Okay, what you’re misunderstanding is that what a political or social philosophy is differs from how it is colloquially referred to. It does not mean, “a person who values people” and if you knew the history of this brutal system you’d see just how insidious such an assertion is. Yes, “liberal” is an abused term in NA as it benefits liberalism (yes, capitalism is liberalism and vice versa) through the occlusion of any alternative way to understand the world. When they say that liberals are radical socialists, they are purposefully misrepresenting what socialism and social justice is. They are not talking about liberalism when they use it that way. Liberalism is fundamentally an individualist way to understand the world that emerged through the processes of European imperialism and settler-colonialism after the sixteenth century (but we really consider it recognizable once they start talking about republics and individual liberties at the turn of the nineteenth century. You’ll see why in a moment). Private property is at the center of its way of organizing and the value of individual human bodies (not beings) is built not despite of that but to facilitate it. Racism, sexism, and heteronormativity are all systemic constructions that emerged to devalue human bodies relative to their position in the hierarchy and consequently the form of exploitation they experienced in the service of white-settler-colonial reproduction. (i.e. Slavery preexisted chattel slavery and racialization. Chattel slavery was made possible through the naturalization of an othered group as deserving of generational forced labour, and so racialization emerged as a means of rationalizing that violence).

“Capitalism” refers to a social order wherein capital is the primary organizing principle in society, which is to say individual pursuit of capital. It is described economically by its imperatives of profit maximization and infinite growth, both hallmarks of colonial perceptions of land and bodies as commodities. It is the economic system that settler-colonial countries grew into because it is already consistent with how they viewed the world.

Liberalism’s appropriation of “progress” and civil rights (“equality”) is how this social order effectively responded to challenge of the hierarchy. The narrative that people “earn” their rights through civil disobedience presupposes that what we imagine to be rights is in fact an absolute truth that we either restrict or permit access to. Conveniently, those rights are legally constructed in terms of pursuit of capital and private property as a metric of human fulfillment. The black Civil Rights movements of the mid-twentieth century is imagined to end when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1968, which intentionally secures the state’s authority over the determination of inequality and redirects challenges to racism into the legal framework of the state. When Black Liberationist militant groups persisted, you get the War on Drugs and the Prison Industrial Complex (which is itself enabled through the legal end of slavery that still permitted forced labour of prisoners). There are many other examples of how this works, but slavery and racism tend to be very clear demonstrations. Message me if you want a reading list.

What you have done here is made the understandable mistake of assuming how the words are used is exactly what they mean, and yes language is fluid which is why they push these misuses in the first place. Make no mistake though, these are not distinct ways of organizing society, they are cooperative in their endeavour to reduce the living world to property. When you see this, liberal inaction at climate change is not only comprehensible, but expected.