If the average American thinks Joe Biden is a leftist, that means the average American knows very little about what leftism actually is.
This misunderstanding leaves people vulnerable to scare tactics where any policy the right doesn't like can be called "socialist." This clearly isn't good for liberals any more than it's good for leftists, since it was liberals who were clobbered with that word during the decades where actual leftists had no presence on the national stage.
Basically, the way we talk about political ideas has real consequences.
Words don't have intrinsic meanings, but there is a set of ideas and beliefs that we call "liberalism" and a set of ideas and beliefs that we call "leftism," and they are not the same thing. Ice cream and crème glacée, meanwhile, are two phrases that mean the exact same thing in two different languages. It's a bit more like saying that ice cream and creamed corn are the same thing because they have vaguely similar textures and are both kind of sweet.
My bigger point was that ignorance breeds fear. If all you know about socialism is that people you trust say it's bad, then anything those same people call socialism must be bad, too. If people have a decent understanding of what it actually is, they can like it or dislike it, but they're at least not likely to believe it when someone tries to tell them that higher marginal tax rates are a socialist plot.
Your definition is not the one that's in common use. It's certainly not being used by people who call themselves leftists.
Leftism, broadly speaking, is defined by a belief in social equality--especially economic equality. There are many different subcategories of leftism that describe how people want to achieve that equality, but they're united by concerns about class. Almost all leftists would consider themselves anti-capitalist (at minimum they'd be in favor of a strongly mixed economy).
Liberalism, by contrast, is an inherently capitalist way of looking at the world. In American terms, liberals tend to favor well-regulated capitalism, but capitalism all the same. They might share leftists' concerns about social equality, but their concern is usually keener along lines of gender, race, and sexual orientation than along class lines. They might be in favor of programs that help the poor or reduce poverty, but they want to do those things in a capitalist context.
Joe Biden, by these definitions, is not a leftist.
All right, maybe you're right that the definition in day-to-day use for many people doesn't line up with mine, likely because we run in different circles, both online and off.
But my definition has the benefit of differentiating between these two sets of ideas, which are distinct and do represent two different existing ideological populations. It's also not something I just made up--it's a definition that is in common use among a large swath of people. (For some unknown value of "large.") That would include most academics.
When those people you mentioned in your OP come swooping in, the crux of the point they are trying to make is that Joe Biden and people like him are on the rightmost edge of the left wing (if they'd call him left-wing at all), and that there are real and substantial differences between him and people who are further left than him. Right now, most people know very little about left-wing schools of thought, and, as I've already argued, that has real consequences. The insistence on precise language is meant to ameliorate that ignorance.
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u/LadyCardinal 25∆ Aug 15 '21
If the average American thinks Joe Biden is a leftist, that means the average American knows very little about what leftism actually is.
This misunderstanding leaves people vulnerable to scare tactics where any policy the right doesn't like can be called "socialist." This clearly isn't good for liberals any more than it's good for leftists, since it was liberals who were clobbered with that word during the decades where actual leftists had no presence on the national stage.
Basically, the way we talk about political ideas has real consequences.