Yeah , a lot of this is very true , and other people have brought it up too . Like the whole Real AmericaFake Urban America dichotomy carries an atleastsubstantially false implication that EVERYONE in the cities owns two vacation homes and sips their halfcaff nowhip frappe whatever while their Tesla drives them to their banking job . There ' s a lot of people who are very poor in cities , and of course people who aren ' t poor but certainly aren ' t living lifestyles that anyone could call lavish or elite with a straight face . And the antisemitic sentiment is very real , too , and has in my opinion been very conspicuously ignored and swept under the rug by a lot of top political players this last year or so . The whole liberal thing honestly feels like a lost cause to debate , that word means a thousand different things to a thousand different people in a thousand different fields . Like yeah , Bernie is more politically liberal as a polisci student or Noam Chomsky or other likeminded people would describe it , and aligns more with my personal beliefs in many ways . However , Bernie ' s liberalism is , like you said , founded on New Deal social democracy , and most economists wouldn ' t describe those policies as liberal . Point being , I think arguing over who is or is not a true liberal is kind of a lost cause , and Hillary believed almost everything Bernie believed , and that was enough for me and many others to consider her a liberal . And from the politics and economics classes I ' ve taken in college , neoliberal and liberal don ' t relate that explicitly . Hillary Clinton wasn ' t purely either one , and one isn ' t the antithesis of the other , thought maybe you ' ve learned otherwise . Also kind of a nitpick , but Clinton didn ' t oppose Obamacare , and Trump didn ' t support any part of it whatsoever until like 4 days ago , so it ' s still really tough for me to buy that Trump was meaningfully to Hillary ' s left on much of anything , unless you consider opposition to free trade to be a leftist position , in which case I think there ' s an argument to be made there . I still think Hillary was incredibly smart and would likely have deftly pushed for socially liberal domestic policies where she could . I also included the paragraph that you highlighted mostly to try to discuss the reason these discussions sting even worse for a lot of Democrats since liberal seems loaded at this point . Like we have to watch the whole Trump fiasco unfold , and not only that , but the person he defeated was not stupid , not evil , upheld solidly Democratic principles , and had a resume out the wazoo . It just feels like a huge slap in the face , even if you don ' t agree with Hillary on everything , which I do not . Personally , I ' ve started seeing allegiances to ideologies , as well as parties , to be detrimental to nuanced political discussion in a lot of ways . Like the boundaries between schools of though are often much blurrier than we think of them as being , as I ' m sure you know , so it feels more divisive than instructive to pull them out in discussions about electoral politics . Plenty of socialists supported Clinton with the knowledge that she was not a socialist , same goes for any number of people who subscribe to any number of more leftleaning political ideologies . Anyway , I thought this was a smart and thoughtful response , so thanks for writing it out .