Hey I just wanted to stop in and say thanks for being patient, the whole terminology thing around ideologies is one of the more confusing barriers to entry into leftist thought but you’re working thru it like a champ

You’ve already been linked the Wikipedia definition which is super helpful but I’m gonna paste the first bit again because it’s worth reading more times, for fluent lefties as well:

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion, constitutional government and privacy rights.

Based on this, all democrats and pretty much all republicans and libertarians are liberals, and that’s on purpose. This is what we mean when we throw punches at “libs” - we all believe that some of these qualities are good, but libs believe that all of these things are good - we don’t terribly like things like “equality before the law” (it’s just as bad for Jeff Bezos to steal a loaf of bread from a supermarket as it is for a houseless person), “freedom of the press/speech” (your freedom of the press is legally endowed on you just as it is to Elon Musk or Rupert Murdoch even though their actual freedom of the press is millions of times what yours is because they own billion dollar news and speech platforms), “right to private property” (you have the right to own dozens of resort properties just like Donald Trump does), etc. Liberalism - democrat, Republican, and libertarian - is built on the idea that everyone can use dollars and power and status to exercise their rights to whatever degree they want to, and one of our biggest reasons for calling them out under their shared umbrella of liberalism is that they all share the same fallacious worldview that allows people with more dollars to have more fundamental enshrined rights, and even though people with very few dollars can’t actually exercise any of their fundamental enshrined rights, liberals pretend they have the same rights just because they could exercise them if they had more money.