this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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I know a lot of liberals that fit the first definition. The only real difference being they enjoy symbolic empathy.
The people I see living in my neighborhood with the "all are welcome here" pride + blm flags in their yard; the same people that show up at our town hall meetings fighting public transit, affordable housing, housing for the homeless.
They spend a lot of their energy having to explain why "maintaining the character and culture" of their neighborhood is all they want. Sometimes I prefer the rascist I grew up with in the south. You don't have to spend 30 minutes to realize their garbage people. They at least tell you straight up.
There aren't any liberals that would like Trump if he was a Democrat. Because he doesn't do the symbolic empathy. That's why they loved Obama so much. They used him like a BLM flag in their yard.
Don't believe me? Go to a city hall meeting in your "Liberal" city for a couple weeks.
Edit: A lot of people that have never been to a city hall meeting in their city.
I mean, a lot of people like to pretend Berkeley, CA is a liberal city. I don't think they realize that the hippies were mostly kids of conservatives who wanted to do drugs and not go to war. That's about it. The summer of love was just that, a summer. The hippies turned into yuppies and traded weed and magic mushrooms for cocaine in the 80s
That movement was largely a place for young liberals, interested in resistance to Vietnam, to go and be useless and not become socialist. It was a means of keeping them separated from a growing militant resistance to the apartheid in America (Malcom X, Black Pathers, etc).
If you're smoking weed and telling everyone "just give peace a chance" you can stand idle as the violent state attacks black neighborhoods for mass incarceration and condemn "violence on all sides". Which is just allowing the violence of the oppressive state to be justified.
Being against bad things while telling everyone else "not yet" when they try to fight to stop the bad things. That's American liberalism in a nutshell.
Hell, listen to Kings frustration.
Or in song form by Phil Ochs: https://youtu.be/3cdqQ2BdgOA
Pointing to historical examples that liberals of the past failed on is hard for modern day liberals though. They know the Jim Crow south was bad. They know the Vietnam war was bad. But they're unable to realize it until after the fact. Israel took them 2 years of genocide to start acknowledging.
Yep, that's why they killed Fred Hampton (and Malcolm and Martin, but Fred was openly socialist, well read, well spoken, and unifying) They were terrified of someone like him
Let the hippies have their peace and love, but as soon as someone comes along with a unifying message of action, and the community is on his side? Time to put an end to that with the quickness.
Yes, they're both right wing ideologies.
Yes, people who actively show up to fight against things they profess to believe in are bad.
People showing up to city council meetings isn't a representative sample, though.
It's most definitely a representative sample of the people that show up to vote in democratic primaries though. Which largely shapes politics
I'm not sure city council attendees are representative of voters. You'd have to convince me of that.