Quoting russell@coker.com.au (russell@coker.com.au):
It seems to be usually about liberty for the powerful people to oppress others and almost never about liberty for the less powerful people to not be oppressed. An example is the discussions about freedom for business owners to discriminate against some customers.
No, as I said, AFAIK it's in USA discourse just a political football, meaning almost anything at all depending on the whim of the speaker. It's effectively duckspeak, hence functionally a useless term.
Doesn't Ron Paul count?
Ron Paul has always, consistently, served in the US House of Representatives (and likewise in his failed run for the US Senate) as a member of the Republican Party for the state of Texas.
Both the main parties are stumping for the rich quite effectively.
Sure. True electoral reform will require getting the money out of politics, which means meaningful public financing for (at least) national-office campaigns and overturning of the very harmful 2009 US Supreme Court decision Citizens United, Appellant v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310, in which the five-member corporatist majority banned the rest of the Federal government from restricting so-called independent political expenditures by corporations, citing 1st Amendment freedom of speech. Now that Justice Antonin Scalia performed his one unequivocal service to the republic (dying, six months ago), the latter reform is suddenly possible if Ms. Clinton ascends to the Presidency after the Nov. 8th general election. (For those who don't know, the US Supreme Court has remained deadlocked at 4 votes to 4 votes, since Scalia's death -- which is on the one hand a disabiling of that institution and on the other an improvement in the eyes of many of us.) Back in 1982, the late Gore Vidal ran to be junior senator for California (my state) and rather charmingly asserted that he was running for the 'Democratic wing of the Property Party'. He got my vote, of course. Quoting Vidal's May 1975 essay 'The State of the Union' (_Esquire_ magazine): There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties. There now _is_ a difference between the parties even to someone of the late Mr. Vidal's jaundiced eyes -- on account of the bizarre eruptions among the Republicans, and signs of the left wing of the Democratic Party reviving some power at the same time. Perhaps I will post some speculations on those matters here soon.