this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2026
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Well, if the principles of Liberalism have to be picked and chosen - "some more of this some less of that" - rather than all being objectives to be maximized, with very different policies and outcomes for a political governing body depending on they picked and chose to maximize and minimize, then that definition itself isn't sufficient to define a Political Ideology.
When you wheel out this definition and claim "this is Liberalism" in the context of politics you're not actually presenting a political ideology, rather you're presenting a bag of ingredients to make political ideologies with, quite a broad range of political ideologies even since some of the ingredients in that bag don't actually work well with each other.
It makes total sense in the context of discussing politics for other people to point out concrete implementations of Liberalism as being "Liberalism", since those things are the actual political ideologies cooked from the Liberalism bag of ingredients, though in all fairness it would be more correct for them to say "this is what's made with with Liberalism" rather than "this IS Liberalism".
Anyway, this circles us around to my original point that when talking about politics you can't just point out to the Wikipedia definition of Liberalism and claim that's the one true definition of Liberalism because what's there is not a political ideology but just a bag of ingredients which can be used in quite arbitrary ways - that's kind of like pointing out at a bag of fruit, sugar, eggs and flour and claiming it's the one true Cherry Cake to dismiss other people pointing at actual cakes.
I don't think there's any ideology that you can unilaterally state "maximize every aspect and you'll be better, you don't need nuance". That's the entire reason why every political philosophy has myriad sects and schools of thought.
Your argument is the same one used to dismiss communism and socialism. In practice, their principles have led to bad outcomes.
It's odd to me to expect a political philosophy to have principles so precise that they don't require nuance when applying them.
My argument is that "Liberalism" is more akin to a domain of politics, such as "Leftwing", than to an actual Political Ideology such as "Socialism".
This is also consistent with the idea that there is a Freedom - Control political axis which is separate from the Left - Right political axis: Liberalism is basically being towards the Freedom side in that axis.
This means that you can't claim there is a real Liberal political ideology and that the various political ideologies which are deemed Liberal are not really Liberal because they're different things: Liberalism is a group of political ideologies defined around freedom and there is no such thing as "the one true implementation of it" because that's not a recipe, just a set of ideas which when combined in different ways and quantities (and, as I think we've both concluded in our discussion here, some of those liberal ideas don't play nice with others or in other words, some freedoms go against other freedoms), give rise to various different Liberal political ideologies.
So you (or whomever started this by pulling out that Wikipedia definition) are absolutely right in saying that the definition presented there is Liberalism and that the people who follow it are Liberals, what IMHO you are wrong in is in claiming that present day Liberals aren't following the "real" Liberalism: if there's one thing made clear from our discussion is that modern political ideologies which implement those ideas in whatever combination and orders and quantities (the examples I've been mainly talking about being those which put Property Rights above Liberty, such as Neoliberalism) are in fact Liberal since the political ideology they follow is a specific implementation of Liberalism.
So yeah, to wrap up the entire discussion, people who believe in modern ultra-capitalist hard-neoliberalism were Property Rights in the most trump Liberty are in fact Liberals -because the most hardcore and capitalist neoliberalism is made up from a specific combination of the principles of Liberalism - but then so are people who believe in Social Democracy because that political ideology too is made up from a (very different) combination of the principles of Liberalism.
This does mean that some Liberals are not in fact hard-right and can even be Leftwing (if, for example, they believe in Social Democracy), but in the present day most Liberals are hard-right because amongst the political ideologies that are made from the principles of Liberalism, Neoliberalism is much more dominant than Social Democracy.