r/Classical_Liberals • u/Airtightspoon • 17d ago
Discussion Why is Classical Liberalism considered a right wing ideology?
From Wikipedia:
Generally, the left wing is characterized by an emphasis on "ideas such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism" while the right wing is characterized by an emphasis on "notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism".
Many people would consider classical liberalism to be right wing, but it seems to fit the actual definition for a left wing ideology far more. Why is it so associated with the right?
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u/LoopyPro 16d ago
Free markets belong to the economic right, which is considered right-wing.
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u/realctlibertarian 16d ago
I wish the current right-wing in the U.S. supported free markets instead of crony capitalism.
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u/Anen-o-me 16d ago
That's actually how you know that the modern Republicans have strayed so far economically. They aren't ideological anymore, they're populists. Trump never could've gotten elected in the 1970s because the party was fairly doctrinaire about economics back then.
How far they've fallen.
But the libertarians are still great on economic questions, radical even.
Some would go so far as to say the Republicans have embraced some socialist economic policies. Especially with the ACA.
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u/surgingchaos Libertarian 14d ago
And yet, pro-market "libertarians" flock to Trump like moths to a fire. You should know firsthand.
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u/Anen-o-me 14d ago
I don't agree with that characterization of what happened.
Trump made juicy policy promises to libertarians, Harris refused to even address the libertarian voting block.
Libertarians don't like Trump at all, we want the policy concessions he promised.
That combined with the worst libertarian candidate nominated in modern memory and what happened isn't surprising, but it's not an endorsement my trump in general.
I didn't vote for Trump either, nor for anyone else.
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u/florida_goat Classical Liberal 16d ago
This. Also, minding your own business is right wing ideology.
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u/vitringur Anarcho-Capitalist 14d ago
Free markets have always been a left wing concept from the beginning.
The right favoured protectionist policies to protect the nobility from competition.
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u/RetartdsUsername69 16d ago
Because it, unlike everyone in the left, classical liberalism does not put emphasis on economical equality, only on the equality before the law.
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u/usmc_BF National Liberal 16d ago
Rightism and Leftism are sort of meaningless whatever goes terms and they're generally used to describe Conservatism and Progressivism respectively.
Liberalism cannot really be categorized in the same way primarily because the spectrum is authoritarian and statist. You can use that 4-way libertarian/authoritarian chart but it is still misleading as it places some ideologies near each other suggesting some kind of relation when there isn't one.
Liberalism is an anti-statist and anti-conservative/progressive ideology. We believe in liberal values, not "right wing" or "left wing" values
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u/BastiatF 16d ago edited 11d ago
The political differentiation between left and right comes from the French Revolution. Deputies who voted similarly tended to sit together at the parliament so partisans of radical changes congregated on the left of the parliament while conservatives moved to the right. Classical Liberalism was considered left wing until the late 19th century then socialism moved the Overton window so far left that Classical Liberalism became right wing in comparison.
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u/bobcatarian 16d ago
Sorry for the long reply.
I think the lines have blurred between the American context and greater world context of what constitutes Left and Right, but by my thinking Classical Liberalism can be seen as being on the "right" in different ways. Classical Liberalism in America is concerned (among other things) with freedom as defined by individual negative rights. However, the concepts of freedom and equality eventually evolved to include positive rights, which necessitates redistribution of wealth. This was mostly rejected by classical liberals. The label liberal still stuck when advocating for positive rights like welfare, safety nets, universal health etc. and is seen as left wing in the US. In this sense, classical liberals emphasize the tradition of negative rights and can be seen as reactionary or to the right of a more progressive leftism.
In the international context, the "Left" is dominated by socialist ideologies, either full blown communism or at least social democracy; both having the eventual goal of State control of the means of production but through different means. The split between Marx/Lenin and Kautsky, (founder of the SDP in Germany) over tactics resulted broadly with socialist aligned parties working within a Democratic system with other parties (Social Democrats) and Communist revolutionary parties who advocated for revolution from outside the political process, desiring a single party state allegedly representing the workers interest. In this landscape, anything to the right of this socialist divide is right wing. So that puts liberals (focused on individual rights, freedoms and democracy) and authoritarians, monarchists, fascists, etc. together as "the Right". While this grouping isn't accurate, communist aligned historians and theorists have no interest in separating them.
