Liberal has never been that wedded to her bedfellows on the Symbolic Order. We're not talking about a gruff, bearded soldier of the Imperial Guard, marching stalwart and wrinkled with Napoleon's final assault at the Battle of Waterloo. This is the lady of dreams, she is as much perfect as she is flawed. Hate to say it but she came to the English Language from a Latin Classroom where the word liber still means free.
In the 1300's a man who was both generous and not bound to a trade or a master, was free. By the late 1700's John Locke and the Enlightenment had attached consent of the governed, individual rights, and free markets to the liberal neighborhood while La Belle France did their bit for Liberté, égalité, fraternité so that almost 200 years later Mireille Mathieu would curl the toes of all patriots with her rendering of La Marseillaise.
Then, just as Liberal was maturing and getting all cozy with her look and style of shoe, a bunch of colonial bovver boys on the western side of the Atlantic who were too delicate to risk the banner of socialism took the Orwellian Newspeak Pen to the word Liberal and turned it into the government intervention of the New Deal where liberal and progressives held hands, exchanged friendship rings, returned power to the working man and soon earned themselves the rebuke, libtard snowflake instead of socialist snowflake or communard.
Meanwhile back in the classroom even the Latin Teacher might point out the search for meaning is a different kind of free when you're hungry, homeless and missing work because you failed to recite the declensions of Mensa correctly.
