"Liberal," for many here in the USA, has become a contemptuous term. I, however, no longer use it to refer to the likes of Harry Reid or Hillary [sic] Clinton, not because they don't deserve the pejorative connotation, but because they don't deserve the positive, obsolescent one. Only a few decades ago, calling someone "liberal" meant that you considered him generous and tolerant; can either of these qualities justly be ascribed to most Democrats in the USA? Generous they are, but not with their own money. What they call "tolerance," especially as regards religion, is actually indifference toward issues of right vs. wrong; the intolerance with which they treat anyone who disagrees with them equals or surpasses that, real or otherwise, which made them indignant in the first place.
There was also a time in the history of Western Civilization when the noun "liberal," if the first letter were capitalized, applied to someone who belonged to a political movement or party of the same name. The United Kingdom's Liberal Party, of which William Ewart Gladstone and other worthies were members, had significant accomplishments to its credit, and so it's not surprising that many moderns would want to evoke its memory. The misnamed liberals, however, have little to do with the Liberals, who favored free trade and a laissez-faire approach to regulation of capitalism, and who made no attempts to revolutionize the social order by endorsing crackpot causes. The Labour Party formed in order to represent the interests of the working class, as had the Liberal Party for the middle class and the Tories for the aristocracy. Indeed, it was the first gaining of a parliamentary plurality by Labour, in the 1920's, that brought about the demise of the Liberal Party; the more conservative of Liberals, such as Winston Churchill, joined the Conservatives, while those of a more left-wing bent became Labourites. As for the USA, Republicans, especially modern "conservatives," generally are the true heirs of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Liberalism, as Democrats have been, from the latter 1960's onward, heirs of the left-wing movements of days gone by. (There are, of course, shades of opinion within all ideologies, and exceptions to the rules.)
Hence, the fact that I refer to leftists not as liberals but as—you'll never guess how I came up with this—leftists. The true Right, as distinguished from racism and other beliefs typically but wrongly classed as characteristically right-wing, survives in some forms and in some places, for instance, factions of the Carlists in Spain. So far as I know, it does not in the USA, except for myself and probably others who don't know that they qualify, but that will have to be the subject of another uncommon commentary.