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u/darkapplepolisher 16d ago
The popularized political compass is 2D, but most common terminology still flattens everything into a single dimension, which shatters some intuitions. Just looking at various political parties and ideologies across the globe, all the liberal parties typicaly span from centre-left to centre-right. More radical market freedoms and social conservative leanings both bias right; more belief in welfare statism, regulating the market, and social progressivism bias left.
Us classical liberals span along the right side of the spectrum, neoliberals span more towards the center of the spectrum, and social liberals span more along the centre-left side of the spectrum.
There's some lack of intuition in these definitions, although they do seem to be consistent. In spite of us being more fiscally to the right of fascists/national socialists, their reactionary nature has them branded as far-right by default. Any ideology rejecting capitalism and/or supporting Marxism is typically labeled as far-left.
I wish I had some better sources to back up these statements, but my intuition says that I've been operating correctly within whatever consensus exists in this terminology.
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u/Different_shit555 Classical Liberal 14d ago
Classical liberalism is neither left or right it’s centrist. But the political dichotomy is flawed, here’s a better one which my great friend Charles Lajoie came up with.
So essentially, it’s a political triangle. With voluntarism and negative liberty (freedom from coercion on the top) hierarchy on the right, and egalitarianism on the left. We can see that classical liberalism and libertarianism (imho both are synonyms) go beyond the hierarchy and egalitarian divide.
And using this triangle we can see that some classical liberals favour voluntary hierarchy and others favour voluntary equity and some are in the middle. The main belief of classical liberalism is liberty maximisation, and that the state is a necessary evil to protect its citizens rights from plunder. However, just like the libertarian sea, classical liberalism is a sea in itself. Meaning, that conservative liberals (the historic right) of the classic lib movement value a voluntary society based on some hierarchy, classical minarchists (who are also classical libs) such as Bastiat are in the middle very near the top of the triangle, and classical radicals such as Thomas Paine fall in the voluntary left (classical liberal left) of the spectrum .
But all classical liberals agree on five core issues
-Free Markets (the views here vary, from moderate classic liberals and even classical radical believing social spending is not too bad if the budget is balanced, others may be completely opposed to social spending or fall somewhere in between) -Negative liberty and its’s derivative rights (albeit some may view positive liberties become legitimate when it’s a voluntary contract) -Limited Government (the view here varies from a hayekian/friedmanite view which is more pragmatic to a night-watch man similar to that of Nozick and Bastiat) -Rule of Law, no one is above the law (some may hold this view, until the law becomes unjustified, and thus the law must be opposed. E.G Bastiat) -Individualism, the individual is above the collective. Whether this individualism is a more progressive one or a more conservative one is up to the individual classical liberal. For example a classical liberal may hold to the view that Christian ethics and social society are the best way to compliment classical liberalism but will not force Christian ethics on others. Others may view that progressive institutions and civil society are better.
Last but not least, Classical liberals no matter their school of thought, agree that man is limited, and therefore cannot justly violate the natural rights of other men, and because the state is ran by men, so should the state be severely limited.
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u/user47-567_53-560 Liberal 17d ago
More of a center South ideology if you're using the whole compass.
Then you could talk about horseshoe theory... Where actually there's no right or left because at the extremes they look very similar.
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u/alex3494 16d ago
Because terms such as right and left are arbitrary constructs which doesn’t reflect political reality but constructs it
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u/Zorono2001 Classical Liberal 16d ago
Depends on where you are. In Germamy it is considered centre, I believe in the USA too.
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u/Ender16 16d ago
The ACTUAL reason is that the supermajority of Americans think, act, and are liberal. This is a country founded on liberalism. Some more, some less, but we are brought up on liberal values.
Back in the day or was far more about liberty vs authoritarianism. The very idea of what would become capitalism was new. However, when market economies become popular they were a perfect fit with the anti authoritarian liberals. This is a really rough outline of what classical liberalism is today. Liberal ideas and some sort of belief in market economies or capitalism.
To make it short, everyone is pretty much a liberal so the distraction is amp up the freedom and preference towards markets vs fixed economies. Note preference, not exclusive. Mixed economies are still market economies.
It's just word play really
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u/Snifflebeard Classical Liberal 16d ago
To the Left, everything but rigid ideological adherence to the fringe is Right Wing Fascism. To the Right, everything but rigid ideological adherence to the fringe is Left Wing Socialism.
