Political Memes

It depends on the person. For some liberalism is capitalism and leftism is socialism. The real cut is for some any capitalism is liberalism and any socialism is communist. So folks who want managed capitalism (regulations) for like selling crap but want social safety nets (government run programs) for necessary things like education and healthcare. Whelp one side says they are way right liberalists (classical) capitalist facists and the other says they are way left radical communist facists. Those who embrace the centerism (not very central now due to the overton window) disagree but are usually willing to give one way or another to get close to what they want. In the us they are called democrats (sorta, again, overton window).

Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism.

In the US, socialism has historically been shunned and not represented in the political sphere, to the point that the right started using "liberal" derisively and associated the term with socialism. Internationally, the term retains more of its original meaning, for example, in the UK the "Liberal Democrats," are more like libertarians.

Liberals are generally conservative, meaning they support the status quo or gradual change. US "conservatives" are sometimes more accurately called reactionaries or regressives, because they don't just want to preserve the status quo but to actively roll back progress that has already been made.

Because leftism is a very broad term, it's difficult to define exactly what leftists believe in an uncontroversial way, but generally speaking leftists support radical change away from capitalism.

Liberalism is the political project which gave us the 18th century liberal revolutions of for instance, the US and France. It centers invidivual freedoms like free speech, association, and the right to own and use private property without interference from the government. It can be seen as a reaction by the land owning middle classes of the 17th and 18th centuries to the power of divine right monarchs, and is the founding principal of both the Democratic and Republican parties. It centralizes human rationality and debate of ideas as means of finding true paths to the future.

Leftism is an umbrella term which holds a few groups in it (Most notably Social democrats, Communist Socialist, and Communist Anarchist ideologies). It can be traced back through history to many times and places, but modern forms of it originate in the utopian socialism of post-revolution France. Leftism promotes the primacy of human well being and equality (or at least more equally distributed material wealth) over property rights. Generally this takes the form of support for the abolition of class society (owner class vs worker class), belief in worker-centered policy, trade unionism, worker cooperativity, and internationalism... but again, it is a big umbrella, and there is a lot of deviation from this formula. In place of rationalism and debate of ideas, Leftism generally centers material conditions and material outcomes of policy.

The cause of the confusion:

Here you go: https://youtu.be/33p-8QHZpzY

liberals tend to be democrats and support democrat views. leftists want something better and tend to vote democratic as there's not really a better option. liberals tend to be center, even center right, while leftists are actually on the left

"Worker solidarity as long as the worker in question agrees with me about pretty much everything"

The real idiots are the liberals, who knew they had to capitulate to the left to win and refused anyway.

I don’t even think you can call them leftists at this point. Being a leftist is fundamentally about worker solidarity. This is something else entirely. It’s a purity spiral death cult!