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NOTE: I am giving my best guesses and I am no expert, but hopefully this comment can serve as some kind of jumping-off point.
I don't really know if a good one-sentence definition, and I usually tend to think of it in terms of historical movements, especially classical liberalism, which Wikipedia describes as "a branch of liberalism that advocates civil liberties under the rule of law with an emphasis on economic freedom." So if you want a textbook definition, I guess you could do worse than that, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
I tend to use the word "liberalism" to describe worldviews that can be traced back primarily to classical liberalism or its offshoots like social liberalism. This describes most of the major political parties in most Western countries, including almost all Democrats and Republicans in the US, almost all Conservatives, Liberals and NDP members in Canada, and so on. The term also applies to libertarians, and there's an argument to be made that it applies to many forms of anarchism as well.
People like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote arguments that were in dialogue with 19th-century liberals, and a lot of what we call Marxism and socialism developed in response to liberalism. Liberalism places a lot more emphasis on individuals as the primary unit of analysis for understanding society and on laws that prevent one individual from harassing another. Which are not terrible ideas, but it ignores e.g. class, racial and gender hierarchies, systemic oppression, existing power structures. Maybe "ignores" is the wrong word -- it's more like liberalism, on its own, is incapable of meaningfully discussing them at all. It's a blind spot.
Example: When the George Floyd protests were in the news, I had a lot of well-meaning older relatives who posted things on Facebook about how you shouldn't judge people by the colour of their skin and we should all just treat each other as individuals. Which is not totally wrong, but it's incomplete as an explanation of racism and not really relevant to the murder of George Floyd. The reason black people are disproportionately killed by police isn't just because individual police officers are racist and we just have to teach them to not be racist. It has to do with the history of policing in the United States, and with policies that have been selected specifically to put black communities at a disadvantage in order to protect the existing distribution of wealth.
Leftists tend to talk derisively about liberals and liberalism, partly having to do with the fact that capitalism is historically very intertwined with liberalism, but I think that there's room for nuance and that there are some good things to come out of liberalism. The idea that people should be free to pursue what they want to do as long as they don't oppress others is not a bad idea, even if it's incomplete. I mentioned that Marxism and socialism developed partly in response to liberalism, and it wasn't 100% disagreement (e.g. Karl Marx acknowledged that capitalism and liberalism were still preferable to feudalism and theocracy). I think our current views on the importance of consent in sexual activity stem from liberalism, and I certainly wouldn't want to give up on those.
Again: This is my flawed understanding and you should take everything I'm saying with a huge grain of salt.
Liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary organizations.
Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism.
Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm
Liberalism is the pacifying of the proletariat in class conflict to benefit the bourgeoisie and uphold capitalism.
it really depends on how you are using the term. In the American political/vernacular context it means something completely different than its historical and ideological definition. In the United States it really comes down to social liberalism, vs. conservatism which comes down to social conservatism. Its useful for the American political context since there really is no large, unified left-wing movement that can push an economically left agenda, so most political battles are over social values, as seen in the current culture wars divisions. However, it really serves to mystify the meanings of words, as leftists constantly complain about - everyone on the left is not a "liberal" in the United States.
But liberals and conservatives are all ideologically liberals. Liberalism really at its most basic is a belief in private property (note this is different from personal property). Compare this with socialism, which at its most basic is social ownership of the means of production. Look at Bernie Sanders, probably the furthest left popular politicians the United States has seen in years: He called himself a socialist, maybe to differentiate himself from the other candidates, or maybe to pre-empt being attacked on the grounds of "hE's A sOciAliSt!" (as you can see even Biden, one of the most right-wing Democratic Party politicians, is being attacked in this way also). Who knows. But many on the left rightly pointed out Bernie isn't a socialist, since (at least in his campaign promises) he did not seek to fundamentally change the regime of private property but merely redistribute wealth and combat its worst excesses. Which, as a progressive position, could be based on a Marxian critique of capitalism, but is not actually socialism or Marxism since property, and capital, is left in the hands of the wealthy.
If you go back to Rousseau, Kant and many of the Enlightenment authors, you'll find a general opposition to democracy. This is because to have a true democracy, one had to give power to those who own no property - note that non-propertied white men could not vote until 1828 in the United States. Liberalism is a belief in the supremacy of private property - how could you allow landless people to take part in a political system that is essentially about protecting private property?
The Platonic Ideal of a Liberal:
The Liberal is first and foremost an Individual. No ties to a community, no ties to a land, just a perfect bare nub that is completely replaceable and completely interchangeable. They do not see this as a problem and would be quite proud to be characterized this way.
The Liberal thinks only in terms of markets. They agree hurriedly that slavery is and was bad, but only because it prevented slaves from access to markets. Solutions to systemic injustice and inequality are presented in terms of how to improve individuals for the market, i.e. just get black people and coal miners to code and everything will be fine. They will agree that climate change is a clear danger but frame responses only in terms of regulation and technology instead of breaking out of the framework of markets.
The Liberal is an ardent interventionist. They will not think of conquest, rather of humanitarian intervention that also happens to open markets and provide resource extraction and labor on favorable terms to the advanced homeland. This does not mean the Liberal is a warhawk or jingoist. Military intervention is merely viewed at the end of a long line of discipline, from diplomatic pressure to sanctions to CIA wetwork to military advisors to full-scale war. War is viewed as wasteful and inefficient rather than horrific or wrong on the basis of human suffering (don't forget the Liberal views things primarily through markets). When Liberals protest war they primarily point to the cost to a budget as they find this to be extremely compelling.
The Liberal does not have a historic view or a view for a future beyond the status quo. The Liberal thinks history was dominated by individuals and markets, even conceives of neolithic hunter-gathering in terms of capitalist free markets. Similarly, the Liberal does not dream of a different future and will proudly proclaim things like "we are living in the end of history." In the darkest of moments of doubt, the Liberal can only imagine a general collapse and apocalypse rather than an end to capitalism and the status quo.
The Liberal is not a political actor. What politics they are in are mostly aesthetic or spectaclized and do not serve any material end beyond the maintenance of the status quo. A Liberal could just as easily by a sports fan as a politics fan, with this sense of politics. Liberals do not understand politics to be part of economics or life, not on the large scale or on the small. You may hear Liberals complain about how politics have "only recently" invaded their preferred entertainment and it is this to blame for the current decline of entertainment, rather than profit declining demanding more pablum to appeal to the widest audience for the least cost.
"Six degrees to the left of center in good times, six degrees to the right of center when it effects them personally"
Someone who believes that all problems exist because of rule-breakers, and the solution to rule-breaking is always rule-following.
I opened up my dictionary and for some reason there's no word definition of "liberal" only a picture of your face.
Broadly: pro-capitalist, anti-communist, anti-conservative/ Trump, anti-bigotry (at least on a shallow level), but sees classism and class-hierarchy as an expression of meritocracy (and consequently fair game).
