Maybe I am missing something, but every time I start a game in the USA, liberals are extremely opposed to my government? I find this odd. President Obama started out liked by the liberals and extremely opposed by conservatives. It seems like this is something that should vary from game to game?
This is related to the term 'liberal. This has been one of the toughest design decisions in the game -> whether to call them liberals or libertarians.
The problem is, in Europe (50% of the games players), the term ‘libertarian’ is almost never used, and the term ‘liberal’ is used for what it is in this game, meaning people who care strongly about personal freedom, non-interference in personal lives by the government, free press, free trials, accountable police force, right to do anything you like as long as it does not harm others. Hence they are vary strongly in favour of lax abortion laws, lax drug laws, allowing gambling, and very much against ‘police state’ measures such as ID cards and curfews.
In the US, that is generally called libertarian, and the term ‘liberal’ means what a European would call a ‘socialist’.
And this is where the arguments start 
I would define Obama as a socialist, in Democracy 3’s terms. The Republicans would be Capitalists, and the Tea party a mixture of liberals and patriots. I know… it sounds crazy to mix liberal and tea-party, but the conflict over the terms ‘socialist/liberal/libertarian/patriot’ are just too hard to solve.
So in other words, it’s the libertarians who hate you, not the liberals, from a USA POV
That makes perfect sense. And it also explains why it is liberals who are likely to assassinate me.
Honestly, I cannot imagine American liberals as being a threat to an opponent, like George Bush. American libertarians, however, might be dangerous – and yes, the game always starting with American libertarians being highly dissatisfied makes sense.
Nonetheless, I wonder about the design decision: the player always begins in the same situation (in that country). But in real life, an American president might start out in with liberals (socialists in this game) but out with conservatives (capitalists in this game). Or it might be the other way around. Whichever was the case, this would affect political capital and expectations. If I won election as a “socialist” my victory gives me more political capital to do socialist things, at least at first. That’s the platform I ran on. However, the political costs would be higher if I went against the grain and started to do capitalist things, because that’s not the platform I ran on. Just a thought.
Thanks for explaining who the liberals are! Makes much more sense why they’re constantly murdering me!
I think that may well have been true 15/20 years ago, but today with the growth in the internet libertarian communities in the English speaking world are pretty well connected.
I am both UK based and very libertarian, and have no problem with the term, I strongly suspect any other UK libertarian would also call themselves the same thing. Certaintly all the ones I communicate with instantly resort to the term.
Indeed English speaking libertarians are likely to share youtube clips or articles featuring Ron Paul, or Daniel Hannan, or read blogs like the National Review, Anna Raccon and so on and I would say the confusion is minimum.
That said I know the average guy on the street may not be familiar with the term, but I would suggest the average guy on a UK street would not consider liberals to necessarily mean classical liberals, since the UK’s liberal democrat party is in favour of massive government intervention and high taxes just like US liberals.
My inclination is that the term would be better changed to ‘libertarian’ as the current term ‘liberal’ will confuse everyone in the US and actual libertarians everywhere.
Then we just need subcategorize them into minarchists and anarcho-capitalists.
this is so confusing. In Denmark we would consider Liberal to be the opposite of socialist.
Socialist or democratic-socialist is a like a soft communist, partial plan economy, state run school, extensive healthcare etc. and liberal being the opposite, Free market, minimal influence from the state and large private sectors. private school private healthcare.
However even our most right wing liberals would still be considered socialist by american standards.