American political conservatism is an effort to conserve American liberalism

From You Keep Using That Word by Jonah Goldberg.  The subheading is I do not think ‘liberal’ means what you think it means.

Goldberg is exploring the confusing history of the American use of Liberal.  For many, perhaps most, people in the modern usage, it is a label on progressive and Marxist derivative ideas.  For some, among whom I count myself, it means what is has always meant - natural rights, rule of law, equality before the law, due process, consent of the governed, etc.  

In the 1930s, progressives needed a new brand name because they had exhausted the p-word like an old horse that had no giddy-up left. So, led by FDR, they started using the word “liberal.” 

This also created an opportunity for the hard, communist-sympathizing left to adopt the “progressive” label for themselves. Tensions between progressives and liberals came to head in the mid-1940s when the Progressive Party, a quasi-communist front led by Henry Wallace, and liberal Democrats, centered around Americans for Democratic Action, went to war with each other. Regardless, the term liberal was not owned by left or right prior to the middle of the 20th century. Even folks like Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy used “liberal” positively into the early 1950s. But by the end of the decade, liberal became the widely accepted ideological signifier of the left. It wasn’t until the early 2000s when the term had become problematic that the word “progressive” was revived as the go-to-word for the mainstream left.  

Goldberg nicely summarizes what I view as one of the more vexing confusions.

One useful way to think about it: The opposite of liberalism isn’t conservatism. Historically, much (though not all) of what we call American political conservatism is an effort to conserve American liberalism. If you believe the government should be bound by the rules laid out in the Constitution (including the amendments!), then you are arguing for conserving (or preserving) American liberalism. If you believe in the right of consenting adults to commit capitalist acts—or to refuse to for reasons of conscience—you are for conserving liberalism. In short, the opposite of political and philosophical liberalism isn’t conservatism—it is illiberalism. And neither the left nor the right have a monopoly on illiberalism. 

Because we are a huge nation, geographically and by population, other than immigrants, it is hard for many native born Americans to understand just how repressive and authoritarian much of the world, even if they have nominally adopted the dressings of classical liberalism.  It is hard for Americans to appreciate just how radical, how revolutionary is the American system of Classical Liberalism embodied in a Constitutional Republic.  American Exceptionalism is alive and well.  

In American contemporary parlance, one can, and most people, knowingly or not, are both Conservative and Classically Liberal.  They are willing and wish to defend and nurture the Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberal model and they reject the totalitarian and authoritarian derivatives of Marxism and the more traditional forms such as dictatorship.  

We are blessed by our history and heritage.  If only we could speak more clearly about it.  But the authoritarian and totalitarian tradition, having no track record of success in human flourishing, is completely dependent on continuingly redefining words to mean something different, often the opposite of what they originally did.