The bottom left is really "liberal".
It looks to me like the left-right axis is about social issues, with "progressive" on the left (those alienated individuals who want everything to change and to become more idealized/utopian) and "traditional" on the right (those who aren't so alienated and like many things more or less as they are). It's about how hard you want to push for social change.
And the up-down axis is about coercion, about how whether people should be compelled (by the law, the state, by revolution, cancel-culture or antifa) to move left or right.
I guess that I would agree that the bottom left is "liberal" in historical European sense of that word. In the US, it might be more "left-libertarian" or something like that. Though that being said, European "liberalism" today has become essentially the ideology of big-business, favoring whatever is in the interests of the big London banks (the
Economist magazine is their mouthpiece). They tend to be rather "woke" socially, favoring things like open borders (cheaper labor) but demand that government keep hands off regulating business and oppose nationalism and protectionism like the plague. So like many, where they stand on the left-right and up-down lines depends on the particular issue. What makes it consistent is whether it's in the interest of multinational corporations.
In the US, "liberal" is more along the lines of what Europeans call "social democrat", in other words socialism-lite. Things like single-payer health insurance, where everyone
must have the insurance and where there is
no choice but to accept the government offering. Coercion slipping in.
Tis not for me to prefer that they be other than who they are.
But it might be fun to have more with me in the bottom right
quadrant (the true libertarians).
That's the quadrant that I most identify with, even if my answers place me more towards the center. I'm not culturally alienated and don't want what exists today to go away in favor of... what?... some idyllic utopian future that exists only in the imagination? I respect and value the contributions of my parents and of everyone who came before me, as imperfect as they might have been. I think that positive change is most likely to be incremental and not wholesale and revolutionary. That makes me something of a classical conservative, I guess.
But I don't think that the state should be enforcing these things. I believe very strongly in the principle of democracy, where decisions on where on the left-right axis society should place itself should rise up from the freely-expressed and un-manipulated will of the people themselves, instead of being imposed on them by elites from above.
Certainly on this board.
