Whenever I speak of liberals sans phrase I mean contemporary liberals. But contemporary liberals are leftists, so perhaps I should drop 'liberal' and use 'leftist.' As Roger Kimball remarks,
Usage note: attentive readers will register the fact that I say “leftists,” not “liberals.” Conservatives, I know, often speak about the depredations and bad behavior of “liberals.” But it has been a long time since the people whom we have called liberals were interested in freedom or liberty. What they are interested in, on the contrary, is pursuing the illiberal agenda of control.
In the same short piece Kimball compares the Tractarian Wittgenstein with the politically correct: "Wittgenstein sought to exclude the whole realm of ethics and metaphysics from the kingdom of speech; our politically correct leftists wish to exclude anything that doesn’t conform to their political agenda."
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