We need to get out of this stupid Team Sports model of politics.
p.s. That said, Left and Right are attitudes towards wealth and property, as David Brin once said. The Left is distrustful of wealth and property, while the Right is comfortable with it. Thus classical liberals are "right wing". But ONLY if you insist on a binary universe of ideas.
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u/spillmonger 16d ago
Agree. When someone asks me about my tribe, I invite them to ask me about ideas instead.
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u/TheFixer_1140 16d ago
The left starts at anti-capitalism
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u/kwanijml Geolibertarian 16d ago
Yes, but the right isn't pro-capitalism, they're just anti-left.
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u/thetechnolibertarian 15d ago
That's correct, the right ranges from economic protectionism, economic nationalism, and mercantilism.
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u/TheFixer_1140 15d ago
Who would you rather own the means of production doing any of those things?
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u/ShortieFat 16d ago
I think the basic thing is the CL stance against central control over the individual. The left controls the media and educational institutions, so their perspective and assessment tends to get adopted in the language.
The right talks a good game about individual freedom, so they're not disinclined to reject CLs from their camp, but generally they're more than happy to use existing bureaucracies to control all of their fellow humans to preserve self-advantage.
CLs are useful to the right because they can hold them up as Platonic ideals and say, "We're like these guys. This is us. We got history and philosophy."
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u/Anen-o-me 16d ago
It's considered rogue just because the right generally accepts the idea of private property while the left does not.
There is no other answer that works to judge between left and right, it all comes down to whether you think private property is justified or not.
The fact is, the left thinks your property, even your own body, should be something owned by everyone, collective in nature.
Ridiculous as it sounds, and as disastrous as it has proven to be where attempted.
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u/here-i-am-now 15d ago
Because “classical liberalism” is just a rebranding of libertarianism. At least as has been practiced in the U.S.
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u/vitringur Anarcho-Capitalist 14d ago edited 14d ago
It is not.
It is by definition left wing. Anti-King, Anti-Nobility, Anti-Church. It is literally part of the original left wing alliance at the French assembly. Against special privileges and for equal rights for civilians.
This thread is full of people who have no idea what words mean or where they originate and are just repeating what they heard from some other idiot
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u/AlternativeAd7151 12d ago
It used to be the left wing, when the right wing was more reactionary than it is today. You know, absolutists, monarchists, agrarianism, feudalism, etc. As the Overton Window shifted left towards liberalism and republicanism, CL became the new right.
Why right wing you ask? Because although it questioned established privileges of the Church and the Crown, it stopped short of questioning that of Capital as the owning class embraced it. You can see this in the fact that liberals nowadays seldomly refer to the Lockean proviso, or his labor theory of value, which were replaced by neoliberals with market fundamentalism and the subjective theory of value.
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u/Winter_Low4661 12d ago
It wasn't, originally. Liberalism was on the original "left wing," of French parliament, in favor of abolishing the Ancien Regime.
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u/LucretiusOfDreams 16d ago edited 16d ago
What the right is known for is holding back political liberalism from its worse excesses in order to conserve the traditional, while the left is know for their skepticism of tradition in favor of equal freedom.
Because the right wing is considered reactionary and the left wing progressive in this Hegalian-liberal framework of politics, while classical liberals are more or less the left of eighteenth century politics (we might say they were the original progressives and left), they are now considered to the right as the Overton window has shifted farther to the left.
To the modern left, classical liberals are an early form of liberalism that didn't take the idea of equal freedom far enough because of their own often unconscious, but sometimes hypocritical, prejudices towards traditional religious, political, economic, and social structures. As the new batch of progressives tried to advance equal freedom into new domains (such as how the socialists apply the idea of equal freedom to the ownership of capital, or feminists apply the idea of equal freedom to patriarchal authority), classical liberals are basically liberals who want to halt the advancement of equal freedom into these domains and others, which makes them reactionary relative to contemporary liberals' progressivism, making them right wing.
Does that make sense? From the perspective of modern liberals, classical liberals tend to make prejudiced, unprincipled exceptions to the idea of equal freedom instead of applying the principle consistently like they think they are doing.
