this ain't it fam. it's the same smug armchair psychology we dunk on redditors for doing.

The liberal instinct is to appear "not too crazy" and to appease conservatives with compromise because otherwise the conservatives will get violent. Thus, when we show up we are "making them look bad" and "ruining their moderate image" through guilt by association. It doesn't help that they never appease us with compromise but only ever reserve compromise for those to their right. This is because they always imagine themselves to be "left of center" and thus compromising with anyone further to their left is "going too far" or "becoming a tankie." or whatever. The cherry on top is that they don't understand that both the liberal and conservative political classes are part of a joint capitalist class dictatorship. They will unironically say "you need both wings to fly" while not realizing the body of the plane itself only carries the capitalists and drops bombs on the workers.

I thought it was because, despite wanting things like universal healthcare and welfare supports, they don't want to let go of capitalism. I'm not from here, and not all the way to where you are, but that's my outside view.

for any lib lurkers, i recommend reading liberalism: a counter-history by domenico losurdo

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.

Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

Look, if they thought our politics were better, they'd agree with us. So it's something else.

ok we show up