YOU may well think of yourself as a liberal democrat.

Don't look so horrified; I used lower-case letters. In any case, you don't need to be Cratylus to grasp that it depends on what you mean by "liberal" and "democrat".

In America, "liberal" is a term of abuse, intended to convey the impression that the person thus labelled is some distance to the left of Trotsky, perhaps because he is in favour of gun control, or increased government powers. This usage seems not to be impeded by the fact that most of the policies favoured by such liberals are in fact illiberal, or at any rate offend libertarians. To confuse matters further, most of them are advanced by people called Democrats.

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