Your failure starts with summarizing everything under one single label, here we are dealing with the word “liberalism.”
This reflects an empiricist view of language which is not compatible with analytic rigor. The kind of “liberalism” undermined by info about unequal capacities (a leftist commitment to economic leveling among citizens) is only associated with the word due to contingent facts about American coalitional politics. The natural cluster in political perspectives that “liberal” was invented to represent does not entail this position. Zack Davis’s Where to Draw the Boundaries? is relevant. If you don’t know the technical meaning of a term, this is a fact about you, not about the person using it.
In both cases of US local and global understanding of the word, it limits the scope of the discussion to be had. Once you start categorizing actions regarding specific issues in this way, you inadvertently start drawing boundaries in relations to other issues that are related to the issue at hand. It’s a failure of methods, not language. For instance, the issue of abortion is closely tied to the issue of personal beliefs, which is also tied to the beliefs and laws regarding the preservation of life. The method is merely a simplification for the political machinery that take actions on resolving these issues. US has its own local political climate, but it’s not to say that when other countries use the same rhetoric for the same functions, they would be much different other than the details.
This reflects an empiricist view of language which is not compatible with analytic rigor. The kind of “liberalism” undermined by info about unequal capacities (a leftist commitment to economic leveling among citizens) is only associated with the word due to contingent facts about American coalitional politics. The natural cluster in political perspectives that “liberal” was invented to represent does not entail this position. Zack Davis’s Where to Draw the Boundaries? is relevant. If you don’t know the technical meaning of a term, this is a fact about you, not about the person using it.
In both cases of US local and global understanding of the word, it limits the scope of the discussion to be had. Once you start categorizing actions regarding specific issues in this way, you inadvertently start drawing boundaries in relations to other issues that are related to the issue at hand. It’s a failure of methods, not language. For instance, the issue of abortion is closely tied to the issue of personal beliefs, which is also tied to the beliefs and laws regarding the preservation of life. The method is merely a simplification for the political machinery that take actions on resolving these issues. US has its own local political climate, but it’s not to say that when other countries use the same rhetoric for the same functions, they would be much different other than the details.