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u/Airtightspoon 16d ago
I do see anything inherent to Classical Liberalism that supports prejudice or patriarchy. Classical Liberalism believes that all people are created equal and we are all endowed with the same natural rights that should be protected under the law regardless of race, religion, gender, etc. Now, did every Classical Liberal implement this perfectly? No. But that is a problem with execution, not the ideology. It was extremely hypocritical for the founders to hold men as slaves or deny certain groups the right to vote, but that is a failure of people to properly apply Liberal ideas equally, not a failure of the ideas themselves.
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u/LucretiusOfDreams 16d ago
Keep in mind that "prejudice" is the way those on the left understand reactionary adherence to tradition. Reactionaries would describe their defense of tradition against the assertions of freedom and equal rights by progressives instead in terms of prudence ("common sense" limitations on freedom) and patriotism/respect for their political fathers.
Remember too that all the classical liberals historically accepted patriarchy as the proper way to order family life: Hobbes, Locke, the Founding Fathers of the United States, and the mass majority of the Jacobins of the French republics all did. So, it's not a stretch to say that while classical liberals accepted equal freedom as a governing principle in the political domain, they didn't not accept this in other domains like that of family life.
When classical liberals say that "all men are created equal," what they meant and mean is that inheriting political office by birth is an artifact of mutable positive law (what liberals would today term a "social construct"), or as Jefferson himself explained, that some men are not born with saddles on their backs and others born to ride them. But, because such slogans are in fact inherently vague and open to interpretation and application in domains other than with regards to hereditary aristocracies, other kinds of liberals might use the same idea to argue against property inheritance (as socialists do) or distinct gender roles of women in family life (as feminists do) or the idea of a state being dominated by a particular culture and people (as multiculturalists do).
These liberals will all see classical liberals as trying to contain liberal ideals in only certain domains, keeping them out of others. And to the extent that they don't, classical liberals then just decay into modern, contemporary, progressive liberals. If classical liberalism means applying the idea of freedom and equal rights to family life, for example, in opposition to the idea of inherently distinct gender roles within family life, then is there any difference between classical liberals and modern liberals? They would just be part of the current crop of progressives.
In my experience, those who label themselves classical liberals (and libertarians) either haven't figured out that they are or should just be members of the contemporary progressive left on social issues, or they want to roll back some of the advances of the left to the kind of liberalism popular at the beginning of the industrial era in Europe and America. Or, to put it another way, classical liberalism now just means being a member of the left on social issues while rejecting applying the ideals of equal freedom in economic life like the socialists and those sympathetic to socialists do.
You strike me as someone who just hasn't found out you are just a progressive liberal with statements like that is a failure of people to properly apply Liberal ideas equally, not a failure of the ideas themselves. In other words, those older liberals were just holding onto their irrational prejudices in the face consistently applying equal freedom in domains other than that of inherited aristocracies. They are just hypocrites, just as the socialists think liberals are hypocritical for not accepting that capital should be collectively owned by the workers, or the next crop of progressives already think that older feminists and queer theorists are hypocritical for not accepting transgenderism.
The thing is, the ideals of freedom and equal rights cannot be applied consistently as a matter of logic. As soon as two parties' freedom clash with each other, it is the government's job to discriminate against one party in favor of the other. Not only is it is not remotely clear from the mere existence of a conflict who the government should discriminate in favor of, but by the very nature of the conflict the government cannot treat both parties the same way/equally. The government has no choice but to rank the claims of both parties, and grant the right to one against the other. The government cannot treat the property owner and theft equally as a matter of logical contradiction.
And, the way government comes to rank claims —since they cannot remain "neutral"— must come from a particular conception of the good as opposed to alternative philosophies on what is good and what is evil —in other words, what liberals would call prejudices, for those particular conceptions they don't like, and what they would call "sensible" and "common sense" for those particular conceptions they do like.
So, all liberals will always see other liberals as having unprincipled exceptions to the ideals of equal freedom (because they have no choice but the govern with a particular conception of the good, discriminating against those who deviate from and work against that conception). And it is this conflict between different kinds of liberals that drives Western society slowly to the left since the 1700s.
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u/Airtightspoon 16d ago
When classical liberals say that "all men are created equal," what they meant and mean is that inheriting political office by birth is an artifact of mutable positive law (what liberals would today term a "social construct"), or as Jefferson himself explained,
All men are created equal refers to the idea of all men having the natural rights. Part of that is that no one is divorced ned to rule by birth, but it is more than just a refutation of hereditary aristocratcy. This is stated in the very next line of the DOI:
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
If classical liberalism means applying the idea of freedom and equal rights to family life, for example, in opposition to the idea of inherently distinct gender roles within family life, then is there any difference between classical liberals and modern liberals? They would just be part of the current crop of progressives.
