Nah the thing we call liberalism is much milder than that. It’s like the watered down, we-do-trust-the-government-but-maybe-tone-it-down-a-little version of libertarianism. I mean the same meaning as eg the Economist gives the term.
I think maybe the term changed meaning in the US because for decades pretty much everyone agreed with it (no social democrats in sight, barring the occasional Bernie). A movement that ~everyone agrees with isn't much of a movement, is it?
It's a movement that won - won so thoroughly that nobody even remembers there was a war. But that means that, since nobody's fighting that war any more, the label (which has "winning" and even "being correct" attached to it in peoples' minds) is now up for grabs for other movements that want to win.
> It's a movement that won - won so thoroughly that nobody even remembers there was a war.
I don't think so. Some things might have been taken more or less for granted, but a lot of policies are now reopening that war again. See for example, the various threads about Chat Control in the EU recently on HN.
The US already has social security, medicare, medicaid. It is often just plain worse/more brutal than Western European countries but the difference isn't a radical reimagination of the social order.
> barring the occasional Bernie
Western Europe has likewise not imagined any new government welfare since the 1970s.
