I don’t generally refer to liberals as the left in my head, but I should have paid that more mind before I wrote that out Even left/right is a bit broad here, as many libertarians are naturally inclined to oppose increased militarization of police And they're generally considered socially left and economically right; I assume you're talking the social left But really everybody is wilding out right now regardless of affiliation, near as I can tell Yeah. Kneejerk generalization. I’m quite libertarian myself I always thought libertarians were considered the far right? They're generally in favour of allowing social expression of all sorts Which doesn't match current social right But they're far right in that they oppose govt overreach Which again gets messy because the current US "right" is often in favour of govt power Libertarianism is pretty broad, but generally speaking, libertarians are going to be focused on constitutionalism, small government, and wide personal liberties. Wide personal liberties being the core of the social far-left yeah, what a world we live in when the conservatives are poised to support big gov't. @seednode I don't think that's right... Libertarians that accept some existence of a state are around here. As a distribution a little bit of a right skew based on my sampling, but not very strong. A socially conservative view might be that gay marriage shouldn't be allowed Again, the terms are heavily overloaded Because there are segments of what would be considered the left that are at another extreme against egalitarianism And a socially conservative libertarian might say “gay marriage isn’t right, but the state shouldn’t be in the business of marriage anyway, so the state should not do anything about it anyway. “ ^ I should have added an additional qualifier to clarify I'm referring to relative to the current US zeitgeist This overloading of terms is yet another factor in how difficult discussing political views is can we all agree that everyone sucks US conservatism is pretty different than the rest of the world anyway. Hard to compare our conservatives to anywhere else, mostly due to topics like universal healthcare. Not to differentiate how much more conservative our mainstream liberal party is @thor I guess to clarify what I mean here is that a libertarian espousing conservative views towards government (small government, Constitutional literalist) might also have liberal views towards social expression (Supports or at least doesn't actively oppose gay marriage) without any sort of cognitive dissonance The overarching view is that people have the right to do as they will so long as it doesn't involve aggression towards others, hence the concept of the non aggression principle/NAP It becomes messier because there's a visceral satisfaction of labelling those you dislike as being some opposing tribe, and so those espousing truly intolerant views may be called "liberals" by the US conservatives, and so the term becomes derogatory and twisted into another meaning And that's not just a dig at the US "right", that's true of both major parties, and of course many other affiliations So nowadays you can't actually refer to political views without a thousand other nuances being dragged in by popular rhetoric Well I say nowadays but it's been true since at least the times of the Roman republic And no doubt long before that We've just had even more time to add baggage to terminology since That’s a good way of putting it. Part of the issue is that people have the tendency to believe that they can only be black/white on issues and those who disagree are incompetent. Which just isn't true. But I guess that's what happens after years of sludge slinging at opposing sides where moderates are slammed for being pushovers. See, moderate is yet another term that's loaded. It's in everyone's "best interest" to confuse terminology so that any labels have inherent negative connotations for anyone involved The best way to stop courteous discourse is to make sure everyone views anyone who disagrees as inferior and a threat Even better when they'll call themselves by a label that to them is positive but to you is an insult Ask a member of the GOP about the term "liberal" and they might use adjectives like "Weak, pansy, snowflake", but ask them about the term conservative and they'll say "Free thinker, independent, patriot" Ask a member of the DFL about the term conservative and they might say "hillbilly, white trash, racist", but ask them about liberals and they'll say similar to what a GOP member might say about conservative The labels mean everything to somebody, and so they mean nothing to anybody Remove yourself from the major political parties and news providers, and take a look at all of it. You'll see that many Americans often do agree on many of the same topics, but people can be spiteful. If a chance of enacting policy that will help everyone, but one 'side' more than the other, you're likely to see spite take hold and push the decision of the group would would benefit less, just to keep their 'enemies' from getting what they want.