Honestly, do people in the US actually know what the words liberals, conservatives, communists, marxists, fascists, etc. even mean? The words seem to just have taken on the urbandictionary meanings and serve as expletives more than anything else. Seemingly long lost are their use as per definition in Meriam Webster or Cambridge Dictionary.
To be fair, the establishment dictionary definitions of those words are about as useless as the urbandictionary definitions.
Even the Wikipedia definitions have their issues, because they’re written in the register of liberal/bourgeois hegemony. Just look at “totalitarianism”: it’s Arendtian horsepoo theory. Hannah Arendt came from a wealthy family and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist, and her work was funded & promoted by the CIA.
Honestly, do people in the US actually know what the words liberals, conservatives, communists, marxists, fascists, etc. even mean? The words seem to just have taken on the urbandictionary meanings and serve as expletives more than anything else. Seemingly long lost are their use as per definition in Meriam Webster or Cambridge Dictionary.
To be fair, the establishment dictionary definitions of those words are about as useless as the urbandictionary definitions.
Even the Wikipedia definitions have their issues, because they’re written in the register of liberal/bourgeois hegemony. Just look at “totalitarianism”: it’s Arendtian horsepoo theory. Hannah Arendt came from a wealthy family and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist, and her work was funded & promoted by the CIA.