Men's Group

Not that I blame the men for this. The right-wing propaganda machine is largely responsible for the confusion.

If you are raised in an environment which labels liberals as weak, even if you gain the ideology of liberalism piece meal, that shame will tend to stick with you. Especially if you are clinging to an outward identity which is beholden to the conservative upbringing you've experienced. I speak of this not simply from theory but also from experience, personal and learned from others.

I grew up watching Fox News in a deeply religious, deeply conservative community where a word like "liberal" literally implied biblical evil. It also was negatively associated with things like femininity and homosexuality because the conservative ideology caters to strict gender norms, emotional remoteness, anti-intellectualism and violence.

Where I grew up, if you were a liberal you were called things like "faggot" or "pussy." Despite abandoning this sort of conservative bullying long ago, that deeply instilled emotional reflex persists to some degree.

Even if you weren't raised in a deeply fucked up community like I was, the idolatry of the stereotypical "male" exists almost everywhere and it still resists much of the symbolism associated with liberalism. So you have a country and a society that has historically been beholden to conservative religious influence, and it has, which still places a great amount of shame on the liberal identity.