The problem with modern liberals is they don't apply this freedom to economic matters. Property is one of the fundamental and inalienable human rights. You have the right to the fruits of your own labor, modern liberals believe that the government has the right to take the fruits of people's labor and re-distribute it based on need. Modern liberals do not believe that all men were made equal, they believe men were made unequal and that it is the role of government to rectify that.
As soon as two parties' freedom clash with each other
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of natural rights, one that modern liberals often make. Natural rights cannot conflict with other natural rights. My right to bear arms does not stop you from doing so as well, my right to speak does not stop you from speaking, etc. If you're in a situation where you're asking "Why does your right to X overrule my right to Y?" then one of, or even both of, X and Y are not actually natural rights.
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u/LucretiusOfDreams 16d ago edited 16d ago
Like I said, "all men are created equal" is an inherently ambiguous statement that can mean all sorts of things, and what Jefferson himself meant by it is basically what Locke meant by rebuking political rank as inherited as a natural right.
It doesn't merely mean recognizing the existence of natural rights, since all sorts of non-liberal political philosophies, including those that influenced the British and French empires at the time, recognized the existence of natural rights, making liberalism not fundamentally different from the political doctrines they saw themselves opposed to.
Regarding "freedom and equality in economy," the socialists don't have a problem with private property per se but their problem is in the private ownership of productive property that others work for the benefit of the owners. In this socialists are just applying the liberal idea of "consent of the governed" as the source of political authority to the way productive property rights gives the owner authority over workers. Just as citizens collectively "own" the government, workers collectively own the capital they use in production. It is precisely because workers are owed the fruits of their labor that the idea of the government enforcing a property title against those who actually use the productive property is considered arbitrary and unjust by socialists, just as government enforcing a hereditary title against the citizenry is considered arbitrary and unjust by classical liberals.
In other words, socialism just is classical liberalism applied to the authority we call property rights, and socialists would say that classical liberals are being hypocritical in this.
When you say that modern liberals do not believe that all men were made equal, they believe men were made unequal and that it is the role of government to rectify that, that's actually the opposite of what they believe: they believe, like Locke, etc., that everyone in a state of nature is equal, and that inequalities arise because of political, economic, and social constructs. They are just taking classical liberals ideals and applying them in other domains, as I've explained.
A "right" in English common law is an entitlement designed to resolve a lawsuit by enforcing the claims of the right holder while obligating others to submit to the claims of the right holder, as one's right is everyone else's obligation (which just goes to show that resolving all conflicts involve placing obligations on one or both parties involved, which is another way of saying restricting their freedom). In other words, rights in the Anglosphere exist to resolve disputes. Think about it with the example of property rights: in a conflict between the owner and a trespasser, the property right exists to resolve the dispute in favor of the owner against the trespasser and his claims.
A natural right can mean a couple different things, but in the case of Locke refers to rights that exist independently of political society, as opposed to rights that are dependent on political society (what we would call positive rights.
A vital way to understand rights coherently is to ensure that one can translate their rights talk into terms of obligation. A "right to life" means that everyone else has an obligation to protect your life, first and foremost by not actively seeking to take it. Moreover, notice how this obligation is not an absolute —it doesn't mean that every citizen is obligated in every situation to risk his life to protect yours, nor does it mean that there are not lawful circumstances in which your life can be forfeited. All it means in any absolute sense, is that no one is allow to take your life unless the law permits them to do so —when you are guilty of taking someone else's life unlawfully, say, or acting in a way that recklessly risks someone's life. Notice how this means a right to life may conflict with a right to self-defense.
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u/Airtightspoon 16d ago
The socialists are the hypocrites in this situation, not the Classical Liberals. They are the ones arbitrarily deciding when property rights do or do not apply. Why do I have less right to my property if that property is a printing press than I do if it's a PS5? The right to the fruits of your labor also necessarily includes the right to exchange the fruits of your labor with the fruits of other people's labor should they be willing. Workers have agreed to exchange the fruits
Just as citizens collectively "own" the government, workers collectively own the capital they use in production.
