Here in the UK, we have the Liberal Democrats party, who are kind of centre-left. I know that in Australia, for example, their “Liberal” party is basically the equivalent of our Conservatives, i.e. centre-right to full-right. I guess I just grew up with “liberal” meaning “leftish”.
This is the problem with words having both an academic definition and a colloquial one, which oftentimes have no correlation to each other beyond being the same word.
The ideology known as “Liberalism”, from which the political moniker “liberal” originates, is by definition a center-right ideology. It has no bearing on what different political parties want to dub themselves. Those names are arbitrary and not bound by the political definition of terms.
Here in the UK, we have the Liberal Democrats party, who are kind of centre-left. I know that in Australia, for example, their “Liberal” party is basically the equivalent of our Conservatives, i.e. centre-right to full-right. I guess I just grew up with “liberal” meaning “leftish”.
This is the problem with words having both an academic definition and a colloquial one, which oftentimes have no correlation to each other beyond being the same word.
The ideology known as “Liberalism”, from which the political moniker “liberal” originates, is by definition a center-right ideology. It has no bearing on what different political parties want to dub themselves. Those names are arbitrary and not bound by the political definition of terms.