in mainstream political discourse, an unqualified “libertarian” in Europe tends to refer to left-libertarianism, and an unqualified “libertarian” in the US tends to refer to right-libertarianism. And making it even more complicated, some people who would probably be called “libertarian” in the US today, like Cato, prefer to identify as “classical liberals” and are grouchy that they got the “liberal” label taken away from them by the social liberal crowd.
If the question of what “liberal” one is using is really confusing – like, if I’m writing for an audience that is pretty European, and writing something for which this really matters and is talking about the center-left in both the US and Europe, I’ll sometimes go out of my way to use “progressive” rather than “liberal”, which has more-or-less the same meaning in both Europe and the US.