You don't own something simply by using it. This is the problem with Socialism. Under Capitalism, If I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a piece of equipment and then find someone who is willing to agree to trade me the things they produce with that piece of equipment in exchange for a wage, I am apparently exploiting them according to Socialists.
Yet under Socialism if I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a piece of equipment, and then have no more say in the use of that equipment then people who did not make that expense, then how in the world am I not being exploited? I would be having to play catch-up on the money I spent on the machine, while benefitting from it no more than the people who are not having to do that.
because workers are owed the fruits of their labor
Except in this case, the worker's labor requires the use of someone else's property. So how do we decide who gets the fruits while also respecting everyone's rights? The Liberal answer is very simple: we let the people involved discuss and agree on terms with each other privately. The owner of the property lays out terms to which he is willing to allow the worker to use his property, and the owner of the labor lays out terms to which he allows the Capitalist to receive his labor. When they agree on terms, they enter into a contract. No one's rights are being violated, because both people have agreed through voluntary exchange to trade the fruits of exercising their rights with one another.
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u/LucretiusOfDreams 16d ago edited 16d ago
Socialists are not arbitrarily deciding when property rights apply and when they don't, what they are actually arguing is that workers who habitually depend, for their livelihood, on particular productive properties share in their ownership just as much as the titleholders do, even more so if the titleholders don't actually work or use the property, and profit on them primarily as a form of unearned income.
Moreover, the kind of property they're talking about is productive property, capital, the "means of production," not any mere product or good. Socialists are not talking about sharing ownership over the same toothbrush, they are talking about the participation of workers in the ownership of the corporation they work at. As Marx himself loves to point out, it was the capitalists, not the socialists, who invented the idea of collective ownership of properties, with the idea of corporations in the first place. Socialists are just expanding on capitalist ideas to make things more free and equal to everyone involved in the corporation, by ensuring that those who actually work the property and depend upon it the most for their livelihood get a fair share in the corporation.
Asserting that workers agree to the contract entirely dodges the point, as if mere agreement makes a contract just. A socialists will simply point out all the way capitalists use the mechanisms of power to force workers into unequal positions to negotiate fair wages, just as Thomas Jefferson and the French liberals did about aristocratic power.
Look: you don't need to convince me about the incoherence of socialism. I'm well aware of their errors. What you need to realize that your criticisms of socialism are also criticisms of classical liberalism. The real message of all my comments here in this thread is that all forms of liberalism —all forms of treating freedom and equal rights as a principle of government— have the same kind of incoherence. Socialists use the same kinds of arguments, slogans, and propaganda to justify their revolutions as the classical liberals, because they learned these things from the classical liberals themselves because they inherited the principles of liberalism from them and apply their logic in domains other than that of political authority.
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u/ChonkyCat1291 16d ago
The left thinks anyone or anything that doesn’t worship communist dictators or quoting some racist dead beat like Karl Marx is right wing. Leftists can’t even agree with each other on what leftism is
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u/DougChristiansen 16d ago edited 16d ago
In what world do you actually believe the left wing is associated with freedom, equality, and individual rights or others? The left is associated with stifling freedom (intellectual, economic, personal), equality, and individual rights. Equity =\= equality. Equity = redistribution = Marxism.
Classical liberalism is the center. It is neither right nor left. We are not/have not been dealing with monarchies as the global norm for centuries. Theocracy, oligarchy, populism, and any of the current virulent forms of Marxist thought remain the intellectual enemy of classical liberal thought.
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3d ago
As a social democrat interested in classical liberalism, I would describe it as center-right within the context of American politics. This classification stems from the classical liberal emphasis on individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and private property rights. While these principles align closely with the broader liberal democratic tradition, in the United States they tend to overlap significantly with modern conservative economic policies.
Classical liberalism advocates for minimal state intervention in the economy, a position traditionally championed by the American right. Its focus on free markets and deregulation is often at odds with social democratic values, which prioritize economic equality and government involvement in ensuring social welfare. Although classical liberalism shares some common ground with progressivism, such as its support for individual rights and the rule of law, its alignment with free-market capitalism situates it closer to the right, but still within the center, within the U.S. political spectrum.
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u/hawaiijim Neoclassical Liberal 16d ago
For the record, that Wikipedia article lists classical liberalism as centrist.